Russian TV News Report About Fallen Soldier Uses Video Game Footage

Video game fans who just happened to be watching Russian state TV on Sunday got a strange surprise. “Vremya,” a long-running television news program on the Russian network Channel One, mistakenly used footage from a military simulation video game in a segment celebrating Russian military veterans, BBC reported.

The Sunday edition of “Vremya” was paying tribute to Roman Filippov, an aircraft pilot who died in Syria less than a month ago. A short montage during the segment was meant to show off the Su-25 aircraft Filippov piloted, but it featured a brief clip from the first-person shooter video game “Arma 3.”

Russian social media users immediately noticed and debated for a while about whether or not it was an accident or a bonus thrown in by a producer. As the BBC report noted, that may not have been the most sensitive thing to do intentionally during a segment on a fallen soldier.

However, Channel One admitted it was an accident. Whoever put together the montage used footage from the network’s video archive, and found the “Arma 3” clip from an older story about video games. The incident was reminiscent of a November story in which Russia’s Ministry of Defense used a screenshot of a mobile game to claim the United States was aiding ISIS.

“Arma 3” might look like a typical military-themed first-person shooter on the surface, but it is actually more of a military simulator than something like “Call of Duty.” Its hardcore fanbase has sustained the series for a number of years, creating mods that occasionally find a life of their own. The immensely popular “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” for example, can be traced back to an “Arma” mod.