Zombie School iPhone app pulled following iPhoneWorld.ca story: developer’s responce
Posted by dennis on July 20th, 2009 at 10:30pm Comments
At around 02:30 last night we posted a story about a school shooting game for the iPhone Zombie School.
About 10 hours later this app was pulled from the AppStore, following continued coverage of the story from TechCrunch, Wired, PC World, and other major news sites that picked up on our story
Now the developer of the game, Retarded Arts, posted an open letter, which goes a little something like this:
Zombie School - a massive confusion, response from Retarded Arts
posted on: July 20th, 2009 - Follow us on Twitter RetardedArtsZombie School, which was approved by Apple, was taken down from the App Store, at 12:30 PM this morning. We think that there has been a massive confusion.
It all started from the an article on iPhone World. In this article, Dennis, has pointed out a comment made by us on iPhoneWordl’s forum. This post was part of a viral marketing campaign that we were doing. It seems to have worked (Zombie School is viral, its on Wired, TechCrunch and PC World!). But right after doing this type of forum post, with in hrs, we realized that it was offending some users so we apologized for it. Please refer to this Forum Post , on Touch Arcade
Forum where we posted this (see below) as a response to some annoyed forum readers:
“Hi Guys,
I am sorry for upsetting some of you for this marketing gimmick. Its just a idea that one of our intern had. He got kicked out from mac forum.
Anyways, I hope you all like the game.
We are still trying to get the original “Wall St to GITMO” released, perhaps change from Banker to CEO???
Hope you all had a good kick out of this!
Take Care!
Retarded Arts”We would also like to point out to an error made by, Robin Wauters of Tech Crunch . In his article . He states that - “It (Zombie School) lets you turn your classmates or teachers into zombies, after which you can use a machine gun, bow or grenades to kill them”. This statement is not true as it is clearly stated in the Game Description that - “Your local campus has been infected by the Zombie Virus!!! Every one is infected!!”. This means that the local campus of the user has been infected by the Zombie Virus. It does not by any means mean that users can convert their friends into Zombies and then kill them. This, we believe, is the root of the confusion.
Zombie school is not promoting school shooting, its rather promoting elimination of Zombies to protect the humans, just like any other Zombie Game. As we also stated in the Game Description that - “You (the game user) have the control over the Zombie shooting tower that your supporters have made you”, who are your supporters the reader might wonder? The supporters are your human friends.
This is just another ZOMBIE GAME. We believe that a genuine mistake, by us, on a forum post in which the game was accidently related to school shooting has stirred all this controversy which we still are trying to digest. Zombies are not humans, according to the princeton dictionary , Zombie is a dead body that has been brought back to life by a supernatural force. There are so many Zombie games on the App Store, where the motive is to eliminated them. If, Zombies, are in a town like Zombievill USA and you kill them by shooting a bazooka at them, then why cant you kill a few in a school?
We hope that folks at Apple, PCWorld, TrechCrunch and others read this article, as we would like them to understand the root of this confusion and put our app back on the store to let people see what Zombie School is really all about.
Again, we would like to apologize to all the users that didn’t like our forum post and we really don’t think that Zombie School is tasteless
So in retrospect, it’s quite funny what has happened.
- A few hours after our story got posted major news sites picked it up.
- 10 hours after our original story went live Apple removed Zombie School from the AppStore.
- Zombie School was in the AppStore for at least 10 days now., before being “suddenly” pulled.
- Until now Apple refuses to give comments on why they pulled the game.
So was the reason:
A) Apple simply missed the controversial side of the game when approving it.
B) Someone from Apple read the news coverage of our story and decided that this sort of advertising is wrong.
C) A+B combined.
… we’re not sure what the real answer is; we’d love to know what you think.
Related posts:
- School shooting in an iPhone game: acceptable?
- Zombie School iPhone app: Post Mortem Review
- Zombie School re-released as Zombie City
- Zombie Headshot game brings animated gore to your iPhone
- Zombie Attack Lite: free iPhone game
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