Remember when Nintendo used an Offensive Word in Mario Party?

Hey so Nintendo work pretty hard to cultivate their squeaky-clean image right I mean you wouldn't expect Mario to go around dropping f-bombs in the next Mario game but it turns out in 2007 Nintendo made a pretty bad mistake and ended up including a very offensive slur in the UK at least in one of their flagship mario party games but what was this slow and why on earth would Nintendo use it in a Mario game well all will be revealed [Music] hi there welcome to Thomas game docks so today we're talking Mario Party 8 this game was not very popular I'm gonna be honest it was the first Mario Party for the Wii and it's pretty rough around the edges case in point here's the title screen which looks normal enough but here's what happens when we start the game notice anything like these two honking black bars on the side yeah for some reason the actual game itself doesn't support widescreen only the menu very strange and I'm not making this out to be a huge huge deal but I think it's pretty indicative of the game as a whole it's all a little rough and unpolished looking now if anyone here has never played Mario Party before it's essentially monopoly but make it Mario maybe that's a slight oversimplification but I think it gets the point across and much like monopoly the whole game is played on a board or rather multiple boards and each of these boards has some kind of special twist to it something to make it stand out from the others in Mario Party 8 for example there's DJ's treetop temple where players journey across the board searching for a star which crops up in a random location or on the other hand there's gumbaz booty boardwalk which is a straight dash to the finish where players are given the chance to purchase a star for themselves before starting the whole journey again that is but the board that interests are specifically is this one shyguys perplex Express great name in case it wasn't immediately obvious this board is all themed around this old-timey train there's an engine room at the front a dining car a kitchen this is a full-on to to experience you start your game at this side of the board and over time make your way closer and closer to the front of the train but alas there are a great many obstacles in yourway littered across the train are a number of spaces with this green question mark on them and landing on such spaces will trigger some kind of event in this case here peach lands on the question mark space and were greeted by our old friend magic Cooper or comic who decides to enact a cruel trick on the game board sending one of the carriages to the very beginning along with any players inside it but what's of interest to us is the specific spell he costs now u.s. viewers probably won't have a strong reaction to this but over in the UK it's a very different story magic Cooper magic turned the Train make this ticket tragic that word at the end of the second line in America it's really nothing of note but over here in the UK it's incredibly offensive it's one of the worst slurs for a disabled person although it originally referred more specifically to an uncontrollable shaking of the muscles of them cerebral policy being the particular disability it didn't used to have such negative connotations so go back 50 100 years and it was the accepted term for this disability in fact there was a charity given the unfortunate name of the Society though in 1994 the name was changed to the more benign scope anyway I digress the North American version was released with this spell as is and that wasn't really an issue it's just like any other word over there but obviously Nintendo couldn't just import the game over to the UK without changing it right that would be rather remiss would it not but they didn't do that they spotted this cultural faux pas before the game was released over here and so they updated the line from the original game to read magic looper magic turn the train make this ticket tragic they fixed it and so the whole issue just went away perfect except that that's not what happened a number of copies managed to somehow make it through production without this line changed only a tiny number had the offensive slur still included but Nintendo had no way of knowing which ones these were and so they decided on some pretty drastic measures they would pull every copy of the game from store shelves and reprint them with the fixed version of their game just to be extra careful this caused a bit of a storm at the time actually with Nintendo releasing this statement unfortunately we have discovered that a small number of games contained the wrong version of the disc due to an assembly error we have therefore decided to recall all copies of the game from UK retailers so that this mistake can be corrected and this they did ultimately the version that 99% of UK players would eventually obtain contain the word erratic it is still possible to find a UK copy with the slur on it but it's certainly not easy and most likely also very expensive oh and another interesting consequence that came of this was that later versions of the u.s. game changed the line to I mean an intended themselves didn't come out and tell customers why they changed the line wasn't really a pressing issue like it was in the UK but many later versions of the u.s. game changed the spell entirely to say let me use my magic to make this all a little more interesting now this line doesn't have the same spell format as the original version but on the other hand it's not offensive to a large swath of the public so that's always Kurt Obert talking of the word Oh still don't like saying I actually unearthed something even crazier because almost the exact same series of events happen to yubi soft one week earlier one week with their game called mind quiz you've probably never heard of this I know I hadn't it looks like typical DS shovelware to me some kind of brain Age knockoff there's a variety of supposedly brain enriching mini-games involving dogs dogs and more dogs if they stuck to a theme anyway when you complete a challenge the game gives you a sort of review of how you did and I think you can probably see where this is going that's right if you do poorly in the mini game mind quiz tells you you're a super oh yeah that is that is quite something again I'm sure that's not super offensive in America but over here ouch now this time round it wasn't even the games publisher that noticed this a random citizen Nicola from Belfast if you're curious happened to be playing the game when she encountered this pretty offensive statement even worse her son had passed away only a few months prior due to cerebral palsy the condition in this word refers to and so rightfully offended she reached out to the BBC who reached out to yubi soft who eventually pulled all copies of the game from the UK they were completely unable to be purchased there was no way of getting your hands on them after that but in update it nothing like that no erratic this time around and so that concludes our story two stories I guess of when publishers didn't quite take to heart the cultural differences between the UK and the u.s. actually it was most likely this very instant that led to Nintendo of Europe producing their own translations of Nintendo's first party games in practice which I believe continues up until this very day don't quote me on that though anyway thank you for watching to the end I hope you found this interesting and be sure to follow me on twitter at Thomas G docs for updates on future videos and we'll sign me if you find that interesting plus subscribe and bring the notification bar if you want to see my future videos as soon as they come out and I shall see you next week bye

Channel: Thomas Game Docs

Views: 1,910,965

Keywords: Nintendo, Super Mario, Mario Party, Mario, Luigi, Wii, Gaming, Magikoopa, Animal Crossing, Wild World, Ubisoft, Mario Party 8, Kamek

Id: oT3NvuTLgM0

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019