ISLAMABAD: A video game based on the Peshawar Taliban school massacre of more than 150 people, mostly children, was removed Monday after triggering a social media uproar, with critics blasting it as tasteless.
The game, called “Pakistan Army Retribution”, was released by the Punjab IT board on Google Play, and invites the player to step into the shoes of a soldier shooting extremists in the hallways of a school.
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It is inspired by the country's deadliest ever insurgent attack that saw nine Taliban gunmen storm a school in Peshawar, shooting students and teachers in cold blood and occupying the school for hours until they were killed by the army.
But after an article on Dawn.com criticised the game, social media users lambasted its makers for exploiting the tragedy.
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“Bizarre and distasteful,” user Shaheryar Mirza wrote.
“Play the APS game on Android, kill the bad guys, empathy and good taste in one go,” wrote Fasi Zaka, referring to the Army Public School that was targeted in the grisly attack.
The Punjab Information Technology Board, a government body aggressively promoting digital innovation in the the province, offered a mea culpa on Twitter.
“The APS game has been removed. It was in poor taste,” its head Dr Umar Saif wrote.
“It wasn’t very well done and it was in poor taste,” he said. “In hindsight it was not a good thing to do.”
Saif, in an interview to Guardian Newspaper, said Pakistan Army Retribution was just one of dozens of videos, jingles and social media items commissioned as part of a Peaceful Pakistan campaign intended to build on national revulsion over the APS attack.
“APS was a watershed for Pakistan so we had the idea of using it as a theme to promote peace, tolerance and harmony,” he said. “The plan was to show children that the best weapons are the pen and the book.”
The game was produced by an independent company that had “misunderstood the brief”, Saif said.
“We tried to the use the campaign to galvanise support for peaceful Pakistan but I guess we messed up with this particular game.”
“Thank you for highlighting this mistake. We have made the amends.”
By Monday afternoon, the game was no longer available on Google Play.
