10 Iconic Video Games Banned For Ridiculous Reasons

Fallout 3 specifically has a weird history with censorship. Before release, Australian censors got a little uneasy about players liberally injecting what appeared to be morphine into themselves. When it was changed to Med-X, the game was cleared for release. In Japan, there are some changes to the title to avoid people comparing the game’s use of nukes to the real world Hiroshima bombing.

In India, the game was outright banned before release due to “cultural insensitivity”.

Now, this one makes a lot of sense, as people of the Hindu faith believe that the cow is a sacred beast, so it was a good guess that many Indian players wouldn’t be happy playing a game with radiated, two-headed bovine. What makes this even touchier though is Bethesda’s name for the mutant.

Either a twisted joke or a very unfortunate coincidence, "Brahmin" happens to be the name for a certain chaste in Hindu society, a kind of priest role. So not only are you mutating their sacred animal, you’re giving them a pretty disrespectful name.

There are clearly a lot of things in Fallout 3 that could flag the game up for censorship but the treatment of bovine is probably not one that the developers expected.