10 Video Games Changed After Real-World Events

Given that Football Manager is basically a Microsoft Excel mod, it's mad to conceive of it being a controversial product. Unless you hate grids, or words, or little thumbnails of flags, that is.

Well you know who hates little thumbnails of flags? China hates little thumbnails of flags. But not one of the mental-looking flags, like West Africa's "dude getting decapitated" flag, or Sicily's "Silent Hill monster" flag (seriously, look them up) - no, China was more concerned with... Tibet's flag. Most notably, that it even has a flag.

China has held a long-standing belief that Tibet is, for all intents and purposes, a territory of China. Therefore Football Manager's inclusion of Tibet as its own region was seen as an insult to the country, and as a result the game was banned from sale there permanently... or until Sega chose to remove Tibet (as well as Taiwan, which China refuses to recognise as independent) from the roster, due to them having created content "harmful to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity".

Sega had no option but to respond with a special Chinese version - with Tibet and Taiwan as part of China - in the region, but the "Free Tibet Edition", a tongue-in-cheek bootleg, would end up being sold prevalently by pirates all over the country.