343 Studios Accused of Racism by Over 343 Twitter Users For Poorly Executed Juneteenth Inclusion

June 16th, 2022 - 9:13 PM EDT by Brandon Wink

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Bonobo Chief and a tweet about the controversy.

With Juneteenth around the corner, corporations have started to jump headfirst into the new federal holiday, sometimes with reckless abandon. Even when it comes to pre-established, long running things, like Black History Month, there are corporate blunders year after year, so it was expected that someone would make a big Juneteenth miscue.

Apparently, the honor goes to Halo developer 343 Studios, who tried to join in on the fun with a cosmetic update pushed to Halo Infinite. Unfortunately, the cosmetic that was pushed to the game was named "Bonobo," which is the name of a great ape, inciting tensions on social media as people claimed the name choice was racist.


Though the issue was quickly patched out by the company, there were still some online who went to bat for them, defending the accident and trying to make sense of it for others.

The reason given, which others declared was flimsy at best, was that an older program used by Bungie, which was then handed over to 343 along with Halo, was called "Bonobo" and that the name was chosen out of convenience, not malice. Evidence was then found via old Bungie dev footage that shows the Bonobo program in action, at least adding a layer of legitimacy to the claim of innocence.


As usual whenever something has to do with gaming, there's often another, unseen side to it. In this case, with Halo being a Microsoft product, it wasn't long before Sony fans came out of the woodwork to use this as a sort of "gotcha moment" against the Xbox community, which many felt was an odd take.



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