10 Iconic Video Games Banned For Ridiculous Reasons

10. Half-Life - Singapore - Violence

As with everywhere else in the world it was released, Half-Life was a smash hit in Singapore. And why wouldn’t it be? Half-Life is awesome.

Gamers were able to get fully nestled into the title for a full year before suddenly the Singapore Government decided that it was too violent. This referred to the original base game but also all the mods and variations that had become available in that time, including the highly popular CounterStrike.

What makes this particularly strange is that, whilst the country was no stranger to banning games for their violence, it had been perfectly fine with it for twelve months.

Why it took so long we'll never know but when Half-Life did get the ban hammer, someone in the country’s ruling powers took it very seriously as they approved of numerous raids. Police stormed retailers as well as anywhere that might host in-person events and LAN parties to retrieve copies and stop the spread of its in-game contents.

However, Singapore gamers didn’t take this lying down and online petitions gained traction pretty quickly. They argued that pulling sales of the genre-defining shooter would actually hurt the financial state of Singapore’s electronic entertainment market.

Thousands of signatures in one week caused the Government to back down and lift the ban.