Former Sucker Punch artist Drew Harrison was fired by studio parent company Sony in September, just one day after posting a joke about the murder of high-profile alt-right provocateur Charlie Kirk. In a new interview with Aftermath, Harrison says the firing, which ended a career of nearly 10 years at Sucker Punch, came about not because of the joke, as Sucker Punch claimed, but because of the Gamergate-style harassment campaign that followed.
The furor was sparked by a Bluesky post Harrison made on September 10, the day of Kirk's murder: "I hope the shooter's name is Mario so that Luigi knows his bro got his back," a reference to the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly carried out by Luigi Mangione. The post was immediately seized upon by Kirk supporters and online trolls, who flooded Harrison and other Sucker Punch employees with threats and demanded a boycott of the studio's then-upcoming Ghost of Yotei.
Much of the effort was spearheaded by streamers Zack "Asmongold" Hoyt and Mark "Grummz" Kern, the latter of whom was a leading figure in the Gamergate harassment campaign that began in 2014. Hoyt subsequently threatened to make efforts to get Harrison fired from future jobs, "for fun. I enjoy it. I like it. It's a nice pastime for me."
Harrison acknowledged in the interview that "the joke was not in the best taste," but despite Sucker Punch studio head Brian Fleming saying she was let go for "making light of someone's murder," she doesn't believe it's the real reason she was fired. Harrison said she was never asked to take down the post (it's still up), nor was an apology requested, and no "senior members" of Sucker Punch management spoke to her prior to her dismissal. Instead, she was simply, and very quickly, shown the door, with no time taken to consider the source and motivation of complaints, or other avenues of recourse.
"It feels like nobody investigated the harassment me and my coworkers were receiving," Harrison said.
One of Harrison's former coworkers, who's still at Sucker Punch, shared a similar sentiment, telling Aftermath, "If we as an industry got better about realizing when harassment is happening and standing up as a block, maybe this wouldn't stop harassment, but there would be much more hesitation to do it."
It's a lesson that should have been learned in the immediate aftermath of Gamergate, but the speed at which Sucker Punch caved suggests that nothing has changed. Harassment campaigns led by a very small but very loud contingent of 'gamers' opposed to wokeness and DEI, terms they never seem able to clearly and consistently define, have continued unabated, as seen in, for instance, the asinine outrage over Sweet Baby Inc in 2024.
Of course, Harrison's firing from Sucker Punch didn't stop Ghost of Yotei's detractors. The game launched to critical acclaim (it won two Golden Joystick awards) and commercial success, leading the mob to claim that reported sales numbers are being faked.
"As it turns out my joke didn't make the game do any worse, my firing didn't make the game do any better, so really the only thing that the harassment campaign succeeded in was sucking all the joy out of my life so I guess that's a W," Harrison posted on October 3, the day after Ghost of Yotei's release.
"I was fired because of a harassment campaign," Harrison told Aftermath. "It wasn't the result of a bad joke. And I really don't want this to happen to anyone else, because I feel like with the state of everything, it will absolutely happen to other people."
And, entirely predictably, so it has: Ghost of Yotei actor Erika Ishii, who was nominated for a Golden Joystick for their work on the game and is also in the running at The Game Awards, has also faced widespread abuse from the same crowd, not for any specific transgression but, well, just for their work on the game.
