Song Screwup Delays LittleBigPlanet One More Time

By Paul Munn | October 17, 2008

I have this thing about songs. I listen to the lyrics when I first hear a song a few times and decide whether or not I like the song partially from the lyrics and partially from the melody. My wife doesn’t get it — she’ll happily enjoy a song that has the most stupid and nonsensical lyrics anyone could ever utter until I point out just how stupid the words are. “Don’t you hear what they’re saying?” That doesn’t mean the songs have to be meaningful, just being playful with language is often enough.

Well I’m guessing someone at Media Molecule was innocently grooving to the music and assuming the foreign language they heard was just peachy when they chose to license a pop song that turns out to have two quotes from the Qu’ran, which offended a listener. Granted these are in Arabic and not English, which seems to make it an honest mistake, but Sony has nonetheless wisely issued a worldwide recall of LittleBigPlanet, which was just a few days shy of landing in everyone’s hot little hands, what with Gamespot’s 9.0 review, IGN’s 9.5 review, and the beta energizing the game’s fans.

Sony’s announced that the game will now be “shipped to retail” during the week of October 27th. I’m guessing we might see it just a day or two shy of Halloween instead of its original October 21st street date, so I’ll stop calling my local game store I reserved it at until then.

I do have to hand it to Sony for behaving very responsibly in the face of this type of criticism, for acting very quickly to perform this recall, and for immediately posting about this finding and the resulting delay on the PlayStation Blog instead of letting rumors get out of hand. These are three unusually nimble and fast things for a very large entertainment company to do intelligently in the face of possibly inflammatory materials in their game. I’m sure Rockstar would agree.