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A screenshot of the game Survival Island 3
A screenshot of the game Survival Island 3 – Australia Story 3D, which advises players ‘You have to fight with aboriginals [sic] – you invaded their home!’ Photograph: None
A screenshot of the game Survival Island 3 – Australia Story 3D, which advises players ‘You have to fight with aboriginals [sic] – you invaded their home!’ Photograph: None

Game that rewards players for killing Indigenous Australians pulled from app stores

This article is more than 8 years old

Survival Island 3 – Australia Story 3D removed from Apple and Google app stores after public outcry over gameplay showing an Aboriginal man being beaten to death with a stone axe

A mobile game that purportedly rewarded players for bludgeoning Indigenous Australians to death has been removed from both Apple and Google app stores following public outcry.

Survival Island 3 – Australia Story 3D tasked players with surviving in the outback. A cached snapshot of the game taken by Google as it appeared in Apple’s iTunes store on 12 January shows its description: “Your goal is to survive.”

“Beware of angry animals, especially if you don’t have any weapon. At nights, there is really dangerous, (sic) try to hide somewhere … Hunt animals or grow plants – you have to eat something.”

“You also have to fight with aboriginals [sic] – you invaded their home!”

A screenshot used to promote the game in the Apple iTunes store showed an in-game alert of “Beware of Aborigines!”

Released on 14 December and priced at $4.49 AU, it was listed as appropriate for players of 12 years old and up, for “infrequent/mild” realistic violence, cartoon or fantasy violence, and “horror/fear themes”.

Google’s cache shows it was available to download from the Google Play store on 13 January, with more than 1,200 reviews and a rating of 4.2 stars out of five.

A series of video walk-throughs of Survival Island 3 posted to YouTube have been removed by the user ‘R2 Darksaber’ since it was linked to by New Matilda; in one, R2 Darksaber reportedly explained he was “searching for natives” in the game before before beating to death an Aboriginal man with a stone axe.

Reporting on the public outcry, gaming news website Player Attack said R2 Darksaber’s uploads showed he “takes great delight in playing the game ...

“The video shows a first-person view of beating an Aboriginal man to death with a blunt weapon while the voiceover cackles gleefully. The gamer is rewarded with a boomerang and what looks like a stone arrowhead – and R2 Darksaber is disappointed with the haul.”

Another video showing 11 minutes of game play uploaded by an Android user remains on YouTube but does not show any violence towards Aboriginal characters.

A video showing game play of Survival Island 3 – Australia Story 3D.

A Change.org petition calling for the removal of the game was started on Friday night, and now has more than 48,300 signatures.

Petition founder Georgia Mantle told Guardian Australia she first became aware of the game when a friend tweeted a screenshot of it; it was then discussed in the Students Support Aboriginal Communities Facebook group, of which she is a member.

Writing from Timor Leste, Mantle said the responses to the petition had been “amazing”.

“There have been a few trolls who seem to think the murder of Aboriginal characters is not any different to the deaths of other characters in other video games but I have taken my time to point out that is is different because it has historical reflections of the real experiences of Aboriginal peoples names Australia. And that fact that this game encourages you to kill people based on their race making it very different to violence in other games.”

Apple’s App Store guidelines for developers says apps will be rejected for “any content or behaviour that we believe is over the line”.

“What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it’. And we think that you will also know it when you cross it.”

Survival Island 3 is not currently available to download from either the Australian or United States iTunes stores, nor the Google Play store.

Mantle said she was aware the app had been removed. “I would like to see a statement and apology from the hosts and the developer though, as it is not enough to just silently remove the app.”

Both Google and Apple have been contacted for comment, as have GFTEAM, listed as the game’s developer in the Google Play store. (The iTunes store attributed it to Kristina Fedenkova.

A Google spokeswoman said the company did not comment on individual apps but that it removed “applications that violate our policies”.

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