Apex Legends‘ lead game designer, Daniel Klein, has confirmed that he has been terminated from Respawn Entertainment/Electronic Arts after a number of racist and sexist comments he made in a blog surfaced on Twitter.
Klein admitted to publishing the comments in question on his Deviant Art profile back in 2007, arguing that he has since made an active effort to become a better person and his termination has left him devastated. However, social media users have pointed out that Klein was nearly 30 years old at the time so he wasn’t exactly juvenile.
In one comment, he referred to females as morons who are incapable of being rational, and talked about shooting “a load of white stuff into their eyes.” In another comment, he equated Africans to animals, and wrote that if you “feed them they’ll come back and s*** all over the place.”
It’s unclear why Klein went on these inexcusable, incoherent, and unhinged rants. The fact that he didn’t even attempt to scrub them certainly came back to hound him 14 years later.
In a statement published on Twitter, Klein apologized and denied being racist or sexist. He claims that he made controversial remarks to get a reaction out of people.
“I said racist and sexist things, not because I deeply believed any of them, but because I knew I could get a reaction out of people,” Klein tweeted. “That does not excuse anything I said; the impact of my words was the same regardless of what I believed.”
Klein also said that he doesn’t fault EA and Respawn for terminating him.
