“On that day, when what should have been a joyful autumn night turned into the scene of a horrible 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, told NBC News that he had been playing the new game “Call of Duty” and didn’t notice the Itaewon footage at first.
“But after hearing about it and thinking about it, I started to realize that the images were very similar,” said Lee, who works at a South Korean video game company.
“The more I thought about it, the more I felt betrayed as a player,” he said. “After all, it was a gaming company and a game series that I enjoyed.”
The premise of the game, in which South Korean conscripts are pushed to defend their country alongside American soldiers after a North Korean invasion, was controversial before it was even available.
Although the “Call of Duty” invasion is fictional, it is inspired by the real-life capture of Seoul by North Korea 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 moves from Washington and Seoul as he continues to advance his nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
“At the end of the day, whether it is a real war or the Itaewon disaster, both involve the suffering of real people,” Lee Mi Hyun, director of the Itaewon Disaster Citizen Committee, said in an interview with NBC News.
“They turn that pain into entertainment,” she said. “It’s an approach that appears to show absolutely no empathy for the people who have experienced this suffering.”
Gn world
