Yup, that thing up above is what we call a conversation starter. Of course, most of the conversations will be a little one-sided and along the lines of “Jesus, what’s that on your coffee table? Oh God, where’s my coat? Tell me where my coat is, I have to go right now.”
So yeah, the special edition of Dead Island: Riptide comes with a pair of bloody severed boobs (let’s not pretend anything but the boobs matter with this statue). Apparently Deep Silver, the publisher of the Dead Island games, didn’t foresee anyone being offended by this patently offensive thing, and took to Facebook to apologize profusely…
“A statement on the Zombie Bait Edition:
We deeply apologize for any offense caused by the Dead Island Riptide “Zombie Bait Edition”, the collector’s edition announced for Europe and Australia. Like many gaming companies, Deep Silver has many offices in different countries, which is why sometimes different versions of Collector’s Editions come into being for North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
For the limited run of the Zombie Bait Edition for Europe and Australia, a decision was made to include a gruesome statue of a zombie torso, which was cut up like many of our fans had done to the undead enemies in the original Dead Island.
We sincerely regret this choice. We are collecting feedback continuously from the Dead Island community, as well as the international gaming community at large, for ongoing internal meetings with Deep Silver’s entire international team today. For now, we want to reiterate to the community, fans and industry how deeply sorry we are, and that we are committed to making sure this will never happen again.”
Ruh oh, some people in the Deep Silver European/Australian marketing department are in troooouble.
Seriously though, this is lame. Own up to your torsos Deep Silver. There’s no way you didn’t realize this thing was offensive — people just got a little more offended than you hoped for and now you’re acting like designing and manufacturing thousands of scabby boob statues was an accident.
A more honest response from Deep Silver would’ve been “Heeey — so, we made a tasteless, gross promotional item for our tasteless, gross game series. We’re sorry it offended some folks, but none of those people were going to play our game anyways, were they? Don’t worry though, we’re still firing our entire European marketing branch.”