The company behind the controversial game Dirty Chinese Restaurant announced on Thursday that it will not release the game, after politicians and members of the Chinese community slammed it as racist.

"After careful consideration and taking the time to listen to the public's opinion, we have decided it's not in anyone's best interest to release Dirty Chinese Restaurant," George Lambropoulos, spokesman for the Toronto-based company Big-O-Trees Games, told China Daily in an email.

"We would like to make a sincere and formal apology to the Chinese community and wish to assure them that this game was not created with an intentional interest of inflicting harm or malice against Chinese culture," he said.

Lambropoulos said the company will begin removing all marketing media about the game from their Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube accounts along with the accounts.

Congresswoman Grace Meng of New York was among the first to criticize the game when it was brought to her attention two weeks ago. She said the game "epitomizes racism against Asian Americans".

"Racism must be called out, whenever and wherever we see it," said Meng in a statement on Thursday. "I want to thank everyone who joined me and spoke out against the demeaning and negative stereotypes depicted in the video game Dirty Chinese Restaurant."

"While I'm pleased that Big-O-Trees Games has decided not to release its racist video game, it is disturbing that something like this would have progressed as far as it did," she said.

The company's website previously displayed the tagline "Because being politically correct is so ... boring," which has been replaced by Lambropoulos' statement.

The game had been scheduled to be released on Apple Store and Google Play, according to trailers posed by the company on YouTube in October 2016. They have also been removed.

In the role of Wong Fu, a restaurateur who inherits the "dirty" establishment from his brother Wang Fu, players are encouraged to run the business as dishonestly as they like by doing such things as scavenging from dumpsters, killing dogs and cats to serve to customers, insulting patrons, sabotaging the competition, and paying the staff in degradingly frugal wages.

Canadian politicians, including Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, also denounced the game, saying "this type of racism has no place in Ontario".

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily USA 10/06/2017 page2)