I’m just sitting here thinking about all the hoopla around palworld right now and I was wondering what other titles out there have been in the controversy filled category in the past few years/decade? I can think of a few, but my game interests are kinda narrow.
What are some of your picks?
Showing my age here, but the OGs of Doom, Mortal Kombat and GTA turned all the millennial gamers into murderous sociopaths who can’t tell the difference between video games and reality. That’s after Dungeons & Dragons turned us into murderous sociopaths who can’t tell the difference between board games and reality. If I recall correctly, the hoopla around all of that made national news in the States.
No, no, no, Dungeons & Dragons turned us into devil worshipping heathens. The murderers all came from videogames.
I thought rock ‘n’ roll did both a long time ago. Who would Charles Manson have become without the Beatles’ White Album and Helter Skelter?
Right you are. I have fallen to the sway of various evils so many times that I get them mixed up.
There used to be an institution in Germany, abbreviated BPJM (I will spare you the full German name) that checked if games are in need of being restricted due to excessive violence. They curated a public list of games that were only acessible for age 18+ to purchase. You can imagine what this list did for young teenage gamers, it was the forbidden fruit, the Streisand-effect before the Streisand. I played those games before I was 18 and that rating had a bit to do with that. It was colloquially called the Index and so any game that would make it to the Index would be highly sought after by gamer teens.
In other news this institution is the reason why there were some specific changes in a few games for the German market. From what I remember, Command and Conquer ( yes the RTS, not just FPS games went on there) had to change the color of blood for the human soldiers which became robots/cyborgs whatever in the German version.
Don’t forget Soldier of Fortune 2 where they replaced all humans with robots and invented a whole new backstory.
Humans created robots, robots staged an uprising, killed all humans. Robots took over the lifes of humans because that was all they knew. That’s why there were robot druglords, robot hobos, robot police men, robot scientists, and so on.
This is not a joke.
I’m old enough to remember the OG Mortal Kombat controversy. If I recall, the Sega and SNES versions were different. I believe the SNES version had no blood and the Sega one had blood.
IIRC the Sega version had the blood hidden behind a code.
It’s crazy the controversy that game caused, considering how tame it is compared to what has come out since. But the first MK opened the floodgates to graphic violence in games.
On the menu for the Genesis version Down, Up, Left, Left, A, Right, Down. Opened up the cheat menu.
Burned in to my head as a Sega kid growing up.
Oddly enough, doom and Wolfenstein was never controversial in my circles, but we weren’t allowed to play the terminator game. It was very willy nilly. I think quake was a bit of a nono as well, but counterstrike was fine.
“Hatred” caused a big controversy ahead of its launch back in 2016, for being a game where the main objective is mass-murdering innocent civilians. Then it released, turned out to be a pretty sub-par uninteresting game and was promptly forgotten by most people.
Depends what you mean by controversial. Shooting innocent civilians in an airport in Call of Duty or Spec Ops.
Ark releasing DLC for a game that is still in early access.
7 Days to Die, a game that is still in alpha after 11 years.
EA releasing over $1000 in DLC for Sims game most of which is just different colours of the same item.
GTA: Hiring a hooker and after the hanky panky you murder her for the cash back.Is that last one a specific game or did a developer do that?
Grand theft auto in general.
7 days to die has been making progress though .I remember picking it up and thinking I made a huge mistake then I played it a couple years later and loved it
Surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention “Postal” or “Bully”.
From the wiki for Postal… “ A man referred to simply as the “Postal Dude” has been evicted from his home. He believes the United States Air Force is releasing an airborne agent upon his town of Paradise and that he is the only individual unaffected by the ensuing “hate plague”. He fights his way from his house to an Air Force Base through various locations, including a ghetto, train station, trailer park, truck stop, and an ostrich farm.”
Hot coffee mod for one of the GTAs (San Andreas I think?), legit news stations were reporting on that
Super Columbine Massacre RPG was pretty damn controversial (Wikipedia link).
I’m surprised there isn’t a Storm the Capitol, Insurrection 2021 game.
Ok, you win
Since it hasn’t been mentioned yet:
What is the hoopla around Palworld?
A small but vocal subset of turbovirgins loudly denouncing it for plagiarizing pokemon, who even the pokemon company themselves is fed up with lmao. The pokemon company’s investigation of the game is basically them saying “we’ll do our due diligence but please shut up they don’t seem to have done anything wrong”
I think it’s more like “We are aware of it” and also unspoken “we are investigating legal action.”
Sure! That’s part of due diligence. But in case you’re still convinced it’s some big conspiracy, just look at Valve. Valve has a proven track record of doing whatever they can to NOT fuck with Nintendo’s legal team. You think they didn’t make sure the game was square?
You think they didn’t make sure the game was square?
The developers of the game? I’d give it a 50/50 shot, how many times do people get so enthusiastic about something that they are more worried about doing it rather then whether they should be doing it? Maybe they are Pokemon fans that saw a big market and weren’t happy with the quality or output of Pokemon games. The company that made the game is called Pocket Pair and seems to only have 3 games:
Palworld (2024) Craftopia (2020) Overdungeon (2018)
If nothing else the creatures are very similar and it’s impossible to know how a court would rule on that. The line between infringement and non-infringement can be blurry and hopefully Pocket Pair is prepared to defend their content.
People are likeing it to Pokemon and big daddy N are very heavy handed when it comes to its IP.
Damn pokemon fans have to be the biggest weirdos around. Even nintendo was like: look, we know, we looked into it, stop mailing us. And the pokemonkos just keep crying to their overlords because people enjoy themselves, sending death threats around. I was listening to the jimquisition podcast and she absolutely hated it for no apparent reason, other than it’s not pokemon and a cheap pokemon rip off and she would rather play pokemon, than this game that is pro slavery and you van even catch humans. Which, completely fair imo, but just one week later she talked about yakuza and how they have a full fetched pokemon rip off in their game where you catch humans to fight for you, and it’s the best thing ever.
But Pokemon is pro slavery. It always has been. Beat them down till you can capture it, then have it fight for you or trade it off to someone else for something you want
Also, didn’t one of the more recent games have the antagonists a group of people who want to release Pokemon. Making you the bad guy for wanting to keep slavery.
A singificant number of Palworld players are Pokemon fans, that’s why it’s so successful. Weirdoes who take it too far are a thing in every fandom.
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Soldier of Fortune. Look it up. SoF Payback was a fun game too.
Hot take on Payback, maybe it’s worth a revisit. I remember that game being a dog after the awesomeness that was 1 and 2. Especially with 2’s crazy rogue’esque mission generator and stellar multiplayer. We ran a heavily modded MP server for years and it was a blast.
Too bad what happened to Raven. Once in awhile you can still feel and see their spirit in some of the CoD details.
I still play SoF2, I like to grab a few random maps here and there!
Ion Fury came with some controversy
https://www.eurogamer.net/ion-fury-studio-apologises-for-sexist-and-transphobic-comments-from-staff
Legally controversial or critically controversial? Legally, Yandere Simulator probably takes the top spot, although it can be debated if it’s even considered a game. As for critically, nothing that I’ve played recently comes to mind. But I would pick The Last of Us 2 for critically controversial
What’s the controversy with Yandere Simulator? I missed it.
- Uses a lot of stolen assets without giving credit. As far as I know, it still has many stolen assets in the game.
- A major, unavoidable mechanic of the game involves you crawling around on the ground and taking secret upskirt pictures of your underage classmates
- Game has made almost zero developmental progress despite being something like 10 years old at this point. It is widely accepted that the developer is likely intentionally dragging out the development time so that he can farm more money from his supporters
- Recently, it came out that the developer, a 30+ year old man, was having explicit and sexual conversations with an underaged girl. The texts (which were released online) show that he believes having sexual relations with a minor is “95% ok” (paraphrasing here). It also shows that he manipulated and gaslit her into keeping quiet about the relationship by accusing her of manipulating him. These texts were confirmed to be true and accurate by the developer himself in a YouTube apology video, although he never takes responsibility for his actions, instead claiming that the texts were taken out of context.
Those are the ones that I remember off the top of my head. There’s more. Way more. And that’s looking at only the legally questionable controversies surrounding the game. There’s also a ton of moral and critical controversies
No mention of Postal yet?
Doom
Duke Nukem
Mortal Kombat Fatalities
Conkers Bad Fur Day
Catherine
Manhunt
Bully
Postal
Modern Warfare: airport scene
Leisure Suit Larry
Catherine
GTA : rampages, interactions with hookers
Dead or Alive
Missed opportunity when double-listing Catherine to use both spellings.
I remember Carmageddon making the news in 1997. It made the game immediately a lot more interesting.
