“On that day, when what should have been a joyful autumn night turned into the scene of a horrific tragedy, the state was nowhere to be found,” he said in a statement on X.
Lee Jin Woo, whose younger sister was 28 when she died in the crowd crush, told NBC News that he had played the new “Call of Duty” game and didn’t notice the Itaewon footage at first.
“But after hearing about it and thinking it over, I began to realize the footage looked very similar,” said Lee, who works at a South Korean gaming company.
“The more I thought about it, the more I felt betrayed as a gamer,” he said. “After all, it was a game company and a game series that I had liked.”
The game’s premise, in which South Korean conscripts are thrust into defending their country alongside American soldiers after a North Korean invasion, has been controversial since before it was available to play.
Though the “Call of Duty” invasion is fictional, it draws on North Korea’s real-life capture of Seoul in 1950 during the Korean War. The conflict ended in 1953 with an armistice instead of a peace treaty, and the two Koreas remain technically at war.
Tensions between the North and South have escalated in recent weeks, with the two countries embroiled in a standoff along their heavily militarized border. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has rebuffed diplomatic outreach from Washington and Seoul as he continues to advance his nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
“Ultimately, whether we’re talking about an actual war or the Itaewon disaster, both involve the suffering of real people,” Lee Mi Hyun, a director at the Itaewon Disaster Citizens’ Countermeasures Committee, told NBC News in an interview.
“They’re turning that suffering into entertainment,” she said. “It’s an approach that seems to show absolutely no empathy for the people who experienced that suffering.”
