Bereaved Families Demand Call of Duty Remove Seoul Crush Footage

Bereaved families in South Korea have demanded that the makers of Call of Duty remove footage of the 2022 Seoul crowd crush from the newest instalment of the video game, according to a report in The Guardian. The bereaved families' council and a coalition of civic groups issued a joint statement Wednesday calling on the publisher to pull the clips, which appear in the opening moments of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.

What footage appears in the game?

The clips are seconds long and are used to depict civilian casualties during a fictional North Korean invasion scenario, The Guardian reported. One clip shows a scene of chaos with a figure performing CPR on a victim lying in the street. Another shows rows of bodies laid out in the road and a victim being carried away on a stretcher.

What happened in the 2022 Itaewon crowd crush?

A total of 158 people were killed in a narrow alley in Seoul's Itaewon nightlife district during Halloween weekend in 2022, according to the Guardian report. Two additional people have since been recognized as victims after dying from trauma caused by the disaster, bringing the toll cited in the families' statement higher than the original count.

What are bereaved families demanding?

The families' council and civic groups said in their joint statement that the game's producers had lifted real emergency scenes from that night without alteration.

"We are appalled that the chaotic and desperate scenes, in which countless citizens performed CPR to save one another and victims lay on the cold street, were used exactly as they were to create a scene in a game," the groups said, demanding that the footage be removed, per The Guardian.

The statement said people who took part in the rescue effort or witnessed the crush are still living with trauma from that night.

How has the game's premise affected victims online?

The families' council and civic groups said hateful comments about the Itaewon victims have been spreading online in connection with the game's premise, according to the Guardian report. The statement did not specify the platforms where the comments have appeared or quote specific examples, but it tied the renewed harassment directly to the game's release and the use of the crush imagery in its opening sequence.

What is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4?

Modern Warfare 4 is the latest installment in Activision's long-running first-person shooter franchise. The Guardian's report was accompanied by a photograph of people queuing for a pop-up "Korean alley" experience in Shoreditch, London, earlier this month, timed to the game's release. The report did not include a response from the game's publisher to the families' demand, and it was not immediately clear whether the footage would be altered or removed from the title.

The Itaewon crush remains one of the deadliest crowd disasters in recent South Korean history, and the 2022 anniversary period has continued to draw public attention to unresolved grief among survivors and victims' relatives. The families' council's statement frames the video game sequence as a fresh source of distress layered onto that unresolved mourning, arguing that the unaltered use of real emergency footage — rather than a fictionalized recreation — crossed a line the civic groups say the publisher should correct.

The Guardian's report, filed from Seoul, did not indicate whether South Korean authorities or media regulators have weighed in on the footage, nor did it cite any legal action contemplated by the families' council. The dispute, as described in the joint statement, centers specifically on the opening-sequence clips and their depiction of CPR efforts and bodies in the street, rather than on the game's broader North Korean invasion storyline.

Who reported the story and when?

The Guardian's account was written by Raphael Rashid, reporting from Seoul, and was first published Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026, at 12:41 a.m. ET, with a later update posted the same day at 8:08 p.m. ET, according to the outlet's byline and timestamps. The outlet's coverage of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 also included a separate piece examining the franchise's narrative-driven gameplay, headlined "The audience gets to be in on it: How narrative-led gameplay is Call of Duty's greatest weapon," which The Guardian linked alongside its report on the families' demand without further elaboration on the connection between the two stories.