Treyarch dev Tony Flame’s Twitter gets hacked – Cold War SBMM tweet goes viral
Tony Flame / PixabayWell-known Treyarch Lead Game Designer for Black Ops Cold War, Tony Flame, saw his Twitter account get hacked the morning of December 25. Flame is known as one of the main channels of communication on social media between the Call of Duty developer team and player-base.
Most Call of Duty fans who are active on Twitter will be familiar with the name Tony Flame. As Lead Game Designer at Treyarch, Flame is not only one of the top voices of authority when it comes to Black Ops Cold War, but he’s also how a lot of announcement and information gets passed on between the devs and players.
Unfortunately, he got a rude awakening on Christmas – not from Santa, but rather from one or more hackers who had infiltrated his Twitter account and posted their own messages on there.
It’s not clear if this was the work of a single individual or several, but there were plenty of tweets that had foul language and racial slurs, so we won’t be posting any of them here.
There was even one tweet that went semi-viral; the perpetrators posted a message asking Activision to remove skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) because it was “ruining the game I [Flame] worked hard to make.”
SBMM has been arguably the most controversial topic in Call of Duty since the launch of Black Ops Cold War, and while Flame would never address it publicly (none of the devs ever do), the hackers took the liberty to do so.
Interestingly enough, all of the tweets remained on his page for a while after the account was hacked; although Twitter quickly locked the page from posting any more (due to the offensive language), the messages themselves were allowed to remain for hours before they were deleted, presumably by Flame himself.
The Treyarch Lead Game Designer is not verified on the platform, which is probably why it took as long as it did for the tweets to get removed.
Neither Activision nor Flame have issued any public comments about the incident, so this could be the last we hear about it.