Telltale’s Batman Contains Real Image of Assassinated Diplomat, Players Demanding Answers

Warning: This story contains an image of a dead body that, while not containing any gore, may still be disturbing to some readers.

Someone at Telltale messed up. The latest episode of Batman: The Telltale Series contains in an image of an actual dead body. The body belongs to Andrei Karlov, a Russian ambassador to Turkey who was assassinated in December of 2016. He was shot in the back and killed while performing an opening ceremony for an art exhibit, and the story made international headlines for days.

This was not an obscure event, and how his body ended up in Telltale’s latest episode of Batman is beyond us.

You can see the screen-cap in question below:

Here is the side-by-side comparison from BroTeamPill:

We’ve reached out to Telltale for comment, but have yet to hear back from them. This story is only going to see a wider circulation as the day wears on, so we expect Telltale will be coming out with some kind of statement in the very near future.

So… What happened here?

How the hell did this happen?

There are a few possible explanations for how something like this could happen. The first, and most likely, is that this was an accident. It’s quite possible that an artist on the team, under a pressing deadline, made a generic Google search for a dead body, and cut out the first thing that showed up. The image of Karlov’s body made headlines for weeks, the photographer responsible for the image won awards for his presence of mind and framing during the event.

It seems likely that this photo would come up as a top result, depending on the search query, and I’m sure the artist didn’t think that anyone would look twice to think about it.

It’s also possible, but far less likely, that this was done intentionally. This image can be acquired from Getty, but we’re hesitant to believe that anyone would intentionally source this image and use this body in poor taste.

We have our issues with Telltale’s resistance to updating its game engine, and we’re far more inclined to believe that this was another lazy oversight and not a crude play at dark humor on one of its artist’s part.

Does this put you off the game?