6 Times Video Games Were Mistaken for Combat Footage

It’s amazing how often the media gets worked up about amazing combat actions caught on camera only to find that the incredible “footage” is actually from a video game.

Pictured: Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense intercepting Hamas rockets near Tel Aviv.

Video games are pretty advanced these days and they, admittedly, look very realistic, but they aren’t that realistic. And the things soldiers do “caught on camera” in the “combat footage” is definitelynot realistic.

It’s really astoundingly dumb how often this happens.

1. Russia’s Veterans Day.

Probably the worst time to f*ck this up. When Russian President Vladimir Putin was describing the heroism of Senior Lieutenant Alexander Prokhorenko, Russia’s state media made the worst edit possible. Prokhorenko was calling in airstrikes on ISIS positions near Palmyra, Syria in 2016. When surrounded with no way out, he called the fire onto himself, killing the oncoming ISIS fighters.

Russian state-owned news Channel 1 edited in a clip from a video game combat simulator, called ArmA. The bit is at 2:35 in the video below.

What happened here? There isn’t enough combat footage in Syria so we have to make it up now?

2. Russia “catches” extremist fighters with chemical weapons.

They caught us red-handed giving “extremist” troops truckloads of chemical ammunition — or so they thought. When Russia’s UK embassy tweeted this “damning evidence,” they were quickly outed. They stood by the tweet, though. It’s still up.

The video game here, as quickly pointed out, is Command and Conquer. It’s not even from the game, they got it from the game’s Wikipedia entry. It doesn’t get much lazier than that.

3. Russia’s Ministry of Defense accuses the U.S. of supplying ISIS.

This time, the Russians were trying to be a bit sneakier by intercutting the video game, AC-130 Gunship Simulator, with old footage of the Iraqi Air Force hitting a vehicle convoy.

Tricky.

I’ll stop harping on Russian media using video game footage when they stop using video game footage.

4. Russia Today’s report on child soldiers in Sudan.

Dammit Russia, you are making this easy. As one former child soldier gives his story about fighting in the country’s civil war, the camera does an entirely unnecessary pan across an image from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

(RT | YouTube)

(It’s not as if there isn’t enough footage of African child soldiers. On RT’s YouTube page, they completely acknowledge it, so why keep it up? Or even use it in the first place?)

5. UK news magazine tries to link the IRA to Muammar Gaddafi.

The United Kingdom’s ITV ran a documentary in September 2011, called Gaddafi and the IRA, which the British TV regulator Ofcom later found to be “materially misleading” and “a significant breach of audience trust.” What sparked the Ofcom investigation was footage of a helicopter being shot down by weapons supplied to the Libyan dictator.

Damn, you Gadaffi.

What the film labels “IRA film 1988” is actually ArmA 2, a sequel to the game Russia tried to pass off as real in the first item on this list. Nice work, Bohemia Interactive.

6. UN Security Council or UN Space Command?

Admittedly, this isn’t from combat, but it’s really hilarious (and just downright lazy). As the BBC was airing a report on Amnesty International’s real-life criticism of the UN Security Council, the logo of the UN Space Command from the super popular Halo series was used instead of the real UNSC’s logo.

Sorry, Amnesty International.

You should know the real UNSC’s logo looks nothing like this… but if you do a Google image search for “UNSC Logo,” you see how some intern got fired in 2012.

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