In a startling move, Sony Entertainment has postponed the release of the PlayStation 3 game LittleBigPlanet (LBP), one of its most highly anticipated holiday releases. According to Sony, the decision to delay the game’s release came after the company learned that a song in the game uses language from the Quran, the sacred text of Islam.
“During the review process prior to the release of LittleBigPlanet,” the company said, “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 Quran. We have taken immediate action to rectify this, and we sincerely apologize for any offense that this may have caused.”
The scheduled Oct. 21 release date in North America has been pushed back to Oct. 27; the game will be released “no later than” Nov. 3 in Europe.
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LittleBigPlanet is an entry in the emerging class of “metagames,” which allow users to not only play the game, but also to design, create and share game levels with other players. Sony Entertainment has been banking on LBP, which has received rave reviews and intense prerelease buzz, to spur sales of its high-end PS3 consoles for the holidays.
Alex Evans, cofounder of the U.K.-based Media Molecule, which designed LBP, said it was completely blindsided by Sony’s decision.
“At MM we were as shocked and dismayed by this as anyone — shell-shocked and gutted,” Evans wrote on the company blog. “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…