Jesus vs. Mohammed? Video Game Upsets Islamic Group

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

CAIRO  — 

An influential Islamic group branded an online video game depicting religious figures fighting each other as offensive to Muslims and Christians and successfully demanded Tuesday that it be taken offline.

In the game "Faith Fighter," caricatures of Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, Buddha, God and the Hindu god Ganesh fight each other against a backdrop of burning buildings.

God attacks with bolts of lighting and pillars of fire while the turbaned Muhammad can summon a burning black meteorite.

The Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents most Muslim nations, said it should be removed from the Internet.

"The computer game was incendiary in its content and offensive to Muslims and Christians. ... The game would serve no other purpose than to incite intolerance," an OIC statement said.

• Click here to visit FOXNews.com's Video Gaming Center.

Game designer Molleindustria told the Associated Press the game, which had been around for more than a year and played millions of times, was misunderstood, but had been removed.

"This was meant to be a game against intolerance and against the one-way Islamophobic satire of the Danish Muhammad cartoons," Molleindustria said in an e-mail message. "So if a respectable organization didn't understand the irony and the message, we failed."

Islamic law generally opposes physical depictions of the prophet.

When a Danish newspaper in 2005 printed 12 cartoons showing negative portrayals of Muhammad, Muslims around the world were enraged.

Deadly protests erupted from Morocco to Indonesia, with rioters torching Danish and other Western diplomatic missions. Some Muslim countries boycotted Danish products.

The style of the game, with characters jumping, kicking and knocking each other out, mimics the martial-arts arcade games popular in the 1980s and 1990s.

Though the game had been around for a while, the OIC was responding to an article in the online British publication Metro UK, which stated the game had offended religious groups.

"We suspect that people at OIC never played carefully the game and only referred to the article on Metro UK that successfully manufactured this controversy," said Molleindustria.

In a statement on its Web site, where the game can be found, Molleindustria said the intention was not to be offensive to any religion.

"Its aim is to push the gamers to reflect on how the religious and sacred representations are often instrumentally used to fuel or justify conflicts between nations and people," it said.

The site also described the game as a way to "give vent to your intolerance! Religious hate has never been so much fun."

However, the authors of the game did offer a "censored" option, which blocks out the face of Muhammad.

Molleindustria's Web site describes the company as "an Italian team of artists, designers and programmers that aims at starting a serious discussion about social and political implications of video games."

Other games designed by Molleindustria include Operation: Pedopriest, Queer Power and Oiligarchy, satirizing the Catholic Church, sexual orientation and the oil industry.

SOURCE

Hrmm... I might have to find and play this just for kicks and giggles. Would you play it? Link to the game. HAHA.

Offending people is not art. Trying to do something for the sake of offending for its own sake, is not being an artist. Odds are also, as a game, it will suck. It will have a brain-dead AI for the fighters and likely poor graphics. So, now we have a new category to add to areas that general suck for games. The first two are: Porn games, and religious games. Now add, political games. I would count this is a religious game, but the creators are far more interested in making a point about intolerance then creating a fun game.

Oh wow, we can show people are intolerant by creating a game that offends them! That scores very few points in my book.

More religious idiots making the world more and more to their taste i guess... So much for freedom of speech?

I mean in the city i live in you see people reading from the bible in the middle of the street (nothing better going on in their lives i assume) yet if i went down and started reading from the book of the devil (actual name escapes me) im sure that i would not be allowed to!

It's just a flash game...

Religion is not cool, at all

Wow! That's really offensive!

Damnit, that game was fun, and now I cant play it anymore

It's just a funny flash game, you play with it for 10 minutes and forget about it. Nothing to be offended about, Buddha has bad special moves though. I have to check Operation: Pedopriest, Queer Power and Oiligarchy now.

Click the link at the end of the OP and you'll be able to play, I just did.

I had a few problems at first, when I used God. I switched to Jesus and beat everyone easily. Mohammed gave me a few worries, but you can't stop Jesus!