A week and a half ago, an ITV documentary which was investigating Colonel Gaddhafi’s alleged support of the IRA contained footage of a helicopter being shot down by terrorists. The episode was the first of ITV’s “Exposure” series. The issue was that the footage was instantly recognized by ArmA II fans as a clip from a gameplay trailer for the PC first person shooter.
The faked ArmaA II footage.The television studio is now in hot water with the UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, who has announced that the company will be investigating the matter. According to The Guardian, the series producers claim they had intended to use actual 1988 IRA footage, but the “other footage” was accidentally included. Of course, this begs the question of why there was ArmA II footage in the studio at all.
Bohemia Interactive CEO Marek Spanel was shocked and subtly pleased by the controversy regarding his military shooter, stating: “Sometimes creativity and realism in our games lead into crazy results and this is one of such example. I just briefly watched the entire documentary and I still can not believe it as it is overall very serious and lengthly feature. We are surprised our games apparently may look real enough to some users already that they can not tell it is not real life footage.”
Below is the actual clip of the news piece, since the original documentary was pulled from YouTube.
