Spider-Man Remastered is proving a big hit with PC gamers but, as one rogue modder has discovered, with great power comes great responsibility.
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered has finally been released on Steam, meaning that PC gamers can get their hands on one of PlayStation’s most acclaimed games of the last few years. So far, the game has reached a peak of 64,893 concurrent players, falling just short of the numbers God of War achieved earlier this year.
Being able to finally play a game you’re hyped for is usually a positive experience, but wherever there is innocent excitement and joy there is likely to be some dickhead looking to sour the moment. Enter: ‘Mike Hawk’, a modder with either homophobic tendencies or a severe fear of rainbows.
Wasting no time at all, ‘Mike Hawk’ went about replacing all the LGBT pride flags that were originally scattered around the world of Spider-Man Remastered with USA ones. While other modders jumped right into designing fun and humorous mods that improve the game, this individual decided all they had to contribute were their destructive impulses and negativity.
For their trouble, they promptly found themselves banned from online modding community website Nexus. The relevant mod, titled ‘Non-Newtonian New York’ (whatever that means), has since been removed too.
Wow. I stopped to perch on a building in #Spidermanps4 and looked over and saw this.
Thinking about all the 12-year-old kids who will be playing this game and seeing this in towns where it's not safe to put that flag up. pic.twitter.com/QGr1Q7QrxZ
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 8, 2018
The removal of this Spider-Man Remastered mod, predictably, sparked strong opinions on both sides of the cultural divide. Accusations of ‘snowflake’ reigned supreme, once again from both sides, and it was all pretty bloody tiresome.
At some point aliens are going to discover an archived version of the internet, long after the last human has perished, and wonder what the hell a snowflake was (they’ll all be melted) and why it was seemingly the worst insult ever.
Hopefully they’ll also come across a version of Spider-Man Remastered and be like ‘these humans created some pretty dope shit when they weren’t busy triggering each other into extinction‘. Oh well; and by the way fuck ‘Mike Hawk’.
