It’s been more than two months since right-wing talking head Charlie Kirk was assassinated and an artist at Ghost of Yotei developer Sucker Punch Productions was fired for making a joke on social media about it.
Drew Harrison wasn’t the only person who was punished by the seething online mass of the American alt-right and the government that supports it—a Reuters special report suggests more than 600 people were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise actioned against. But Harrison’s story, which she is commenting on here for the first time, dovetails with a year-long harassment campaign her company had faced and remained publicly silent on until the day she was let go. An online mob had been railing against Ghost of Yotei and Sucker Punch since the sequel to Ghost of Tsushima was announced last September. They were further riled up by Kirk’s death and the firestorm of censorship and cancellation around it.
From my conversation with Harrison, it appears that Sucker Punch’s parent company, Sony Interactive Entertainment, acted swiftly and with little investigation into the situation around Harrison’s comments, as many companies did during those few weeks in September. In doing so, it emboldened gaming’s worst-behaved actors yet again and set a worrying precedent for an industry that too often kowtows to the reactionary sects within it.
Muffins and death threats
On September 10, hours after Kirk was shot, Harrison made an off-color joke on social media: “I hope the shooter’s name is Mario so that Luigi knows his bro got his back,” she wrote, referencing the alleged murder by Luigi Mangione of a United Healthcare executive back in December 2024.
A screenshot of her BlueSky post immediately began circulating on Twitter after right-wing commentators and influencers urged people to track down those who had mocked or criticized Kirk.
For the next 12 hours, Harrison’s cellphone was bombarded with threatening calls and texts from unknown numbers. Dozens of replies to her post urged Harrison to kill herself and demanded a boycott of Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yotei, which was less than a month away from launch. “Say goodbye to your career,” reads the only post from one anonymous account. Others called her a “worm” and much worse for what they viewed as a celebration of Kirk’s death. “I hope the same happens to you,” said another anonymous account with one post.
Despite this, Harrison was hopeful Sucker Punch was well aware of the tactics of Gamergate, especially since they had resurfaced in the previous year. The allegations that consultancy firms were injecting diversity, equity, and inclusion principles into video games extended to Sucker Punch when Yotei was announced and queer actor Erika Ishii was revealed to be playing its protagonist.
“I just thought, ‘I’m their entertainment for the day,’” Harrison told me of the people harassing her. “I assumed it was going to go how it always has: Nobody cares about what they say because they literally only harass for the fun of it.
“There’s no moral code they’re trying to uphold. There’s no cause they’re rallying for. They are just trying to make people suffer.”
Despite the night of harassment, Harrison was determined to continue working as usual at Sucker Punch. The studio often ordered too many bananas for the communal kitchen at its office in Bellevue, Washington. Harrison would take the mushy, brown-spotted ones home, bake them into a sweet treat, and share the results.
The morning after Kirk was killed, Harrison sent a message to the companywide office chat: “I made the worst people on the internet mad. As an apology, there are banana muffins in the kitchen.”
Colleagues reached out almost immediately. Some told Harrison they were also being harassed, while others were unsure what she had done. Many expressed concern for her safety.
An office manager, Harrison said, explained that the company’s phones were being bombarded with anonymous calls — so many that another Sucker Punch employee, who was granted anonymity for fear of retribution, told me they were instructed to unplug their desk phones.
A human resources employee asked if Harrison was getting death threats. She said yes, recalling that the employee replied, “I’m here to protect you.”
Midday, a member of Sucker Punch leadership sent a message to the office chat, along with a copy of Sony’s social media policy.
“Due to a social media post by one of our team members, many corners of our studio and Sony organization are having to manage a developing situation,” the message read. “We may have to pause a trailer release…there will be some significant amount of work created now to ensure we keep the spotlight on the fantastic game we’ve all created. Please be mindful of how you represent yourself online…”
Hours later, Harrison was invited to a video call with someone she had never met, a member of Sony’s human resources department. Within 10 minutes, she no longer had a job.
‘Fire them all’
At the time, Sony confirmed to Kotaku that Harrison was no longer employed but otherwise didn’t comment. A little more than a week later, Sucker Punch studio head Brian Fleming told Game File, “I think we’re aligned as a studio that celebrating or making light of someone’s murder is a deal-breaker for us, and we condemn that, kind of in no uncertain terms.” He declined to elaborate further.
The campaign for Harrison’s firing had been led by popular streamer Zack Hoyt, known as Asmongold, and Mark Kern, a former video game executive who posts under the name Grummz. On the day of Kirk’s death, Grummz instructed his followers to help Asmongold amass a list of those “mocking or cheering Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
“Fire them all,” he wrote. “Every game dev, too, who celebrated this. We no longer have tolerance for death cults.”
After Harrison was fired, Asmongold, who has more than 3.6 million followers on Twitch and 4.5 million on YouTube, discussed the developments on his stream.
“They got fired from their job,” he said. “Too bad, huh? Wow. What a shame for you.” He added, “Eventually, you’ll get a new job, and when you do, I might just make another video and contact that employer, too. Now, why would I do that? For fun. I enjoy it. I like it. It’s a nice pastime.”
“Studios don’t want to address toxicity against their employees because they see it as confronting the dark sides of their community, which they believe is a core demographic."
But Harrison’s firing didn’t happen in a vacuum—as mentioned, both Kern and Hoyt, along with a slew of other content creators and right-leaning voices on Twitter and YouTube, had already had Ghost of Yotei and its creators in their sights for over a year prior to her Charlie Kirk post.
Some of the online subculture’s rowdiest voices complained that Erika Ishii, the queer actor who portrays the game’s avenging samurai, was not pretty enough. Others suggested that Sucker Punch had hired too many women to work on the game. Harrison pointed out that a picture circulated by rightwing reactionaries to support the latter argument (a side-by-side of all men sitting at a table versus all women, with Ghost of Tsushima emblazoned over the men and Ghost of Yotei over the women) was, shockingly, inaccurate. “It’s literally a picture of the Sucker Punch soccer team and our Women’s Day photo, from the same year,” she said.
Sucker Punch never made any public statements about the harassment of Ishii or the allegations against its dev team, and as far as Harrison and the anonymous Sucker Punch employee know, no statements were made internally, either. Sony did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
“The studio has a lot of vulnerable people. There are a lot of LGBTQ people. There are a lot of people on work visas,” the employee told me over a call. “There are a lot of people who would be targets if their name was put to their words.”
Leaders at games studios, who are often in much less vulnerable positions than their employees, also choose to remain quiet, for a much different reason. “Studios don’t want to address toxicity against their employees because they see it as confronting the dark sides of their community, which they believe is a core demographic,” said Rachel Kowert, a research psychologist and visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge.
The wrong kind of action
Harrison said she asked for clarification about her firing during the brief video call, and the Sony HR employee said her BlueSky post was “celebrating and inciting violence.” When she asked what part of her post was celebrating and inciting violence, she said the employee replied with “the comments.”
Harrison acknowledges that her post about Kirk’s death could be considered a violation of Sony’s social media policy (tenets include “think before you post,” “consider the impact of your words,” and “be civil”).
“Full disclosure, the joke was not in the best taste,” Harrison, who had never been formally reprimanded during her tenure, said. “But at no point did anyone ask me to delete it. At no point did anyone ask me to apologize — and for the record, I would have. I would have worked with PR to write an apology. It feels like nobody investigated the harassment me and my coworkers were receiving.”
She and her peers wondered if the deluge of harassment would force the company to take action against the harassers, especially after a companywide email noted that a security guard would be temporarily stationed at the office entrance.
In 2023, a Washington State judge found a man liable for nearly $500,000 after he harassed a community manager for Destiny 2. After the employee shared the online creations of a Black fan, the judge said he faced a “campaign of racist, stochastic terrorism” that included a “hideous, bigoted voicemail.”
“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."
Harrison, though, said that no senior members of Sucker Punch’s management or executive teams spoke to her in the hours before she was fired.
“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,” the anonymous Sucker Punch employee said.
“I know within our studio there’s this mentality of ‘don’t feed the trolls, there’s going to be harassment, there’s going to be people on the fringes trying to nibble at you…just ignore them,” they continued. “But that comes from an era of the internet where everyone was on forums in these siloed communities that were moderated, and you would have a lone actor enter a community and try to agitate people, and everyone would starve them of attention, or the moderators would put them in their little bubble. But that’s not how the internet works anymore, it’s people with global reach, an agitator that has millions of followers, and they use coded language and dog whistles and speak in a way that lets them shirk accountability and responsibility.”
Ghost of Yotei was released to critical acclaim on October 2, becoming the fourth-best-selling game in the United States between August 31 and October 4, according to research firm Circana. Circana’s mid-November numbers have it ranked 10th in year-to-date sales. It has the second-most nominations at this year’s Game Awards, tied with Death Stranding 2: On The Beach. Harrison said she did not receive any severance or the industry-standard “ship bonus,” a cash injection given to developers who worked on a game to celebrate its release.
The day after Yotei's release, Harrison posted on BlueSky, writing: “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.”
Two months after her firing, Harrison told me she’s “extremely depressed and isolated” and is trying to fill her days with things that bring her joy. “I’m not sure if I want to try and stay in an industry that seemingly does not value its employees or support women and diversity,” she said. “I’ve accepted that even Sucker Punch is changing from what I really loved about it, and that’s been helping me move on knowing that I was there for the best of it.”
Harrison’s firing hasn’t stopped reactionaries from speaking negatively about Yotei and the team that made it. In the days after its launch, a false rumor spread that a potential ending involved Atsu in a lesbian relationship with another character named Oyuki, much to the alt-right’s disgust. A large number of detractors believe that the recent Circana numbers showing Ghost of Yotei ranks within the top ten best-selling games in 2025 thus far are purposefully doctored or otherwise inaccurate. Some replies to Ishii’s nomination for Best Performance at The Game Awards call her a terrorist (they once jokingly tweeted that they were antifa) and a DEI hire, or others express disbelief and disdain.
But when the ire for Yotei eventually fades, Harrison knows it will just be transferred to another game, another group of developers, or another individual. That’s why she wants people to remember what actually happened to her.
“I was fired because of a harassment campaign. It wasn’t the result of a bad joke,” she said. “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.”
Nathan Grayson
