Games are a worldwide enterprise, but the subject matter and names don't always translate from culture to culture, resulting in some pretty hilarious blunders. Most of the time you can see what the developers were going for, like Nintendo's Donkey Kong as an attempt at "stubborn monkey," but others are just....wow.
Case in point, this gallery of inexplicable PlayStation 2 game covers from Iraq caught a nice bit of attention on Reddit over the weekend. Video games were very difficult to buy in the country while Hussein was in power, but they have since grown in popularity in the last few years. Piracy is still a fairly viable way for gamers to get a hold of titles, resulting in some...unique box art to say the least.
With Call of Duty: Ghosts being the latest release (which is doubly interesting, as PlayStation 2 support was long gone by the time Ghosts rolled around), we'll start there.
The differences are notable, but by and buy, it's nothing too crazy. The signature mask is gone, replaced by a generic soldier plodding along under what looks like a bridge. Tolerable. The only odd thing about it is the ESRB logo with the glaring E for Everyone rating on the Iraqi box. Maybe the organization's standards are a little more lax on a game featuring explosions and warfare coming to a country that's known for such frivolity.
On to The Mark of Kri...
Yeah...that's Yoshimitsu from Tekken. Kri's protagonist Rau and any semblance of the game's Polynesian artistry is long gone, swapped for the familiarty of Namco-Bandai's fighter.
Again, we have another chop job of characters from other games playing substitute. Looking at the cover, the Iraqi version of Shadow of the Clossus would have you believe that the young protagonist Wander is gone, having been replaced by Sun Jian, one of the many characters from Dynasty Warriors series. In the background is War's horse Ruin from the first Darksiders. I understand the reason to include a horse on the cover, as it becomes the main form of transportation for Wander, but there's no sign of the game's titular walking monoliths.
But it only gets worse from there folks. Next...
Bloody Roar 3, which is an odd concept in and of itself featuring fighters that can transform into were-beasts, including bats, cats, rabbits, boars, lions, dragons, crows, elephants, and of course, wolves. It's not documented, but the series is probably a big hit with the fury community. The original box art alludes to the fighters' transformation ability, but there's no such clue in the Iraqi box, which has Metal Gear Solid's Big Boss replacing the game's various fighters. About the only thing they got right was that Big Boss was indeed a prominent part of the third Metal Gear game.
But Matrix: Path of Neo might be the oddest one yet. Older gamers might remember this as the one "decent" Matrix game that also added in a new ending for the Matrix movie trilogy, abandoning Neo's martyrdom.
Inexplicably, Agent Smith has returned, but with the body of a character from Splash Damage's Brink. The Fallout Vault Boy tattoo is hard to miss, and can be explained by the fact that one of Brink's pre-order bonuses was a Fallout theme that offered character and weapon customizations. I'd like to think it could also be a subtle nod to Fallout 3's Matrix styled Tranquility Lane simulation in Vault 112, but given all the rest of the covers, I think that's giving the cover artists a bit too much credit.
