Treyarch Developer Apologizes for Black Ops III’s Twitter Stunt

A couple of weeks ago the Call of Duty Twitter was entirely redesigned to take nearly all the references to Call of Duty off of it. The account name was changed to Current Events Aggregate and what followed was a series of tweets regarding a terrorist attack in the nation of Singapore.

What followed was 18 tweets regarding this alleged attack. Then everything reverted back to the standard Call of Duty account. What this was, was a marketing push for the new Call of Duty game, Black Ops III. What this appeared to be to many was something that was in incredibly poor taste.

Now, in an interview with IGN, Treyarch game director Jason Blundell is apologizing for all of this getting out of hand.

“Here’s my view – and again, I’m a simple director and not involved in the marketing at all…However, it was absolutely not done for any kind of attention in any way. It was not done maliciously, or as any kind of scare tactic. I personally am very sorry for anyone who looked at it and got the wrong idea because it genuinely wasn’t meant that way.

While this was obviously meant to help build the story of Black Ops III, their method for doing so left something to be desired. We’re inclined to believe that this was more due to a lack of consideration than an attempt to court controversy. Having said that, the idea that it might have been done to intentionally set people off in order to get more media attention is certainly within the realm of possibility.

Hopefully, this will wake up a few marketing departments and help them realize that there are things they don’t need to do to build hype.