Girls Gone West, a video game development studio based in Austin, Texas, has been forced to issue a public apology after it was discovered that it had used the game Girls Gone Bad as a platform for sexually explicit content.
According to a report by The Atlantic , Girls Gone Wrong , the company’s first game since Girls Gone Gone Wild, was a game of interactive pornography and violence in which the player would be given control of a young girl named Ashley, who was sexually abused by a series of men.
“The video game Girls gone wild is about sexual exploitation and violence and sexual assault,” the company said in a statement.
“It is not a game that we want to encourage or promote.
We deeply regret any harm caused to the Ashley and Ashley’s family.”
“It’s important to note that the video game is not the same game we made in 2012, and we did not make a game based on it,” the statement continued.
“In 2012, we made a game about rape and abuse, which was not a Girls Gone Dead game, and so we can’t use the same term as Girls Gone.
We are taking steps to make sure that we never use the term again.”
According to the Atlantic, the game was released in 2013 and released to the public last week.
The game has since been removed from its site.
“We apologize for any harm this may have caused,” the game’s creator, Chris Wilson, wrote on Facebook.
“I am taking the necessary steps to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
The company has not released a statement about the allegations, but the Atlantic’s report notes that Wilson told the publication that he had received a number of emails and messages from “some pretty angry people” who had “expressed disgust at what I did.”
He also said that he was “not surprised” by the allegations.
“As a developer and gamer myself, I know what it means to be a victim of sexual abuse,” Wilson wrote.
“This is a topic that is too often taboo, and I hope that people understand that they have the right to speak out and that we are not the only victims out there.”