10 More Video Games Cancelled For Ridiculous Reasons
4. Nazi Iconography Prevented Selling It In Germany - Indiana Jones & The Iron Phoenix
Before any project is formally greenlit, it's important for producers and publishers to do their damn homework, which they evidently didn't on Indiana Jones and The Iron Phoenix, the planned sequel to 1992's point-and-click adventure game sequel Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis.
The story was to be set after World War II, with the Nazis attempting to retrieve the Philosopher's Stone to resurrect Hitler and the Wehrmacht, forcing Indy to spring into action.
This sounds neat enough, but development was met with numerous obstacles, including an inability to settle on a consistent aesthetic, and the departure of the main programmer, Aric Wilmunder, early in production.
But the final straw for LucasArts was the realisation that the game wouldn't be releasable in Germany due to censorship laws preventing use of Nazi imagery such as Swastikas.
Given that Hitler was the primary antagonist and the game was set to be awash in Nazi iconography, the decision was made to discontinue development after a year of work, at which point it was adapted into a Dark Horse Comics series instead.
Even though adventure games performed extremely well in Germany at the time, was the German video game market really substantial enough that it merited cancelling the entire game for the rest of the world?