Namco Honors Chilean Miners With Wallpaper, Then Apologizes For It

Namco has learned the hard way that you can’t please everyone on the Internet. Yesterday, the company chimed in on the miraculous rescue of 33 trapped Chilean miners with a wallpaper featuring Mr. Driller, the son of Dug-Dug who’s appeared in video games since 1999. The wallpaper simply said “Bienvenido de nuevo” (Welcome back) and showed Mr. Driller jumping triumphantly in the air. Namco then pulled down the image, explaining that it “lacked consideration.” Said Namco’s Twitter feed, “We would like to offer a profound apology to everyone. It was inexcusable.”

I don’t know. General attitudes about the rescue have been pretty jovial. It was, after all, a collaborative effort between several countries, and I think of gaming as a universal language. Maybe could argue that Namco was trying to capitalize off a potentially tragic situation to peddle some video games, or was just trivializing the whole ordeal with a character that digs into the ground. But I have a hard seeing this as anything more than a celebratory gesture in the spirit of the moment. The bigger question comes from a commenter at GameSetWatch: “1280 x 1024? What is this, the past?” [Kotaku via The Escapist]