It’s a rare but troublesome side-effect of gaming’s global appeal that sometimes they’ll bump up against a certain culture’s values, accidentally bringing content that prickles morals that weren’t even on the radar when the game was being made. Who worries about Australia’s distaste for decapitation when you’re making a game in Seattle? When those problems are serious enough to address, the game needs altering: graphics changed, quests chopped, countries renamed. The game you play might have some startling differences elsewhere. Here are ten games that had to change before they were allowed on sale, and what the developers had to do to them.
You’re probably only aware of Ice Climber through the star characters’ later appearances in the Super Smash Bros. series, but they first appeared in their own platform game in 1984. In it, you scale a series of mountain levels, fighting off monsters. Those terrifying enemies include seals, basically a cross between a baby and a kitten, and as such Nintendo of America found the seal-clubbing to be as distasteful for American audiences as a blubber kebab. The response was to remove the vicious, cute-looking killers and replace them with the gentle yeti, who now suffers a split skull on the seal’s behalf.
Carmageddon is a violent car combat game. It’s most famous feature was civilians that exploded in red gloop when the car mowed on through them. Publishers SCi celebrated the controversy it created, and submitted it to the British Board of Film Classification in the hope that it would gain an 18 certificate that they could play up. The plan backfired and the game was refused classification unless the gore was removed, which is a beautiful irony. The game was released with the civilian casualties replaced with green-blooded zombies and oil-spurting robots. Humans were eventually reinstated in a patch.
Japan is unsurprisingly sensitive to nuclear issues. Bethesda’s post-apoclayptic RPG Fallout 3′s caused the censor’s Geiger counter to spike with the Megaton quest line. You’re given the opportunity to re-arm a nuclear weapon sat at centre of a town, with the further option of detonating it, destroying the town and leaving an irradiated hole behind. It’s one of the game’s most spectacular set-pieces and was completely removed before it was allowed to be published in Japan. Also, the personal nuke launcher, the Fat Man, was renamed. Its original moniker mimics the name of the nuclear device that the USA detonated over Nagasaki in WW2.
Valve and the German censors have butted up against each other so many times that when it turned out a German teenager was responsible for the Half-Life 2 source code theft, you had to wonder… Even Valve’s cartoon multiplayer shooter, Team Fortress 2, has a level of violence the German Government are uncomfortable with; stabbings, rocket deaths, head-loppings. Valve being Valve, they dealt with it in a cheeky way that still retained the cartoonishness of TF2′s world: they replaced the gibs strewn across the screen when killed with random toys, presents, even springs.
Valve’s gory zombie shooter series fell afoul of twitchy censors on opposite sides of the world. In the UK it was the cover image that caused most consternation. The problem wasn’t the fingers torn from the hand (though that was covered up in Germany), but the fact that the design had the damaged hand visually demonstrating the “2″ of the title with what’s colloquially known as “the vicky” – which is about as offensive in the UK as flipping the bird. Valve turned the slaughtered hand around in the UK so that it’s pulling an ironic peace sign. Australia’s ratings system, meanwhile, doesn’t include an adult rating for games, and the censors there felt there was insufficient difference between normal humans and the game’s “Infected”. In order to get it released there, Valve had to cut most of the violence, neutering the zombie mayhem with vanishing, bloodless bodies.
Electronic Arts’ RTS series has never been sparklingly realistic, but even it has had to acquiesce to the German censors. Command Conquer: Generals’ expansion pack, Zero Hour, had controversial civilian casualties and suicide bombers that needed removal. They were replaced with robots and a bomb on wheels. The portraits of real people as the Generals appearing as still shots between missions were also changed: EA took the photos and applied an ugly, remarkably cheap looking robotic overlay. It’s almost a mockery of the law that they could get around it with such a terrible effect.
Hot Coffee should have been a storm in a teacup. It was the unofficial name of a scene in GTA: SA where the player was in control of intercourse mini game, directing the lead character as he switched sexual positions with his girlfriend. It never existed in the released game, just in some code that required a mod to unlock. But GTA is something of a magnet for controversy: it didn’t matter that it needed a mod, people Like Jack Thompson and his ilk still responded negatively to the content. The American ratings board, the ESRB, investigated the newly discovered scene and re-rated the game, taking it from an M (mature) to an AO (Adults Only). In response Rockstar Games had to release a patch that removed a part of the game that 99.9% of its players would never have seen.
THQ’s modern day FPS had terrifying world superpower North Korea invade the tiny island of the United States of America (wait, is that right?), with the player taking control of members of the American resistance. To keep this wholly unrealistic prospect from spinning out of control, the developers included a real-world dictatorial dynasty, with Korean leader Kim-Jong-un being the instigator of a resurgent Korea. But in order to pass the Japanese ratings board’s guidelines about the portrayal of existing people and places, the identity of the aggressor had to be entirely removed, with all mentions of the country replaced with the brilliantly sniffy “A certain country to the North”.
Will Wright’s simulation of an ant colony suffered the ire of Nintendo of America when it landed on the SNES. Was it the death sequences, where other ants come along and rip your ant’s limbs off, leaving you in pieces? Nope. Those scenes are still in the American cartridge. The censors were fine with the death; they were more concerned with the little animation that played when your ants were sharing food, where it appeared one ant was vomiting masticated matter into another’s welcoming pincers. It’s a tiny change, as the scene lasts a fraction of a second, but nonetheless the puke provisions were removed.
You probably couldn’t come up with a more inoffensive game series than Football Manager. It presents you with all the minutiae of the beautiful, but with none of the colourful vocabulary from its sideline shouters. But it managed to offend the Chinese state by including Tibet. In doing so, according to the Ministry of Culture, it would “pose harm to the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”. (This is a situation that’s been brewing since the 13th century; native Tibetans have presumably been waiting all this time for a football management sim to champion their cause for independence.) In order for the game to be properly released in China, Tibet was annexed into China – but only in the game.
Craig Pearson is a freelancer, which explains the dressing gown, the beard and the crumbs, as well as the volume of cat-related tweets on his Twitter account.
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