In recent years, online video game store Steam has exploded with more games thanks to looser release rules. This has happened in large part thanks to store subsections like Early Release, where unfinished games can be sold with giant asterisks attached, and Steam Greenlight, where fan votes can dictate which games get approved for the store.

Still, the growing deluge of Steam games is so huge that even questionable stuff can sit on the store for months at a time. A recent 25 percent sale on the Steam version of Playing History 2: Slave Trade brought the game back into the limelight—especially its trailer video, which showcased a "slave Tetris" mode. On Monday, following wider reactions from users on Steam and social media, the creator removed that mode from both the trailer and the game itself, explaining on Twitter and Steam that "it was perceived to be extremely insensitive by some people."

The mode, which can still be seen in Let's Play videos captured before the game's update, flatly asked players to stack dead-eyed African bodies that had been squished into uncomfortable Tetris shapes into a slave ship. (The mode's instructions included an oddly rhetorical question: "How come the slave traders were so inhumane?") Players didn't try to "clear" the board by creating full lines; instead, they accumulated points for fitting more bodies onto the ship before reaching its top line. The mode concluded with an informational note about slaves being "packed to use every square millimeter."

The game's Steam page was updated on Monday with the following note: "Apologies to people who was [sic] offended by us using game mechanics to underline the point of how inhumane slavery was. The goal was to enlighten and educate people—not to get sidetracked discussing a small 15-second part of the game." The creators had posted similar comments in September when Steam Greenlight users first expressed outrage at the Tetris portion: "We try in the game to communicate the absurdity of the past. Our experience is that in the game it really gets people to think about just how absurd and cruel it is—trust me nobody is laughing or finding it a joke to play that kind of Tetris. They do however get an 'a-ha' experience that will indeed haunt them."

While the Tetris portion was removed, other content that educators had objected to, particularly math problems that required users to calculate the cost of individual human lives, were not. Serious Games has at least one other game that contains a stack-human-bodies-via-Tetris mode, called Playing History: The Plague; its dead-body-stacking mode is pictured above. Serious Games CEO Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen had responded to complaints on Twitter earlier this week—"Contemplating what our next game will be.... something that can't possible hurt anybodies feelings... maybe just do a good old plan shooter [sic]"—but he has since taken his Twitter account offline.