The military vehicular combat game War Thunder is under fire, as the developers use a real-life photo of the Challenger exploding in their key art for a game mode announcement.
According to Rock Paper Shotgun, the developers apologized once they realized the similarities between the key art they used and the real-life images of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. The devs do state that this Seek and Destroy art was curated by their artists using a reference pack and that this was accidental, but one Reddit thread shows that the original image of the catastrophe and the art line up almost exactly.
Gaijin Entertainment stated that they sincerely apologize for this “accident” and that the context was lost when using the reference pack. They also stated,
“We’ll be altering this artwork as soon as we can and will take measures to ensure that this doesn’t repeat again in the future,”. In the past, War Thunder has been memed for being inaccurate to real life, but this time around they seemingly went too far by depicting a real-life incident that took the lives of seven crew members, including a teacher Christa McAuliffe. Hopefully, they change the key art and change how they create this art in the future.
