7 Censored Video Games That Went Way Too Far

Censorship is a complex issue in the gaming community. It conjures images of hysterical Christian mothers burning Pikachu plushies and elderly judges furiously bringing down the ban-hammer of justice on any game that dares to use the word ‘tit’.

Censorship is often viewed as something that compromises the purity and expressive capability of art and suppresses the fundamental human right of self-expression and free speech.

We can all point and laugh at the time Football Manager 2005 was banned in China, or The Pokemon Trading Card Video Game was banned in Saudi Arabia for promoting Zionism, but sometimes games go so far that censorship might actually be justified.

This list isn’t a casual collection of funny little quirks that were randomly banned by overpaid and out-of-touch censorship boards. This isn’t about an interactive sex mini-game in GTA, or a vaguely inappropriate dildo joke in a Super Mario game (yup, it happened). This is a list of the times when games were sometimes unsettlingly, or hilariously, inappropriate, and got censored for it.

Buckle up folks, we’re going beyond the worst the gaming industry has to offer, into the murky waters of what it wasn’t allowed to show at all…

The world of gaming censorship can lead to some very interesting questions. For example: How to censor House Party out of your own brain after you research it for an article?

Well, for the uninitiated, House Party is a game that involves performing various errands for a women at a house party in order to seduce them. If you do everything right, the game rewards the player with an actual pornographic cutscene.

Yup.

The game received a lot of understandable attention online for being equal parts hilariously stupid and hilariously bad. The cutscenes aren’t much more graphic than those in AAA games such as The Witcher, although they are made all the more ridiculous by the complete absence of any other gameplay.

There’s nothing wrong with nudity and sexuality in gaming as a part of a narrative progression. There’s a lot wrong with House Party, which is, in all honesty, more of a lame attempt at providing titillation than a game. Initially banned from Steam, the game was allowed back with heavy censorship, so it’s still available for anybody who hasn’t worked out what the internet is for to err… ‘enjoy’.