In a somewhat similar flap to that over Wikipedia and pictures of the prophet Muhammad, Sony has delayed the hotly-anticipated PS3 game LittleBigPlanet due to the discovery of background music tracks containing two expressions found in the Quran.

The game had been scheduled for North American release Tuesday. Instead, Sony says it will start shipping LittleBigPlanet
to N.A. retailers on October 27. Copies of the game that have already
shipped elsewhere in the world will be recalled from retailers and
replaced, according to Sony.

i It was a post by one user, solid_08, has seemingly brought the release to a halt. Part of his post said:

We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran
deeply offending. We hope you would remove that track from the game
immediately via an online patch, and make sure that all future
shipments of the game disk do not contain it.

British game developer Media Molecule made the following statement:

We
learnt yesterday that there is a lyric in one of the licensed tracks
which some people may find offensive, and which slipped through the
usual screening processes. Obviously MM and Sony together took this
very seriously. LBP should be enjoyable by all. So within 12 hours of
hearing about this issue involving a lyric (in Somalian, I believe!),
Media Molecule had prepared an automatic day 0 patch and had a new disk
image ready; however a decision was made within Sony that the right
thing to do for quality and support of people with no on-line was to
replace existing disks.

Sony said the following:

During
the review process prior to the release of LittleBigPlanet, it has been
brought to our attention that one of the background music tracks
licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two
expressions that can be found in the Qur’an. We have taken immediate
action to rectify this and we sincerely apologize for any offense that
this may have caused.

Of course, the result of the "protest" has not gone without notice at the Sony forums, either.

One poster said that not all Muslims feel the way solid_08 does:

I
would like to point out, that he DOES NOT represent all of US muslims.
Quranic verse/words have been mixed with music for songs all over the
place and are very popular in countries that are majority muslims.

Here are some examples …

Another thread asked if the delay set a "dangerous precedent."

We suppose the real question is, is this another example of trying to bend
over backwards and be overly politically correct? Or is it simply the
right thing to do? What do you readers think?

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