The company blamed “a series of mistakes” and inconsistent font rendering.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20260606180621/https://www.theverge.com/games/945088/gog-apologizes-email-nazi-symbols-the-end-of-the-sun
The company blamed “a series of mistakes” and inconsistent font rendering.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20260606180621/https://www.theverge.com/games/945088/gog-apologizes-email-nazi-symbols-the-end-of-the-sun
I’m struggling to figure out how they even ended up with it. So far as I can tell, 𖥞 is from a symbol from the Cameroon Bamum language, having nothing to do with the game. ꥟ is a character from Sumatran dialects, but it at least looks like a sun, so I could maybe see that. That said, the ϟ, nonetheless repeated, seems inexcusable. Its specifically Greek koppa, not the Old Norse ᛋ (the sowilō character they reference in their apology) and I see no reason to use it twice.
Honestly, the only way I can think of that this was included, was it being AI generated and unmonitored. Why else would they combine a random Bamum symbol, a Sumatran symbol, and what is pretty clearly an SS emblem?
I was assuming that they used that wheel symbol as a stand-in for the black sun symbol that the Nazis also used. But I also wonder if it’s just AI and some very dumb people. The AI might have encountered these symbols in training on some weird occult neo nazi forums or something, and when prompted to generate some cool runes, it put these in. Either that or the person who did this knows exactly what they’re doing and just pretends to have made a mistake.
GOG is Polish right? I’d expect better of them, the SS symbol should be commonly known. There’s no way this should’ve gotten past multiple people, it’s inexcusable
Unfortunately, the double koppa as a Nazi symbol is neither new or rare, esspecially relative to the fequency of other patterns of symbols. Seeing as LLMs just output common text, its unfortunately unsuprising that this would be among the results if limitted to symbols.
Thats the trick. Has GOG gone so far downhill that they publish unreviewed AI output, is it that the company hired a Nazi and put him in a global marketing role with zero oversight, or does the company have a more widespead Nazi problem?
None of the possibilities here are good, and the fact that the apology doesn’t even try to address any of these seems even worse.
To me, it is the fact that they used that S-like symbol twice in a row. I don’t care what that Unicode character is supposed to actually represent on its own. The juxtaposition of having two of the character together like that is clearly an intentional subtle wink from someone.
I’m not convinced it is, just because the other symbols are so random. Like, if it was a human, you’d think they’d at least use other runes, or would use something more standard like, ☉ or ☼, or would at least put in some effort to disguise it. I mean, if they actually wanted to make it subtle, they may even have actually used the sowilō symbol, given that that is what the SS runes originate from. Instead, its Koppa, undisguised, front and centre. An AI on the other hand, would just output random symbols with common patterns, such as this.
Then again, Nazis aren’t exactly known for being smart, so…