Big-O-Tree Games is cancelling their Dirty Chinese Restaurant game after the title gained negative feedback last week, including a New York legislator publicly denouncing the Canadian developer’s project.
The developer tweeted the mobile game’s cancellation earlier today, along with an apology. Dirty Chinese Restaurant had no target release date before Big-O-Tree canned the game, but was marketed on the studio’s Twitter and official website last year. All traces of the game were removed from both of these outlets, with the website entirely wiped except for Big-O-Tree’s apology.
The full apology is listed below.
After careful consideration and taking the time to listen to the publics opinion we have decided it’s not in anyone’s best interest to release Dirty Chinese Restaurant. We would like to make a sincere and formal apology to the Chinese community and wish to assure them that this game was not created with an intentional interest of inflicting harm or malice against Chinese culture.
Out of respect we will begin removing all marketing media pertaining to DCR off our Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. These accounts will also be removed. We ask the press to please respect our privacy at this time as we begin the task of removing all our content.
-Big-O-Tree Games, Oct. 5, 2017
This is a different tone compared to Big-O-Tree’s previous defenses, claiming the game employed satire and they developed “the offbeat games we know you want to play, but you didn’t think anyone had the cojones to make” on their now defunct website.
As the name states, Dirty Chinese Restaurant was built upon racist stereotypes against Chinese food establishments. The main character, Wong Fu, was often shown chasing cats and dogs through an alley as part of the game’s promotion. This scene was promoted to emphasize the game’s morality mechanic, which gave the player the choice to run their restaurant however law-abiding or unethical as they wanted.
Dirty Chinese Restaurant was slated for release on both Apple and Android stores before its official cancellation.