Religion has always been a controversial topic since ancient times in video games. Many companies have tried - and do try - to avoid the clash between faith and the content of their programs, resorting to self-censorship to avoid future problems with certain religious communities. A company well known for snipping content is the mythical Nintendo, who always tried to heal in health, although as we will see, it was not always like that.
In this report, and taking advantage of the burning news, we are going to review some of the most notorious cases in which a video game has been the center of criticism from the most fervent Muslim community.
We start by getting on our time machine and going back to 1998, a great year for video games and in which one of the best games in history was released: we talk about the mythical The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. In the first cartridges that appeared, you could find a symbol very similar to that of the Islamic crescent, used to represent the Gerudo people and that even appeared on the surface of the moon mirror. Criticisms of the faith of Islam forced Nintendo to remove that symbol and later replace it with a new one, as we would see in the port of GameCube or in the fantastic remake for 3DS.
But the culture clash with Islam did not end there, and in one of the game's dungeons, specifically in the Fire Temple, Muslim choirs could be heard praying "there is but one God", "in the name of God, the most compassionate and merciful" or Allahu Akbar, which means "God is the greatest."
A similar case was that of Zack & Wiki, that nice adventure made by Capcom for Wii, where Allahu Akbar's backing vocals were also heard during the game's first promo video, pushing the Council of American Islamic Relations -an American Muslim lobby- to file a formal complaint with the Japanese, who did not hesitate to remove that reference from the game and not to broadcast that promotional video again.
The creative and colorful LittleBigPlanet he was also in the eye of the hurricane for an identical incident. In the first level of the third world of the game, called Swinging Safari, a Muslim player found phrases from the Koran in the lyrics of the song on that screen, in which sentences such as "everything on Earth will perish" or "each soul must carry with it the taste of death" could be heard. Apparently, mixing quotes from the Qur'an with music is considered offensive, and SonyGiven the situation, she was forced to review the content of the game and issue an apology.
In the fighting game Tekken Tag Tournament 2 we can fight in a Saudi Arabian scenario called modern oasis. Apparently, on the floor of this stage an engraving with the word Allah could be found, a very injurious situation, since in the Muslim religion it is forbidden to step on the name of God. The complaints came directly to the producer's Twitter Tekken, Katsuhiro Harada, who apologized and claimed that it was all a mistake due to ignorance, and a patch was released to remove that detail from the scene.
The last case that we will show you brings us as the protagonist to the controversial Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. One of the various controversies with which this war action game came to us - remember the creepy level of "No Russian" - was in one of the multiplayer maps known as Slum. In it, we could access a bathroom where we found some paintings. If you looked at the frames, you could find an inscription in Arabic that read something like "Allah is beauty and loves beauty." The Muslim community did not find it very appropriate to find references to God in a bathroom, and once again, the editor had to correct the situation with an update and sing the mea culpa.
