Someone recreated the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting in Cruelty Squad

1 week ago 47

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Image: wget/Consumer Softproducts

Nicole Carpenter is a senior reporter specializing in investigative features about labor issues in the game industry, as well as the business and culture of games.

Last week, a masked shooter killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside of a Manhattan hotel. Thompson’s wife said he had received threats potentially related to “a lack of coverage.” UnitedHealthcare reportedly uses “a faulty artificial intelligence algorithm to deny elderly patients coverage,“ according to CBS News, and denies coverage to chronically ill patients, per ProPublica, despite billions in profit. When UnitedHealth Group made a statement on Facebook addressing the killing of its chief executive, the majority of the emoji reactions — more than 57,000 of approximately 62,000, per CNN — were the laughing emoji. Many others online have turned to uncomfortable and dark humor as a response to the shooting. One such response has been a modded map for Consumer Softproducts’ 2021 first-person shooter Cruelty Squad, a game in which you play as a hired assassin in a capitalist nightmare world.

In the base game, you start by taking out enemies of corporations. It’s an aggressive, surreal, and deeply weird experience. Cruelty Squad players can create custom maps that live on an equally aesthetically aggressive website. This new fan-made map is named “Hilton Hitjob,” a clear reference to Thompson’s killing.

Here’s the map’s description — it mimics the style of writing in Cruelty Squad, which is set in a dystopian cyberpunk world:

UnitedHealth CEO, Brian Thompson, has lately been failing to provide enough spare organs to executives through denying claims and then harvesting with a measly 22.7% denial rate. This is already beyond the possible tolerances of our clients, but with the holiday season drug rush we cannot forgive his failure to meet market demands any more. Once he’s removed from the equation, we can expect to finally get on with our partying. We’ve provided you a rented bicycle to intercept the target.

Video of the mod shows a first-person view of someone picking up a gun and approaching a man in a suit from behind — again, recreated in the surrealist aesthetic of Cruelty Squad — before shooting and fleeing to a bike. It’s grisly, essentially a first-person recreation of the security footage distributed by police of the actual shooting.

Polygon has reached out for comment to the creator of the mod and to Valve, which owns Steam, the online storefront where Cruelty Squad is sold. We will update this story when they respond.