War Thunder developer Gaijin Entertainment has apologized after players spotted that the studio had used a shot of the explosion from the Challenger disaster in a piece of artwork for the free-to-play military combat sim.
Over the weekend, Reddit user abacs21 noticed that an explosion in artwork for the game's new "Seek & Destroy" expansion looked markedly similar to a shot of the Challenger spacecraft exploding.
Following that, Reddit user HarryTheOwlcat posted a shot of the Challenger explosion superimposed over the War Thunder artwork in question, and it's pretty difficult to deny the obvious similarities between the two.
In a thread on the official War Thunder forums, community manager magazine2 admits that the Challenger disaster explosion was indeed used in Seek & Destroy artwork.
They say the shot was used "accidentally", and that it was "part of an aerial explosion reference pack" used by Gaijin's artists. As such, the "context" of the explosion being from the Challenger disaster "was lost".
The community manager goes on to say that the team will alter the artwork "as soon as we can" and will take measures to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again in future.
If you're not from the US, the historical significance of the Challenger disaster, in which seven crew members died when the Challenger shuttle exploded just 73 seconds after its liftoff, may not be as apparent to you as it would to a US citizen.
Suffice it to say, though, that this event is still reverberating throughout the US space industry, and specifically throughout NASA. It led to the shelving of civilian spaceflight plans for over two decades and also changed other key parts of NASA policy.
Although Gaijin says its artists mistakenly used the shot as part of a "reference pack", it's not entirely clear what a shot of a spacecraft exploding is doing in a reference pack for a military game that focuses on air, land, and sea vehicles.
Still, this makes a nice break from the stuff Gaijin and War Thunder usually get in trouble for, which is to say the leaking of confidential military secrets. It happens far more frequently than you might think.
