Someone recreated the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting in Cruelty Squad

Last week, a masked shooter killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside of a Manhattan hotel. Thompson’s wife said he had been receiving threats potentially related to “a lack of coverage” — healthcare coverage, presumably. The American healthcare system is notoriously cruel, and UnitedHealthcare is one of many health insurance providers that’s been criticized; it reportedly uses “a faulty artificial intelligence algorithm to deny elderly patients coverage,” according to CBS News, and denies coverage to chronically ill patients, per ProPublica, despite billions in profit. The internet responded to Thompson’s death with a distinct lack of sympathy, turning instead toward dark humor: When UnitedHealth Group made a statement on Facebook addressing the killing of its chief executive, the majority of the emoji reactions — more than 57,000 of approximately 62,000, per CNN — were the laughing emoji. Many others online have turned to uncomfortable and dark humor as a response to the shooting. One such response has been a modded map for Consumer Softproducts’ 2021 first-person shooter Cruelty Squad, a game in which you play as a hired assassin in a capitalist nightmare world.

In Cruelty Squad, you’re an assassin taking out enemies of corporations — and the game evolves from there. It’s an aggressive, surreal, and deeply weird experience. Cruelty Squad players can create custom maps that live on an equally aesthetically aggressive website. This new fan-made map is named “Hilton Hitjob,” a clear reference to Thompson’s killing. “the reason why i made the hilton hitjob mod is because i thought it would be funny to recreate the uhc ceo shooting in one of my favourite works of interactive art cruelty squad,” modder wget told Polygon in an email. “also, i thought it would bring more attention to cruelty squad modding, as i would very much like more crus players to try out all the custom levels that modders have made for the game, and maybe get more people making mods themselves.”

Here’s the map’s description — it mimics the style of writing in Cruelty Squad, which is set in a dystopian cyberpunk world:

Video of the mod shows a first-person view of someone picking up a gun and approaching a man in a suit from behind — again, recreated in the surrealist aesthetic of Cruelty Squad — before shooting and fleeing to a bike. It’s grisly, essentially a first-person recreation of the security footage distributed by police of the actual shooting.

On Monday, police arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione on multiple charges, including murder. In an email to Polygon, the modder expressed his displeasure at Mangione’s (whom the modder called “mr luigi mansion”) arrest, said that she was glad Thompson got killed (“people like him represent the worst in society”), and expressed his hatred of American society as a whole. “the US is a disgusting country that robs its own people to enrich the already unimaginably wealthy,” she wrote. “now see all those executives quaking in their boots, suddenly trying to hide their info on their websites, hiring more private security, crying online about how they’re human beings too, now that really puts a big smile on my face.”

Polygon has reached out for comment to Valve, which owns Steam, the online storefront where Cruelty Squad is sold. We will update this story when it responds.

Update (Dec. 10): This story has been updated to include comments from the creator of the Cruelty Squad mod, and to use the modder’s correct pronouns.