Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann has responded to backlash around the studio’s next big game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, and if the source of the backlash is what I think it is, I’m a little disappointed he’s even giving these people any air.
I don’t want to get too into the weeds for obvious reasons, but from my research it seems a vocal minority of anti-woke internet dwellers are big mad that Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet stars a woman of color who happens to be bald and isn’t universally considered to be conventionally attractive. The audacity, I know.
Naughty Dog disabled YouTube comments on Intergalactic’s reveal trailer from last year’s Game Awards after it was flooded with hateful comments directed toward protagonist Jordan’s appearance. PlayStation’s upload of the same trailer still has comments enabled, so you can see for yourself what some people are complaining about, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Anyway, Druckmann was asked to touch on the so-called controversy in a recent interview with Last Stand Media, and thankfully he didn’t sound too phased.
“I don’t know if there’s much I could add to that conversation, to be honest,” he said. “It’s just that there’s stuff happening right now with media that you just have to ignore for the most part, stick to your guns, and do what you believe in, and I feel like that’s how I would want artists to carry themselves.”
It’s a perfectly acceptable answer, but an unnecessary one, in my opinion. I don’t even like using the word controversy here, because that implies Naughty Dog did something to stir up controversy and for which Druckmann should have to explain. It didn’t. We hardly know anything about Intergalactic, we haven’t seen any gameplay, and the one cinematic trailer we have seen was… fine?
If anything, Naughty Dog is playing it safe with Intergalactic. It just looks like a cool, Cowboy Bebop-ey action game, and it’s deeply weird to me that it’s considered by some to be controversial. But in a post-Last of Us 2 world, I don’t know why I’m surprised.
