10 Video Games Changed After Real-World Events
8. Bully - UK Was A Dog-Eat-Dog Country
Backup toilet paper tabloid, The Sun, cheekily sneered in the autumn of 2005 that Bully would be Rockstar's "Grand Theft Auto Kids", despite never having played it - keeping true to their modus operandi of just printing the first thing that comes into their heads.
Yet, it was around this time that anti-bullying campaigns were gaining traction in the UK, with Labour MP Keith Vaz naming the unreleased game in parliament (to the Prime Minister directly), asking if a game which "glorified bullying" should really be sold in this country.
Clearly this query gained traction, as Rockstar felt the pressure to back down on the game's name from numerous forceful campaigners (ironically, bullying them into submission).
As such, the game would release in the UK as Canis Canem Edit (Latin for "dog eat dog") - a mixed-blessing marketing move which pleased high-brow Eton students (who would never touch the game, yet appreciated the private school motto reference), and confusing their core audience by offering up "something in foreign", incomprehensible to them.
Ostensibly, retailers would still refer to it as "Bully" in all but the official marketing materials, in order to help people locate the game they'd heard so much about - I like to think that someone, somewhere, purchased it thinking they were getting a university prospectus, and is now a degenerate 14-hour-a-day MMORPG player.