Ethnic Cleansing was produced by theNational Alliance, an Americanwhite supremacist organization.[10] According to theAnti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), it was "the largest and most activeneo-Nazi organization in the United States".[2] Shaun Walker, thechairman of the National Alliance, said the game's sole purpose was to be "racially provocative".[4] It was advertised as the "mostpolitically incorrect video game ever made".[11]Ethnic Cleansing was developed usingGenesis3D, anopen-source 3Dgame engine, and its Reality Factory set of tools.[12] Using an existing engine allowed for the game's creation with only minor modifications to thesource code.[12] D. Bryan Ringer designed and programmed the game using theVisual Basic andC++ programming languages, while Bob Hawthorne provided additional video and sound elements, including the voices for Jews.[13] The game was released byResistance Records, arecord label owned by the National Alliance, on January 21, 2002, coinciding withMartin Luther King Jr. Day.[2][14] The label sold the game onCD-ROM via its website forUS$14.88, a reference to theFourteen Words.[8] Several thousand copies were manufactured and shipped by Rainbo Records until the company severed its ties with Resistance Records in June 2002.[15]
Marcus Brian highlightedEthnic Cleansing in his report on racist video games for the ADL and said it was "the most sophisticated racist game available online".[2] The organization's national director,Abraham Foxman, regarded it as a perversion of the "very legitimate and popular" medium of video games.[16]James Paul Gee, a professor at theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison, described it as a "persuasive example" of an ideology conveyed through a video game.[17] Similar concerns were raised by the National Association for the Advancement of Hispanic People and theNational Urban League's Institute for Opportunity and Equality.[18] Mahnoor Saeed at theInstitute of Regional Studies found the game to reinforce racist stereotypes.[19]ABC News, as well as the authors Constance Steinkuehler and Kurt Squire in the bookGaming and Extremism, attributed the rise of extremist games at the time to the availability of open-source game engines like Genesis3D.[9][20]Alex St. John, thechief executive officer ofWildTangent, which owned the engine, distanced himself from the game and said his company was not involved.[16]
William Luther Pierce, the National Alliance's founder, claimed the game had a positive reception and sold 2,000 copies by March 2002, with 90% of customers being "white teenage boys".[7][21] He characterized it as a "medium for the message" that teenagers could be subjected to even before being old enough to join the National Alliance.[18][22] Several academic writers noted the use of video games and the associatedpopular culture as an effective recruitment tool for young people.[5][6][23][24] Nick Robinson and Joe Whittaker believe that having the collectable life rune, which doubles as the National Alliance's logo, restore the player's health makes them associate it with positive effects. However, they believed the game's high difficulty may limit its appeal to experienced players.[5] In a retrospective forVice, Paweł Mączewski noted that "the game itself is so tragic in terms of execution that even neo-Nazis would not want to play it".[25]The Record interviewed several young men who identified aswhite nationalists, and they found the game to be in bad taste and potentially harmful for their movement due to the violence it depicts.[26]
Kristian A. Bjørkelo inGame Studies, as well as Galen Lamphere‑Englund and Jessica White of theGlobal Network on Extremism and Technology, remarked thatEthnic Cleansing was one of the first right-wing extremist video games and was key to their rise in popularity.[27][28] According toMic's Ryan Khosravi, it was the best-known neo-Nazi game and continued to be discussed onStormfront, a neo-Naziinternet forum, until at least April 2017.[29]Ethnic Cleansing has been ranked among the most controversial video games byPC World (2010),[30]GameZone (2012),[31]PCMag (2014),[32] andThe Escapist (2015).[33]UGO andComplex considered it the most racist game in 2010 and 2012, respectively.[34][35]Ethnic Cleansing is explicitly prohibited to be shown onTwitch, avideo game livestreaming service.[36]
Ethnic Cleansing was advertised as the first in a series of games. The second game was to beTurner Diaries: The Game, based on Pierce's novelThe Turner Diaries, which depicts Aryans eliminating all non-white people throughnuclear,chemical, andbiological warfare.[2][14] In 2003, Resistance Records releasedWhite Law.[37][38] The game casts the player as the formerSWAT member Michael Riley, who must reclaim the fictional new American capital, Kapitol City, frompeople of color.[38] It expands on the gameplay ofEthnic Cleansing with more levels and weapons.[6]
^Mączewski, Paweł (October 17, 2013)."Gwałcę, torturuję i jestem rasistą" [I rape, I torture, and I am a racist].Vice (in Polish).Archived from the original on March 31, 2020. RetrievedSeptember 20, 2023.
Crisafi, Anthony F.; Drawmer, Lois (2009). "The Seduction of Evil: An Examination of the Media Culture of the Current White Supremacist Movement". In Balmain, Colette; Drawmer, Lois (eds.).Something Wicked This Way Comes: Essays on Evil and Human Wickedness. At the Interface/Probing the Boundaries.Rodopi.ISBN978-90-420-2550-9.
King, C. Richard; Leonard, David J. (2014). "Gaming the Racial Order: White Power Identities and Ideologies in Video Games".Beyond Hate: White Power and Popular Culture.Ashgate Publishing.ISBN978-1-4724-2746-5.
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