Game retailer sells, then takes down, horrific 9/11 NFT

American game retailer was selling an NFT mocking a famous image taken during the 9/11 attacks.

GameStop, an American brick-and-mortar game retailer, recently sold an NFT inspired by a haunting photo of a man falling from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The NFT has since been delisted on the GameStop Marketplace but is still able to be traded privately.

GameStop, which is the parent company of EB Games, announced its foray into the world of crypto with an NFT Marketplace back in February. This NFT Marketplace allows customers to trade NFTs minted by GameStop-approved creators.

One such creator named Jules minted and began to sell an NFT labelled “Falling Man,” which heavily resembles one of the most horrifying photos to come from the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorism attack — a photograph that depicts a man falling to his death during the Twin Towers collapse.

GameStop is selling an NFT of this 9/11 suicide victim pic.twitter.com/CulIvW3jjd

— Cringe Political Posts (@cringepolitik) July 23, 2022

The NFT, which was labelled ‘The Falling Man’ after the original photo, replaced the man in question with an astronaut. Astronauts are sort of GameStop NFT’s mascot character, so most NFTs on the marketplace feature an astronaut in some capacity. Following a torrent of backlash from online communities, GameStop announced publicly that the item in question had been delisted from the Marketplace, and while users can trade it privately, it cannot be listed publicly on the Marketplace any longer.

One user messaged the GameStop NFT Twitter account privately, and received a response that was a little more strict in tone: “This user has already had their minting ability removed from their account, and we have already been in direct contact with the creator about these actions.”

Gamestop got rid of the nft and removed the creators ability to mint thankfully. pic.twitter.com/tJpcmXqkJz

— Thrawnbelina (@AltStacie) July 23, 2022

If the entire situation wasn’t weird enough, internet sleuths discovered that the “astronaut” depicted in the NFT wasn’t actually an astronaut at all. Jules stole and reused a 3D render of a Soviet-era flight suit and used that in the minting of The Falling Man NFT.

GameStop is no stranger to odd stories — earlier this year the company announced a series of huge job cuts on the corporate side of the company, while declaring to reinvest in their brick-and-mortar stores and employees. This comes following a series of stories of GameStop employees walking out of their jobs due to bad working conditions.

Original reporting by PC Gamer.

Written by Junior Miyai on behalf of GLHF.