Media regulator investigating ITV Arma 2 blunder

Arma 2

Remember the ITV documentary that claimed ARMA 2 footage to be a secret IRA film ? The Guardian report that the slip is getting the broadcaster into trouble with the british media regulator, Ofcom, who today announced that they will be launching an investigation into the incident to see if the mis-labelling of the documentary footage constitutes a breach of its broadcasting codes.

The scene showed a helicopter being shot down by a soldier taking cover near an armoured vehicle, and was instantly recognised by Arma fans on the Bohemia Interactive forums . The documentary was the first in ITV's new Exposure series, which hoped to expose links between Muammar Gadaffi and arms supplied to the IRA. ITV ended up issuing an apology instead.

Bohemia Interactive's CEO, Marek Spanel was understandably surprised by the incident. “Sometimes creativity and realism in our games lead into crazy results and this is one of such example. I just briefly watched the entire documentary and I still can not believe it as it is overall very serious and lenghtly feature,” he told us.

“We are surprised our games apparently may look real enough to some users already that they can not tell it is not real life footage,” he added.

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.