Wonderful. The game that Sony was hoping would be the major "console pusher" of holiday season '08 is being delayed from an expected release on Tuesday, to mid-November.
Apparently, one of the background songs in the game contains two phrases from the Qur'an which Muslim types don't like. From what I learned in basically my religion 101 class, a fairly fundamental Islamic belief is that the Qur'an is literally the word of Allah. This is why it is RARELY translated. Allah (in keeping with the "no translation rule," the Arabic term for God, which, regardless of what your old aunt from Tennessee wants to tell you - and if I remember correctly - is actually the exact same God Christians worship. Fun fact.).
So, some song, the artist of which is actually Muslim (Sunni no doubt), had a few Arabic phrases in it and one of the beta testers noticed it. Rather than mentioning this, oh I dunno, BEFORE MILLIONS OF COPIES WERE MADE AND DISTRIBUTED, he decided to wait until a day or so ago.
Now, tens of millions of dollars in investment later, everything is being recalled, Blue Ray disks (not the less expensive DVDs, mind you) are being burned with the same version of the game, sans song, and shipped all over the world again.
Personally I see this from three sides:
1.) Gamer side - Shit shit shit, this sucks. As a beta tester for the game and college kid with seriously no money, I was considering giving some plasma for money to buy this game. It's that good. The creativity it allows as well as the ability to play others created levels from around the world was really exciting, even in a limited beta version. I can't imagine how this will be in a full release.
2.) Moral side - I understand the problem, and to be fair to the person who mentioned it, he suggested releasing a patch deleting the song (I assume this would be possible) and from here on out printing the new copies sans song. Problem is, he is not the voice of the entire Muslim community, so drastic steps needed to be taken to please everyone. to be honest I feel like if this was released in America only it would not be a major issue, admittedly because American-Muslim relations are so far in the shitter that 95% of the country would give two shits, with maybe 40% actually celebrating pissing Muslims off. The game was initially delayed for Europe only by the company that created it, but Sony stepped in and gave the word to hold it for the world.
3.) Business side - Someone will be getting fired over this. If there has ever been an example of a company putting their eggs in one basket, LittleBigPlanet may be it. Since it was publicly announced in March 2007, they have not skirted around the fact that it is anticipated to be a "console pusher" to get them back competing with the 360 in software sales. Since Sony is still losing money for every system sold, having blockbuster software titles is that much more important. Make no mistake, the fact that they are hoping to have it completely reprinted, shipped, and released in about three weeks time shows how important this is for the company. If I were to explain it in an analogy, it would be like Carson Palmer getting hurt for the Beng--- oh wait. Yea, it's like that.
P.S. the past two blog posts being horribly long will not turn into a trend, I promise
UPDATE: ah the joys of blog posting on developing events... apparently media molecule (the publishing/design company responsible for the game) is going with the patch/change future discs route. This makes a lot more sense, and further shows what I was saying about this being a huge product for Sony. The patch was made and ready for release about 12 hours after it came to their knowledge. For some perspective on that: NCAA 09 finished a gameplay patch about a week following the release, but Sony did not approve it and put it up for download until two months later. This speed of turnover is rare to say the least (unprecedented is more like it)
