Censorship In Games That Make No Sense

As with television and movies, censorship is a prevalent fixture within the video game industry. This is particularly true when it comes to developers and publishers looking to secure a more accessible rating or localize games for international release without offending local sensibilities. For these reasons, games often have to make alterations to avoid ruffling any feathers that may potentially affect sales. However, there have been some instances throughout video game history where the choice to censor something has either felt laughably absurd or woefully inconsistent with other elements within a given game. Sometimes these efforts backfire so noticeably that they venture into the realm of unintentional comedy.

It doesn't always make sense to the player, that's for sure. From localized games bending over backwards to reduce their depictions of violence to rushed efforts to clean up content result in an incomplete experience, here are some of the biggest and most head-scratching examples of censorship in video games.

1998's "Half-Life" is a landmark PC game, one that put developer and future video game powerhouse Valve on the map with its sweeping story and intuitive first-person gameplay. In the game, a scientist named Gordon Freeman faces an invasion of extra-dimensional monsters and human marines sent in to cover up any evidence of the cataclysmic incident. However, even a game as celebrated and influential as "Half-Life" proved to be no match for strict German censors, particularly when it came to its depiction of human-on-human violence. This ultimately led to a puzzling edit.

In the German version of "Half-Life," whenever Gordon attempts to kill other human characters, they aren't visibly killed. Instead, the defeated individuals dejectedly sit down on the ground and shake their head disapprovingly when Gordon has damaged them enough to ostensibly take them down, with no blood or gore shown at all. While the rationale for German censors to omit any sequences depicting Gordon killing humans is sound enough, these moments are replaced with an unintentionally laughable substitute.

The RPG twist on Nintendo's flagship Mario franchise arrived on the GameCube in 2004 with the acclaimed title "Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door," which brought along with it a sardonically self-aware sense of humor. From winks to the more puzzling aspects of the Mario franchise to fourth wall-breaking gameplay segments that saw the audience assist or hinder Mario and his friends, "Paper Mario" spun jokes in a way mainline Mario titles wouldn't dream. One sight gag, however, went a bit too far for American audiences as far as the censors were concerned, leading to an incomplete scrub of one environment visited by Mario.

Much of "The Thousand-Year Door" revolves around Rogueport, a shady coastal town filled with pirates, thieves, and other less-than-admirable denizens. Mario works his way around Rogueport as he recruits new friends to rescue Princess Peach. In one of the rooms in Rogueport's back alleys, Mario and Goombella stumble across a murder scene in the original Japanese version of the game, complete with a chalk outline and blood splattered everywhere. 

This macabre room is scrubbed from the North American version of the game, with the chalk outline and blood on the floor removed. However, it looks like the censors missed a spot, as the blood remains visible on the room's walls. If censorship is required to clean up a crime scene, it should at least go all the way.

Developer Rare pushed the boundaries of what content was permissible to include in a video game with its raunchy 2001 platforming game "Conker's Bad Fur Day" for the Nintendo 64. Filled with gross-out humor, profanity-filled dialog, and over the top violence, the game subverted players' expectations of its cute protagonist. After Rare was acquired by Microsoft in 2002, "Conker's Bad Fur Day" was remastered for the Xbox as "Conker: Live & Reloaded." While you still wouldn't want to play this Xbox game in front of your parents, the port was actually more restrained than the original game in some ways. Though still rated for mature audiences, "Live & Reloaded" bleeped out more curse words than its N64 counterpart, most noticeably during a musical number delivered by the a particularly disgusting boss called the Great Mighty Poo. 

During development, "Live & Reloaded" was known under the working title of "Conker: Live & Uncut" (per IGN), though this was quietly changed when cuts were indeed made to some of the game's adult content. With Microsoft advertising the original Xbox for a relatively more mature gaming audience than Nintendo, the decision to remove adult elements from its "Conker" remaster seems counterituitive, right?

The "Kingdom Hearts" franchise brings together the visual aesthetic and RPG sensibilities of publisher Square Enix's long-running "Final Fantasy" franchise with the iconic characters and worlds from films produced by Disney. This unlikely crossover has led to tremendous critical and commercial success, though elements of the original Disney films have quietly been retooled to avoid higher content ratings in the North American market. 2005's "Kingdom Hearts 2" features some of the series' most noticeable censorship, especially when compared its international counterparts and even the actual films that inspired the game.

"Kingdom Hearts 2" sees players visit the worlds from the 1997 animated film "Hercules" and the 2003 movie "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," battling against enemies from both films. One of the stranger alterations in the American version's "Pirates of the Caribbean" level is that the undead pirates are armed with crossbows instead of muskets, even though flintlock weapons are present in other portions of the level. In the "Hercules" level, players decapitate the monstrous Hydra in a moment that recreates a scene from the animated movie. However, the creature's green blood has been replaced with black smoke — despite the fact that the blood was present in the movie's take on the battle.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the long-running animated series "South Park," approached developer Obsidian Entertainment to create a video game that faithfully captured the world and humor of the show (per Eurogamer). This collaboration led to 2014's "South Park: The Stick of Truth," a multi-platform role-playing game that really felt like an interactive adventure within the raunchy world of the animated series, right down to its scatological humor. One extended gag proved to be too controversial for the game's release in Europe, Australia, and parts of Asia, resulting in a censorship screen replacing the sequence. The developers took this opportunity to insert self-aware, localized jokes for each region instead.

For instance, over the course of "Stick of Truth," the player character is abducted by extraterrestrials and (ahem) probed in an invasive procedure by the inquisitive aliens. While this sequence is shown in its full risqué glory in the American version, the European and Australian versions replace this with a text screen explaining what transpires, all while mocking censorship practices. What makes this cut particularly bewildering is that anal probes have been something of a recurring gag for "South Park" ever since the beginning, with the series premiere featuring scenes in which Cartman is probed by aliens.

Gaming is a lot different in China when compared to the US, and Chinese censorship practices are quite strict on the type of content and messaging that appears in content consumed by the general public, including video games. The popular first-person shooter game "PUBG" was likewise impacted by the Chinese government's move to ban violent, sexual, and other activities deemed immoral in video games in 2019. In response to these content restrictions, Tencent, the Chinese publisher behind "PUBG Mobile," delisted the game in its original form and launched a heavily retooled version rebranded as "Game for Peace" (per Polygon).

Rather than shooting traditional bullets, guns in "Game for Peace" appear to fire a green paint-like substance as in-game messages promote the gunplay as a community-building exercise. The most absurd change has players that are eliminated calmly sit down, offer up their items in a neat bundle, and politely wave at the player who eliminated them from the match. As far as game censorship goes, the lengths Tencent went to re-release "PUBG" in China make the popular game into an unintentional comedy.