How Apex Legends Made Mad Maggie Authentically Māori

thegamer.com:

Mad Maggie is entering the Apex Games against her will, but that doesn’t look like it’ll stop her from causing a ruckus. Whether you want to counter Gibby bubbles with her tactical ability, to hear her inevitable voice lines arguing with Fuse, or to just cause general chaos with her whip-and-shield combo, Maggie’s sure to hit Apex Legends Season 12 like a wrecking ball. Literally.

However, some fans were understandably tentative when it came to how Maggie’s Māori heritage would be represented, due to missteps by Respawn in the past. Gibraltar, who is of non-specific Polynesian descent, performs a haka as one of his emotes in Apex Legends. The haka is a deeply personal and specifically Māori tradition, and Respawn refused to acknowledge whether Gibraltar was specifically from that culture.

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However, during a roundtable discussion about Mad Maggie’s design, Respawn’s narrative lead Sam Gill explained that the developer had put a lot of effort into ensuring Maggie’s heritage is as authentic as possible.

“It's really important that we work with a consultancy, with genuine Māori to make sure that [Maggie] is as authentic as possible, that she is someone that can be aspirational in her own way,” he says. “And so we worked with a team called Māui Studios in New Zealand, specifically with a guy named Vincent Egan who's incredible - one of the smartest dudes I've ever worked with really.”

Gill acknowledges that, even as a Kiwi himself, Maggie needed input from Māori people if they wanted to create an authentic character. “Each Legend has about 1600 lines [of dialogue] that we write and that grows every season as more content comes out. Each