Muslim Protest Prompts 'Faith Fighter' Developers to Take Down Game
A team of game developers has removed from their Web site a video game that pit major religious figures such as Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha against one another in all-out combat.
Italy-based Molleindustria took down "Faith Fighter" after the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) issued an official statement Tuesday calling the game "incendiary in its content and offensive to Muslims and Christians."
"[T]he game would serve no other purpose than to incite intolerance," the group reported an OIC spokesman as saying.
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In their response Tuesday, the team at Molleindustria said they took down the game for their Web site, bud did so as a "symbolic act" and not because they were "bowing to the foundamentalists (sic)."
"[W]e have no sympathy for any religion but we are aware that muslims are victim of widespread racism in the western world," they stated.
Molleindustria claims that its mission has been to spur serious discussion about the social and political implications of videogames and that its fighting game "depicted in a mildly politically incorrect way all the major religions as a response to the one-way islamophobic satire of the Danish Mohammad cartoons."
"If a established organization didn't understand the irony and the message of the game and is claiming it is inciting intolerance, we simply failed," they added.
Though the game was released more than a year ago and has reportedly been played by millions of players on the internet, OIC said they came across the game through an article on Metro UK, which Molleindustria said had "successfully manufactured this controversy."
In their closing remarks, Molleindustria said they hope that people who are hearing about the game for the first time will check it out themselves before making a judgment, as copies of the game still can be found across the internet.
"Hopefully this will help people to make their judgments by examining the actual work and not the sensationalist accounts spread by mass media," they concluded.
"Faith Fighter" featured six characters, including God, Jesus, Buddha, the Hindu deity Ganesha, the Taoist deity Budai, and Muhammad.
Other controversial games produced by Molleindustria include "Operation: Pedopriest," "Queer Power," "Tamatipico," and "McDonald's."
