8 Bizarre Reasons Video Games Were Pulled From Sale

Plenty of games are recalled or outright banned all the time, often because of strict laws specific to certain countries. Germany for instance doesn't particularly like overly graphic content or Nazi imagery (the reason for the latter is pretty obvious) and Australia has a particular hatred for drug use.

China also has a pretty frequent bone to pick with video games too, usually due to the portrayal of China itself. Most recently, the game Devotion was removed from Steam due to a spicy easter egg that made fun of Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. China also famously banned the game Hearts of Iron for making Tibet an independent country, and for showing Taiwan to be under Japanese control.

They also don't like skeletons, which is much more understandable.

Regardless, most games are banned in several countries at once for pretty standard reasons, like violent or sexual content, but here, boring stuff like nudity and brutality isn't gonna cut it. For this one, we're delving into the weird and the bizarre; more often than not, the flat-out ridiculous.

Whilst "banned" and "recalled" can be used pretty interchangeably in a lot of cases, we're specifically focusing on titles that were recalled due to dumb mistakes - rather than titles that were banned for offensiveness.

Fantasia, the video game adaptation of the Disney film of the same name, was released on the Sega Mega Drive in November 1991. By all accounts, the game sucked - proving that game adaptations of films being rubbish isn't something exclusive to the 21st century

You can't recall a game just for being crap, unfortunately, which is why a team of six were forced to rush the game out in time for Christmas, so Sega could capitalise on those sweet, sweet holiday sales. However, unbeknownst to anyone involved in development, Sega didn't technically own the rights to make a game based on the Fantasia film at all.

Roy E. Disney, nephew to the late Walt Disney and (at the time) senior executive of Disney, wasn't aware that Sega were even developing the title - as the rights to the game had, somehow, mistakenly been sold to them.

See, Roy had put a ban on any adaptations of Fantasia being developed at the behest of uncle Walt, something that some executive at Disney was clearly unaware of. As a result, 5,000 copies of the game were destroyed, advertising for the game was pulled down, and Fantasia was banned from being resold.