When the Resident Evil 5 trailer was first shown, it raised some eyebrows. Some were critical, saying the set-in-Africa game used racist imagery.
Later builds of the game showed a variety of races as the zombies, but several website reported that some of questionable imagery remained. Both Eurogamer and Kikizo described a scene depicting “a white blonde woman being dragged off, screaming, by black men.”
Apparently, the version of the game submitted to the British Board of Film Classification did not contain this potentially offensive scene. Sue Clark, Head of Communications at the British Board of Film Classification, explains, “In the version [of the scene] submitted to the BBFC there is only one man pulling the blonde woman in from the balcony, and I can’t say the skimpiness of her dress impressed [[link]] itself [[link]] on me. The single man is not black either. As the whole game is set in Africa it is hardly surprising that some of the characters are black, just like the fact that some of the characters in an earlier version were Spanish as the game was set in Spain.”
The BBFC states that it does take racism “very seriously”; however, it added that [[link]] the version of RE5 is not racist. “As I said yesterday, we do take racism very seriously,” said Clark, “but in this case there is no issue around racism.”
BBFC Rubbishes Resident Evil Racism Claims [Kikizo via Eurogamer]