Capcom: "Resident Evil 5 is not racist"

Resident Evil 5's producer, Jun Takeuchi, has defended the game against claims of racism in a recent interview, claiming that he was frankly very surprised by the reaction to the early footage of the game.

Takeuchi was responded specifically to comments made by Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, who had said previously that his first reaction to the trailer was that obviously no black people worked on the game.

Talking to MTV however, Takeuchi said that there are a number of black developers behind the title.

"There are black members in the development team. We do have staff working on the game, who are aware of the historical background and we are constantly checking these kinds of things with them," said Takeuchi.

"We certainly didn’t anticipate the reaction. We were quite surprised," he continued. "I think everyone understands that we never set out to with the intention to make anything that was racist - that was never our intention."

Takeuchi said that much of the misunderstanding came from the fact that journalists still don't actually know a lot about the game and the story it has to tell. He remained adamant that as more information became available to the press then the issue would resolve itself.

Resident Evil 5 is planned for a mid-March release next year on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 - will you be picking it up? Let us know in the forums.