An Apex Legends developer has been fired due to racist and sexist comments made over a decade ago. Daniel Klein, one of Apex Legends's lead designers, announced his departure from Respawn Entertainment following the resurfacing of his comments.
In the social media age, it has become a common trend for people to be exposed by their old content and posts. Living forever in the public sphere, and many times unable to be fully deleted, these comments and posts are never truly gone, and in many cases, return to destroy the careers of their authors. For instance, Activision parted ways with Modern Warfare's Ghost actor, Jeff Leach, after a series of sexist comments about a Twitch streamer resurfaced online.
Klein's derogatory comments resurfaced in late July and began circulating on Twitter. Posted to DeviantArt in 2007, Klein's blog included multiple offensive and hateful posts targeting women and African people. Quickly Klein took ownership of his comments, denouncing them as any sort of indication of his current character. Just recently, Klein announced on Twitter he had worked his final week at Respawn Entertainment.
Klein's tweets offer insight into his character at the time and the type of person he saw himself as since. He iterates that his comments came not out of belief, but out of an attempt to generate people's reactions. Importantly though, he acknowledges that the intent does not excuse him of the comments made, remarking that he has tried becoming a better person since 2007. Either way, EA fired Klein for his comments, in the same way EA fired one of its own directors.
This is not the first time that Klein has been fired from working at a AAA game studio. Klein told The Verge he was fired in 2018 from Riot Games for violating the company's social media policies regarding the exclusion of men from a League of Legends tournament. In this instance, he was defending the PAX West's decision to offer events that only allowed women and non-binary people, but his speaking out was out of conduct according to Riot Games' standards. Previously, Respawn been committed to addressing development problems both internal and externally, so it will be interesting to see if any further action is taken.
Klein's situation raises the continued question about people's social media personas today. Should people's past inappropriate comments forever indications of their character, or should they allowed to change and continue their occupations? While the latter outcome is more forgiving, it is much harder to follow through on and make happen. This development follows the ongoing discrimination allegations at Blizzard against many of the company's executives, with many of Diablo 4's designers leaving the company.
Apex Legends is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: The Verge