Days after the absurdist affair of Sonny Truyen and his outrage against Singapore over not being able to play Pokémon Go here, the man himself has spoken about the widespread controversy.
Truyen reached out to Mashable yesterday with a statement, admitting that it was wrong of him to act out like that.
“It was a dick move on my behalf and a very big error in judgement to negatively label an entire country over Pokémon.”
‘Twas this dick move that cost him his new job, too. The Australian native was only recently inducted into the folds of local property search engine 99.co as vice president of digital marketing. It’s definitely deserved for calling Singapore a “piece of fucking shit country” just because he couldn’t catch Pokémon here, and then getting into a flame war online and tarnishing the image of his company.
Truyen, however, took issue with the fact that he was “racially villified for not being a ‘white’ Australian”, referring to the multitude of online comments targeting his Vietnamese ethnicity.
“It was disappointing the lengths Singaporeans went at to attack me and deny any chance of making amends for my actions,” he added.
That point was brought up by 99.co CEO Darius Cheng in his apology, calling for folks not to carry out categorical attacks on race and nationality.
In any case, Truyen’s definitely not interested in getting his job back, assuring that he’s parted ways with 99.co.
The irony is that Truyen could have kept his high-flying job if he kept his Rage (Normal-type move, TM20) to himself for a little while more. Pokémon Go makers Niantic Labs and Nintendo announced that they might be launching the game in Europe, Japan and other Asian countries within a few days.
Unless all this hullaballoo was a ploy to raise 99.co’s profile in the headlines, then Truyen was indeed a digital marketing genius.
