Little Big Planet adiado

A nova mascote da Playstation 3 vê a sua entrada adiada devido a versos religiosos.

A estreia de Sackboy na Europa, prevista para 22 de Outubro, irá ser atrasada uma semana. A decisão veio no seguimento de uma queixa sobre a inclusão de passagens do Corão na música do nível Swinging Safari. Segundo a tradição islamita, é uma ofensa misturar o livro sagrado com qualquer tipo de entretenimento. A reclamação foi feita por X_ANGEL-DEVIL_X, membro do fórum norte-americano da Sony Computer Entertainment. No texto lia-se o seguinte:

While playing your latest game, "LittleBigPlanet" in the first level of the third world in the game (titled "Swinging Safari" ), I have noticed something strange in the lyrics of the music track of the level. When I listened carefully, I was surprised to hear some very familiar Arabic words from the Quran. You can listen to part of the track here:

http://mt14.quickshareit.com/share/preview/soundclip22503c0.wav

The words are:

1- In the 18th second: "كل نفس ذائقة الموت" ("kollo nafsin tha'iqatol mawt", literally: 'Every soul shall have the taste of death').

2- Almost immediately after, in the 27th second: "كل من عليها فان" ("kollo man alaiha fan", literally: 'All that is on earth will perish').

I asked many of my friends online and offline and they heard the exact same thing that I heard easily when I played that part of the track. Certain Arabic hardcore gaming forums are already discussing this, so we decided to take action by emailing you before this spreads to mainstream attention.

We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending. We hope you would remove that track from the game immediately via an online patch, and make sure that all future shipments of the game disk do not contain it.

We would also like to mention that this isn't the first time something like this happened in videogames. Nintendo's 1998 hit "Zelda: Ocarina of Time" contained a musical track with islamic phrases, but it was removed in later shipments of the game after Nintendo was contacted by Muslim organizations. Last year, Capcom's "Zack & Wiki" and Activision's "Call of Duty 4" also contained objectionable material offensive to Muslims that was spotted before the release of the final games, and both companies thankfully removed the content.

We hope you act immediately to avoid any confusion and unnecessary controversy, and we thank you for making such an amazing game.

Regards,

Embora X_ANGEL-DEVIL_X tenha apenas pedido a criação de um patch, a Sony, consciente de que nem todos os utilizadores possuem acesso à Internet, resolveu recolher todas as cópias já distribuídas a lojas e pediu desculpas ao público nesta nota de imprensa:

During the review process prior to the release of LittleBigPlanet, it has been brought to our attention that one of the background music tracks licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two expressions that can be found in the Quran. We have taken immediate action to rectify this and we sincerely apologize for any offense that this may have caused.

We will begin shipping LittleBigPlanet to retail in North America the week of 27 October . Sorry for the delay, and rest assured, we are doing everything we can to get LittleBigPlanet to you as soon as possible.

Este incidente veio aumentar ainda mais a animosidade entre grande parte dos gamers ocidentais e gamers da fé do Islão.