South Park: It all started with a suspected prank call

Feargus Urquhart, the leader of Obsidian Entertainment, was playing through that alien probing scene in his studio's game, South Park: The Stick of Truth, the evening before a meeting with South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The next morning he'd have to go and talk to them about censoring it.Urquhart was at the top of his house. His children weren't allowed up but his wife was, and up she came, watching in silence as the scene unfolded."That's atrocious!" she declared when Urquhart timidly turned for her verdict. "I'd never ever heard her use that word before," he tells me."I know," he replied"What is that?" she asked."It's..." and he pauses, remembering his embarassment, "the game.""Uh."He had to tell Parker and Stone."I've got to tell you guys," he said when they sat down the next morning, "my wife was watching me last night play this and the word she used was 'atrocious'."Their response was unanimous."Yeah!"That's what South Park does, that's what Parker and Stone do - cross the line. Urquhart's wife's exclamation was exactly the validation they crave.Imagine being Obsidian reading po-faced reports from game certification departments at Sony, Microsoft, ESRB and PEGI. "In hour X, minute X, a minor is subjected to non-consensual... You know what I mean?" Urquhart giggles, talking to me on Skype."This is our video game! Look at what daddy made!"Censorship came nonetheless, the European PS3 and 360 versions masking seven controversial scenes, each around 20 seconds in length. No strangers to censorship, Parker and Stone - to their credit - wrote humorous screens to mask the content, but it was still odd, still jarring and still Ubisoft's decision to do it."I'll be honest," Urquhart says, "for me that scene is funny as hell. But then it's hard for me to judge other people and whether they feel it should be in a game or not. That's really hard for me."How did Parker and Stone take it?"That's where we don't... have that conversation!" he snorts in amusement. "That's one of the few times we get to say 'we're just the developer'."That's a Ubisoft-South Park conversation."Obsidian was simply told to do it. "This is what we need to do, here are the things you need to do, South Park will get you the things that you need and there we go."I imagine him shrugging. "Internally it was not a big conversation. You have to put it into perspective; we're trying to get this game done. The worst thing for us is if that conversation had taken two months, because we would be sitting with a part of the game waiting to be figured out, which is just scary as hell for us."But Urquhart would have stuck his neck out had things gone too far."At some point if the censorship had gone to even more of an extreme, and particularly if there wasn't a PC version, then I would have gotten more involved, as to say 'this is getting ridiculous'."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ted-prank-call