LittleBigPlanet was destined to be one of October’s best-selling PS3 games. With the game scheduled to ship Oct. 21 (next Tuesday), the innovative platformer was going to release the same day as Fable 2, giving Microsoft a serious run for its software money.
A sudden development, however, has put LittleBigPlanet in jeopardy of releasing before mid November. [Update]: Looks like it’s only slipping one week.
At the last minute, Sony discovered that one of the licensed music tracks in LittleBigPlanet included two “expressions” from the Qur’an (Koran). The Qur’an is the revered holy book of Islam, much like the Bible is the holy book of Christians.
Originally, the potentially objectionable references were to affect LittleBigPlanet’s release in Europe alone. However, Sony has now made the decision to recall the final retail discs in all territories, including North America, thus requiring new manufacturing and re-delivery on a global scale. Due to the logistics involved, this process could very well take two weeks or more.
According to Media Molecule, the developers of the PS3 platformer:
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. … [W]ithin 12 hours of hearing about this issue involving a lyric (in Somalian, I believe!), we 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. They assure us that they are doing everything in their power to get things straightened out as fast as possible, and will announce dates soon.
Media Molecule also indicated that the LittleBigPlanet patch is already compete on the development side.
DailyGame will bring you more details as they surface.
