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When Elon Musk dissed the latest Assassin’s Creed video game this week, its makers fired back in surprising fashion: by mocking his alleged habit of cheating at online games.
For months, the gaming community has been abuzz over claims that the world’s richest person has been paying other people to play online games for him and then bragging publicly about his skill ranking — a practice he appeared to admit in January.
So you’d be forgiven for thinking that Musk was on thin ice as he slammed left-wing video game streamer Hasan Piker as a “fraud” and a “sell-out” for promoting the just-released Assassin’s Creed Shadows.
“Objectively, he is promoting a terrible game just for the money,” said the Tesla tycoon, Trump ally, and avid video gamer on his social network X on Tuesday.
Then the samurai-themed game’s corporate PR account moved in for the kill. “Is that what the guy playing your Path of Exile 2 account told you?”
As of Wednesday evening, that rhetorical blade-slash had won around 70,000 retweets and 648,000 likes compared to 977 and 32,000 on Musk’s original effort.
Musk did not comment further, except to call Piker a “chickens*** r****d” for blocking him.
Musk has not publicly commented on the claims about his video game habits, but private messages shared by YouTuber NikoWrex appear to show him admitting that he paid to have his virtual characters ‘boosted’ by professional players in Path of Exile 2 and Diablo IV.
He reportedly insisted that he had never intended to take sole credit for the resulting achievements, and refused to apologize: “What would I be apologizing for?”
Shadows, an action roleplaying game set in 16th-century Japan and created by the French gaming giant Ubisoft, has been mostly praised by critics, with an 82 per cent rating on the review aggregation site Metacritic.
But for nearly a year the game and its creators have been inundated by anti-“woke” culture warriors — boosted by Musk himself — who objected to Ubisoft’s choice for one of the game’s two protagonists: not a Japanese man but a real-life Black samurai named Yasuke.
The actual Yasuke was an east African man who came to Japan in 1579 as a bodyguard for a Jesuit mission, during a time of tumultuous civil conflict, and ended up as a soldier in the entourage of the notorious warlord Oda Nobunaga.
While there is some ambiguity about his exact rank, and the details of his life are scarcely documented, historians believe he would have been seen by his contemporaries as a samurai (which was in any case a fluid category in that era).
In the game he serves alongside a fictional female ninja named Naoe — who is from Japan — as one of two playable protagonists, caught up in a centuries-long war between all-powerful secret societies over control of hyper-advanced technology created by an ancient pre-human species. That part, to be clear, is not historically accurate.
Initially the game’s makers tried to ride out the storm non-confrontationally, and were sometimes criticized for failing to stand up to racism, but in recent months they have increasingly chosen the path of the warrior.
The Independent has asked Elon Musk for comment.
