Where the Trump-as-Master Chief post is merely cringeworthy, the Homeland Security message is flat-out dangerous. Comparing immigrants in the US to a parasitic alien life form that infects and annihilates advanced societies is not deeply offensive, it’s also rooted in the worst of human history: As seen in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untermensch of the Holocaust and “cockroaches” in Rwanda, to name a couple recent examples, dehumanizing the “other” so you can more easily inflict cruelty, injustice, and horrors upon them is hardly a new technique, and the US government’s messaging was not subtle.
You might think that using imagery from one of its best known videogames in a call to “destroy” immigrants would prompt Microsoft to action, or at least to express some small modicum of disapproval. For now, at least, you would be wrong: Rather like Nintendo, which eagerly picks copyright fights it knows it can win but kept its mouth tightly zipped when Homeland Security used Pokémon to promote violent immigration raids, a representative told PC Gamer that “Microsoft does not have anything to share on this matter.”
Unexpectedly good political commentary from checks notes PC Gamer
This was in a way by design, Sega and Microsoft had an very interesting relationship at the time. With Windows CE on Dreamcast, Isao Okawa meeting with Bill Gates to try to save the DC library, and Peter Moore moving from Sega to Xbox.
It reminds me of how the PlayStation was originally supposed to be a SNES CD before they went their separate ways.