Some people will look anywhere for racist undertones. Houston Chronicle writer Willie Jefferson posted an article on Game Hacks, a video game blog with the Chronicle, earlier this month and accused the yet-to-be release Left 4 Dead 2 of containing racist undertones.

Jefferson points out that “players will have to fight their way through hordes of zombies – with several of them who appear to be African-American.” He also accuses Valve of being insensitive to Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath, saying that having the game set in New Orleans so soon was a bad call and “the city has enough to deal with – Valve should have spared them, even if it’s a video game.”

Apparently including “several” black zombies in a video game deems the entire project racist in these turbulent times. Obviously Valve and the team behind L4D2 disagree and when Left 4 Dead writer Chet Faliszek was asked about the accusations by Destructoid, he called them “utter insanity.”

“There are mixed races of zombies” stated Faliszek, “there are all different races of zombies that you shoot, and since we placed it in New Orleans, that makes it racist? I honestly re-read the paragraph about five times … but when two of the characters in your game are African-American, it’s a weird thing to be accused of. We’re like, ‘how does this work’?”

“… As far as Katrina goes, if you go down to New Orleans, Katrina’s still going on. I mean, it’s messed up, it is crazy that the city is still in the state it’s in, and we treat that with the utmost respect. Our CEDA thing is not some subversive commentary on anything. This is a videogame, those are real people’s lives, we are not trying to make a statement with that … It’s a place we love, it’s dear to our hearts. We would not cheapen it. It’s not a brick-for-brick representation of New Orleans; it’s a fictional version, and I love that city.”

Left 4 Dead 2 is due to be released on Xbox 360 and PC November 17th 2009, racism free of course.

Source