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Ukraine wages war on a Russian game (financed by the Chinese): because Kiev wants to eliminate Atomic Heart

2 years babelfish

Ukraine wages war on a Russian game (financed by the Chinese): because Kiev wants to eliminate Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart, a video game developed by Russian developers accused of racism and even of collecting information that would be transferred to Moscow, continues to be talked about. But what's true?

To be a video game startup, the Russian software house (but based in Cyprus, in order to enjoy greater freedom than that granted in its homeland) Mundfish has been able to organize a marketing campaign for the debut of its video game made up of controversy and even boycotts worthy of a big tech. The Russian reality – not even the smallest: 130 employees, most of them working remotely – debuted its title on February 21st: Atomic Heart and in a few days it unleashed a hornet's nest of controversy, up to the request of the Ukrainian government to ban the game. But let's go in order.

ALL THE CONTROVERSY RAISED BY ATOMICH HEART

The first concerned the presence, in this costume video game that offers a fictionalized and parodied version of the second half of the last century, of Nu, Pogodi!, an old Soviet animated series along the lines of the American Tom & Jerry dating back to 1969. Well, in the twelfth episode an African tribal chief appears represented in a "caricatured" and "racist" way.

atomic heart
The offending frame

Nothing really striking: let's think when, in Italian films, Totò parodied African populations in the same ways without anyone tearing their clothes. Probably also in Tom and Jerry here and there the two dress up as Indian chiefs, parodying the Native Americans. Sensitivity to the theme has simply changed, but if a video game intends to faithfully represent at least some parts of the past, it certainly cannot change them.

THE SFOTTO' TO THE UKRAINE

The accusations of some users who complain that Atomich Heart contains various mockery of Ukraine have quite another weight. One of the game's iconic characters, the robot twins, whose real job isn't that of a bodyguard, but of a sex worker, has hair that refers to the hairstyle of Yulija Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko , a politician and businesswoman of Ukrainian origin.

Also posted in the game is a Russian-language poster, which talks about the stupidity of pigs and their cultural limitations, as they can't do anything other than read Mein Kampf. Well, the user who reported this claims that Russians would call Ukrainians 'pigs' and 'Nazis'. And that was enough to raise new controversies.

THE UKRAINIAN GOVERNMENT MOVES

Nothing really significant so far. It is even obvious that two warring peoples even dispute simple works of genius if they get across the border. The story took a very different turn in the last few hours, when the Ukrainian government intervened (which after a year of war, evidently, is also able to follow similar events of secondary importance).

The Kiev executive has sent a letter to Sony, Microsoft and Valve asking the companies to ban the sale of Atomic Heart on Ukrainian territory for PlayStation, Xbox and Steam. The Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, Alexander Bornyakov , then explained: «We also ask to limit the distribution of this video game in other countries due to its toxicity, the potential collection of information on user data and the possibility of their transfer to third parties in Russia, as well as the potential use of money raised from video game purchases to wage war against Ukraine.

The story seems to recall that of TikTok, the Chinese app banned , at least for bureaucrats, by the White House and the EU Commission, given that it could act as spy software, but the minister's words are very unclear. War hysteria? Propaganda? Who can tell.

WHO IS BEHIND MUNDFISH

What is certain is that seeing them like this, the developers of Mundfish also show a certain tenderness: clean faces, calm faces and the courage to move to Cyprus in order to continue doing the job of their dreams. They even look like the first victims of Putin's regime.

The team

But it is also true that if you dig a bit, some interesting elements emerge, for example among the main investors: the Chinese giant Tencent, the Russian label Gaijin Entertainment (which moved its offices to Hungary in 2015) and the GEM Capital group, also of Russian origin but based in Cypriot Paphos.

Tencent now has stakes in the most quoted software houses on the planet: its presence does not necessarily allude to the proverbial Chinese hand. Paphos, according to some press sources, is instead more cryptic because the founder and owner of the company, Anatoliy Paliy, seems to have links with various Russian state enterprises (such as Rusal and VTB), and for years he worked for Gazenergoset , a subsidiary of the Soviet giant Gazprom.

Even currently Paliy's company has interests in the Russian energy market, consolidated after the acquisition of the Volga Gas company, completed in 2021. But even in this case the link that the video game in question is a propaganda work or, worse, software capable of collecting data to be transferred to Moscow – as Kiev claims – remains to be demonstrated.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia-on-demand/lucraina-muove-guerra-a-un-gioco-russo-finanziato-dai-cinesi-perche-kiev-vuole-eliminare-atomic-heart/ on Fri, 24 Feb 2023 14:14:04 +0000.