Religious Controversy Delays LittleBigPlanet One Week

Players hoping to get their platform-jumping, level-creating juices flowing with the PS3’s LittleBigPlanet are going to have to wait another week, and not for the usual reasons. Instead of the normal “ensuring performance quality” hoopla we’re all used to, it seems LBP had a genuine problem: Arabic passages from the Quran had inadvertently been used in the game’s “Swinging Safari” level.

The official announcement came on October 17th in a post by Patrick Seybold, Director of Corporate Communications and Social Media for Sony. Seybold stated 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.” Shortly thereafter, the post was updated to announce that LBP would begin shipping to North American retailers “the week of October 27th.”

Media Molecule, LBP’s developers, were similarly “shellshocked and gutted” when they realized what had happened. Within twelve hours of hearing the news, they had developed an alternate plan for dealing with the issue: “[We] had prepared an automatic day [zero] patch and had a new disk image ready; however a decision was made within Sony that the right thing to do for quality and support of people with no on-line was to replace existing disks.” All of the copies that had already been sent to retailers were recalled in order to avoid releasing one of the unmodified games.

This incident was brought to Sony’s attention by a Muslim user on a Playstation feedback forum, who respectfully requested that the lines be removed from the final product: “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.”

The user also revealed which lines from the Quran were used in the game: “kollo nafsin tha’iqatol mawt,” which when translated into English says “Every soul shall have the taste of death,” and “kollo man alaiha fan,” which means “All that is on Earth will perish.”

Interestingly, the track in question has never been disputed by the Muslim community before. According to Joystiq, “the song is ‘Tapha Niang’ from the 2006 album Boulevard de l’Independance by Grammy award-winning Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté.” Not only is Diabaté’s music celebrated worldwide, he is acknowledged as being a “devout Muslim, with his own prayer room next to his office.” This track (and other songs by Diabaté) can be listened to on his MySpace page, or can be purchased on iTunes.

This isn’t the first time a game has been altered due to religiously-offensive material. Nintendo edited content in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time after receiving complaints, removing Islamic chanting from one of temple’s soundtrack and redesigning the emblem on the Mirror Shield. A more recent example is Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure, where a common Muslim phrase (”Allahu akbar,” or “God is greater”) was removed from the game.

While it’s always frustrating when one of your most-anticipated games is delayed—even more so when the release date is less than a week away—at least this action was taken in order to make a game more enjoyable for everyone. Sony’s delay shows both tactful choices and respect for all members of their gaming community. Furthermore, it would have been unfortunate to see Sony lose sales on a quality product had they ignored this request, as a boycott would have likely been inevitable. Whatever your opinion might be on the issue, chances are that Sony made the right decision in the long run.

That being said, it’s going to be a long wait for October 27 to arrive…