9 Bizarre Reasons Why Popular Video Games Were Banned

1. Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure

Jeez what a mouthful that title is right? Well for those of you willing to look beyond its wordy name, you’ll find a surprisingly brilliant game about a graffiti artist named Trane who is helping to overthrow a dictatorship through mad tags and the like. It might sound weird, and to be honest it kinda is, but it’s actually really heartfelt and the sound and aesthetics really work in the game's favour.

Yet this message of hope within a repressed society didn’t get a chance to air in Australia because their government suppressed it. Talk about a rich irony. It turns out that the game was banned because the government was worried that it would inform other people how to actually tag and ruin their lovely boroughs with bad art, and their evidence for this was testimonies from real life artists being used in the game.

As you’d expect, there was an uproar about this within the gaming community, and publishers Atari appealed for the ban to be lifted. The response was a firm "no", leaving Marc Ecko himself bewildered at how Need For Speed, a game which glorified illegal street racing, was rated G by the same governmental board.