Curated playlist

Obscenity controversies in video games

Grand Theft Auto: San AndreasGrand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a 2004 action-adventure game from Rockstar North, gave players one of the most repeated lines in gaming. Early in the story, a mission called "Wrong Side of the Tracks" goes badly, and Big Smoke shouts, "All…
Grand Theft AutoGrand Theft Auto was voted one of Britain's top 10 designs in 2006. It sat beside Concorde and the Spitfire.
BioShock InfiniteBioShock Infinite sends its hero to a city that floats among the clouds above America in 1912. Irrational Games developed it and 2K published it in 2013, and it is a first-person shooter that leans hard on story. The hero is Booker DeWitt,…
Grand Theft Auto VThree days after Grand Theft Auto V reached stores in September 2013, it had passed one billion dollars in sales. No entertainment product in history had reached that mark faster. The game came from Rockstar North and was published by…
Grand Theft Auto: Vice CityGrand Theft Auto: Vice City, a 2002 action-adventure game from Rockstar North, sold more than 500,000 copies within 24 hours of its release. Within two days it had reached 1.4 million, which made it the fastest-selling game in history at…
Grand Theft Auto IVGrand Theft Auto IV sold more than 3.6 million copies in the first twenty-four hours after its release in 2008. That worked out to roughly 310 million dollars in revenue. The game came from Rockstar North and Rockstar Games, and it centres…
Manhunt (video game)Manhunt, a stealth game from Rockstar North, reached the PlayStation 2 in November 2003 with a premise that few players had met before. You control a death row inmate who is forced to star in snuff films, killing gang members while cameras…
Mortal Kombat (1992 video game)Mortal Kombat, the 1992 arcade fighting game from Midway, spent six months of its development without a name. Co-creator Ed Boon later said that nobody could come up with a name "nobody didn't hate." The rejected candidates included…
Mafia (series)The Mafia video game series has sold more than 34 million copies over its lifetime. Four mainline games sit at its core, joined by a remake, a remaster and two spin-offs for mobile devices. Not one of the cities in these games exists on a…
Grand Theft Auto IIIGrand Theft Auto III began with an art director's complaint about the games of his day. Aaron Garbut felt that most of them were "a thing you played". He wanted this one to be "a place you lived in". The core team behind that ambition was…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reached stores on the 10th of November 2009, and within 24 hours it had sold roughly 4.7 million copies in the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sales brought in $310 million. At the time, that made…
Hot Coffee (minigame)"Hot Coffee" is the unofficial name of a hidden minigame inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and it surfaced as a video clip. At 11:37 p.m. Central European Summer Time on the 8th of June 2005, a Dutch modder named Patrick Wildenborg…
Doom (1993 video game)Doom crashed a university network the night it was released in 1993. Ten thousand people tried to download it at once.
Bully (video game)Bully, a 2006 action-adventure game from Rockstar Vancouver and Rockstar Games, begins with a boy who has already been expelled from seven schools. His name is James Hopkins, known as Jimmy, he is 15 years old, and he is about to be left…
Hearts of Iron IVHearts of Iron IV is a World War II grand strategy game from Paradox Development Studio, and it lets a player take command of nearly any nation on the map. Fans commonly call it HOI4. Polygon found a striking example of its openness in a…
Mortal Kombat 11Mortal Kombat 11 is the best-selling game in its franchise, with more than 15 million copies sold worldwide by 2022. Yet in 2019 a developer told Kotaku that some members of the team had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.…
Conker's Bad Fur DayConker's Bad Fur Day, a 2001 Nintendo 64 game from the developer Rare, hinges on a villain who wants a red squirrel to serve as the missing leg of his table. The squirrel is Conker, a greedy, hard-drinking creature trying to get home to…