Spanish fascists stole a game publisher’s domain
By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.
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Last week, IGN featured a game called Ecumene Aztec — in which you play as an Aztec warrior going full guerrilla warfare on Spanish conquistadors. In the wake of this IGN profile, Ecumene Aztec’s developers have been harassed by far-right extremists, including having the website associated with the publisher stolen by far-right trolls, who then made it into a page promoting Spanish imperialism.
In the initial write-up for the game, IGN named Giantscraft as Ecumene Aztec’s developer and publisher. Giantscraft is also listed as the publisher on press materials for the game that The Verge has obtained. There are no links to Giantscraft’s site on IGN’s article, but searching for Giantscraft reveals a single Instagram page.
On this Instagram page, Ecumene Aztec does not appear; instead, the page features a link to the website giantscraft.com. Upon visiting the website, users are greeted with an extremely bare-bones site for a game publisher, featuring a quote attributed to Hernán Cortés — one of the conquistadors responsible for the destruction of Tenochtitlan and the enslavement of its people — as well as a giant image of the Cross of Burgundy — heraldry linked to Spanish royalists, far-right South American extremists, and Nazis. Also featured on the page is a link to another Instagram page that is very clearly a kind of “anti-woke” 4chan-esque account filled with memes celebrating Spanish imperialism.
To be clear, Giantscraft does not appear to be affiliated with the Spanish far
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