Gaming

On May 12, a developer going by FzzyBzzy released the wildly racist slavery simulation game Plantation Simulator onto Steam.

It’s a top-down sim game in which you play as a Southern plantation owner forcing a number of Black slaves to grow crops under threat of being beaten. That’s it. That was the game.

For the first week or so this game was live, it mostly flew under the radar. No reviews, no players really, according to SteamDB. But around May 20-21, it started picking up.

Reviews began to trickle in, the vast majority of them positive, containing racist commentary, and largely written by people who had played for less than half an hour. For context, the game’s concurrent player peak was 109 individuals last night.

Posted later in the day yesterday, the 1.2 update changed the Black slave characters in the game to white people. A further update not long after changed the whipping animation to a string of hearts, put bikinis on the slave characters, and updated the mature content description to, “In this game, your friends wear bikinis and you can give them little kissies.”

We’ve reached out to Valve for comment twice now about Plantation Simulator and haven’t heard back, and the game remains on the Steam store at the time this piece was published.