An unimaginative, translator-turned-troll managed to add an unpleasant racial epithet to Minecraft‘s main menu.
Yesterday, Afrikaans-speaking players who fired up the latest snapshot build of Minecraft got an unpleasant surprise: The phrase “You are a NIGGER,” had replaced the single player option on the menu screen.
Recently-promoted head developer, Jens Bergensten, apologized for the incident and pinned the blame on a “prankster” hiding amongst the multitude of volunteer translators working on the game. “Sorry about that =( I thought I had banned that user,” read one of his tweets.
The offending translation has since been removed, and the forum topic that originally it pointed out has been shuffled off this mortal coil as well.
Minecraft is largely text-free, but many users have taken it upon themselves to translate the game into a variety of different languages, evidently without much oversight from Mojang. The game is currently playable in 56 different languages, including a few humorous, made-up ones, like “Pirate,” “Canadian English” and “French.”
Now, I’d be lying if I said that the idea of contaminating a highly popular game’s main menu with absurdly offensive expletives doesn’t tickle my ever-so-slightly anarchic funny bone, but is “NIGGER,” complete with caps, really the best this person could come up with? That’s just sad, in a tired kind of way. It makes the low-brow gremlins who scrawl mustaches and crudely-drawn genitals on billboards look like Banksy.
