IGN Says Resident Evil 5 is Racist

Video Games

Alex Gherzo | Mar 14, 2024 |

Ever read a headline people are freaking out about and think it’s an overreaction till you actually read the article? Yesterday, IGN published a piece titled “The Resident Evil Game That Can’t Be Remade.” For its first few paragraphs, it’s just your run-of-the-mill opinion piece about why Resident Evil 5 isn’t as good as its predecessors and should be skipped over in the remake queue. Then, the sixth paragraph introduces what is clearly the reason the article was written and this person feels the way he does – “But all of this doesn’t account for Resident Evil 5’s most notorious problem: racism.” Yep, here we go.

I’ve never played Resident Evil 5, so I’m admittedly looking at this from the outside, but what I gather is that the game is set in a fictional African country where the evil zombie virus gets loose and turns the population – who are black, because it’s Africa – into zombies, and the players have to fight their way through them. One of IGN’s criticisms is that the Africans in the game are portrayed as “a nation of mobs and primitives who are violent even before their infection.” Again, I can’t speak to the validity of that, but you know who has? The British Board of Film Classification (who, as someone who’s spent some time in England and watched American movies there, likes to censor), who, when they were asked to review a scene early on, dismissed the notion that it was racist. Moreover, two of the voice actors from the game, Karen Dryer and T. J. Storm, who are black, disagreed that the game was racist when speaking to the Associated Press:

T.J. Storm makes a good point: why does a Resident Evil game get to be set anywhere but in Africa, and why does it have to be watered down when it is? Well, IGN has an answer for that in their new article, which says, “in a post-Black Lives Matter world, there is only one acceptable response to a white man shooting waves of Africans for an entire video game: no.” So, despite their contextualization earlier about the depiction of Africans in Resident Evil 5 before the virus hits, they wouldn’t be okay with it if it were just the zombies of infected Africans either. There you go, gamers; IGN has decided that black people can’t be zombies, or, presumably, any other video game bad guys, although they do suggest making a new Resident Evil game with a black protagonist. (They conveniently leave out that two of the good guys in Resident Evil 5, played by the actors in the above video, are black – which, at the time, was called an attempt to escape racism charges.) And T.J. Storm also points out that there are antagonists who aren’t black, which, again, IGN doesn’t mention. So, this is just another virtue signal from games journalists taking a break from carrying Sweet Baby Inc.’s water.

If you want a good laugh, click “See Results” on the poll at the bottom of the IGN article. If you want another one, here’s something Yellowflash dug up: