“We are Luca and Leo, two passionate French developers (17 and 20), and together we’ve created Bodycam, an ultra-realistic multiplayer FPS game utilizing the latest features of Unreal Engine 5” – so says the Steam intro for the aforementioned Bodycam which initially attracted attention for its hyper-realistic graphics and the fact it has been developed by two teenagers.
Today it is attracting attention for a very different reason – the apparent patching in of extreme right-wing and Nazi symbolism through in-game graffiti.
The issue is the prevalence of the number 1488 throughout a new map. 1488 is a neo-nazi symbol comprising two references, the 14 is for “14 words” which is a relates 14-word slogan spoken by David Lane, a hardcore white supremacist and one of the founding members of The Order terrorist organization.
The 88 meanwhile stands for the 8th letter of the alphabet twice – HH and is used as the abbreviation for Heil Hitler.
The Abandoned Hospital Map which has arrived in Bodycam is where the graffiti lives and as was pointed out on Reddit, absolutely does not need to be there. Here are a few telling comments.
“This is pretty blatant. It wasn’t there at launch and was patched in. It isn’t a case where you are like, breaking into a white supremacist hideout where there may be a reason for things like this to be present. They just put it in with regular graffiti in an abandoned hospital.
Insanely gross. One more game and developer to ignore. I have precious little time to play games as it is, certainly will not waste it on developers who go out of their way to include neo-nazi symbolism in their games for no discernible reason beyond “we wanted our game to have neo-nazi symbols in it”.
“Main points include the inclusion of “1488,” a known Nazi symbol, prominently displayed as graffiti in a new level, and the developer not responding even after this was pointed out and asked about for some time. Seems pretty blatant.”
The Steam ratings are still Mostly Positive for the game but we would expect it to start dropping once this news gets about more widely. Unfortunately, knowing what we know, it probably won’t.
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