14 DAY TRIAL // So, this is the day that censorship wins. We reported earlier in the summer that Fallout 3 was going to be banned from sales in Australia because the regulatory body for videogames, the Office of Film and Literature Classification, had decided that the references to real drugs in the game, where they were used to relieve pain, were too much and should be eliminated in order to approve its selling. At that time, Bethesda was said to be thinking of creating a version of the game for Australia in which they would replace real life drugs with fictional names.
Apparently, Peter Hines, who is the vice president of public relations and marketing for the developer of Fallout 3, has recently stated to gaming magazine Edge that the Australian variant of the game would be “identical to both the U.K. and North American versions in every way, on every platform”. In other words, it seems that the references to real world drugs will be gone from the game for good.
Hines continued and said that “An issue was raised concerning references to real-world, proscribed drugs in the game, and we subsequently removed those references and replaced them with fictional names. To avoid confusion among people in different territories, we decided to make those substitutions in all versions of the game, in all territories”.
We are talking about a game that at one point featured an atomic bomb obliterating an entire city but a reference to real world drugs is seen as inexcusable? I think that the people rating games are taking too many precautions when it comes to what gamers see.
The news about the changes to Fallout 3 come just one day after Electronic Arts reported that its Dead Space survival horror would be banned from sales in China, Japan and Germany, because of the excessive violence portrayed in the game.