Dlaczego Microsoft wycofał grę Kakuto Chojin na konsolę Xbox?

In early 2003, Kate Edwards found herself sitting at the offices of paper Al Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, preparing to apologize on Microsoft’s behalf.

“Large room,” Edwards says. “Big circular table in the room. No windows or anything. There was a couple of guards standing at the door.”

As she sat with 2 local Microsoft colleagues, she tried to remember what she’d discussed days before with global elder public relations manager Ricardo Adame.

“‘Say this. Don’t say this. Be careful about this.’”

Edwards was the head of Microsoft’s geopolitical strategy team, a group built to keep — or in this case, get — the company out of problem erstwhile its teams produced content that could upset people from different cultures. Disputed map borders. Misrepresented flags. Hand symbols that change meaning by territory. Anything that could trigger a backlash.

In the weeks leading up to the meeting, Microsoft offended Muslims due to the fact that its Xbox game Kakuto Chojin: Back Alley Brutal utilized verses taken from the muslim holy book the Quran in its soundtrack, and Edwards had flown in to meet not just with paper staff, but with representatives of the Saudi Arabian government’s Council of Ministers.

An “entourage” of 5 people entered, Edwards says, 3 dressed in conventional Saudi clothing, 1 of them wearing gold and carrying a legal pad.

“They sat across from us, and there were no introductions made,” Edwards says. “We’re just sitting there. And the main individual — the gentleman in gold robes with a large white beard — he starts out the conversation by pointing at me like this [holds index finger out] and he says, ‘I want you to know that we do not hatred Americans.’

“And I was like, OK. I didn’t say anything. I’m just thinking, Where is this going?

“He went on to like a 10-minute monologue about how they love Americans and ‘they’re generous’ and ‘they’re friendly.’ Of course, I’m sitting there thinking, Well, this most likely has something to do with the 100,000 U.S. troops that are sitting in Saudi Arabia that have just started the second Gulf War.”

The gathering was about to take a turn. For Edwards, the primary concern wasn’t Kakuto Chojin or even Xbox. It was about Microsoft’s broader business interests in the mediate East, and the possible financial impact a mistake like this could have on another parts of the company.

“That’s erstwhile it gets scary,” she says.

Appealing to nipponese players

This all began not in Saudi Arabia or at Microsoft’s office in the U.S., but in Tokyo, where in 2001 Microsoft was building a squad to release the first Xbox in Japan.

As part of Microsoft’s efforts to appeal to the local marketplace — which included a marketing run showing founder Bill Gates holding a cheeseburger — the squad was looking for games to sale nipponese players on the console. In particular, it was looking to sign deals with established developers who had been successful elsewhere.

One of the top names on its list: Seiichi Ishii.

Over the erstwhile decade, Ishii had a front-row seat to the origins of 3D fighting games, working as the main designer on Virtua Fighter at Sega and directing Tekken and Tekken 2 at Namco, then starting the studio DreamFactory with Square and directing anime-styled fighting games Tobal No. 1 and 2, organization fighter Ehrgeiz, and brawler The Bouncer.

After finishing The Bouncer, DreamFactory broke distant from Square, changing its name to Dream-Publishing right as Microsoft was setting up its Xbox group in Japan.

“They were the squad that people wanted to work with and Xbox in Japan was just starting up, so I wouldn’t say we had the better hand or anything,” says Microsoft Japan product planner Jonah Nagai of the negotiations to sign the game. “It was beautiful much just a small, fresh Microsoft squad working with a — not legendary, really, but close to legendary — game creator.” (Ishii didn’t respond to multiple requests to participate in this story.)

The task began as a shiny tech demo named task K-X, then evolved into a full game, with a dark, violent speech and improvement responsibilities divided between Dream-Publishing and Microsoft Japan. On paper, the game checked a number of boxes — it was a fresh fighting game from a notable developer planned as an Xbox launch title that could show off the hardware’s visual capabilities, akin to what Sega had with Virtua Fighter and PlayStation had with Tekken.

“It was rather a strategical title to have in the lineup,” says Microsoft Japan maker Yoshikatsu Kanemaru.

The game never paid off on its first promise, though. improvement delays led to it missing both the U.S. and Japan Xbox launches, putting it a year behind squad Ninja’s breakout Xbox fighting game, Dead or Alive 3. And reviews criticized the game’s depth and inspiration, with its Metacritic score landing at 46.

“I remember it was hyped up at E3 1 year,” says Edwards. “It was like, Well, it’s a full fresh fighting system, and as you fight you get more bloody and beat up, which at the time was truly novel, and it was kind of sold on that full idea. And it truly didn’t live up to those expectations.”

In early November 2002, Edwards discovered Kakuto Chojin had a bigger problem than reviews or competing with Dead or Alive for marketplace share.

The game was nearing its scheduled Nov. 12 release erstwhile she got a message asking about an audio file in the soundtrack. The file appeared in a background song for the character Asad, a Muay Thai fighter from Somalia, and featured what sounded to Edwards like Arabic chants.

This was what her group was built for — requests would come in from different parts of Microsoft, and the geopolitical strategy squad would analyse and flag any cultural concerns. Edwards says she had pitched Xbox executives Robbie Bach and Shane Kim on taking a more comprehensive approach, which they resisted, so her squad took one-off requests as they came in.

Edwards was curious about the file, so she took it to Ahmad Mustafa, an Arabic linguist friend who worked in her building at Microsoft. Mustafa identified portions of the Quran in the chants, specifically lines from Surat al-Ikhlas referring to the virtues of the muslim god.

For Edwards and Mustafa, this raised multiple red flags.

“In Saudi Arabia, Islam plays a central function in all aspects of life, and the Quran is revered as the word of God,” says Mohammed Kateeb, then managing manager of Microsoft’s operations in the mediate East. “There are strict guidelines around how Quranic verses should be treated — they are recited with large reverence, and proceeding them in inappropriate contexts, specified as mixed with music or in entertainment, is considered profoundly disrespectful. Additionally, associating Quranic verses with violent video game content was seen as offensive, as the Quran is regarded as a guide for spiritual and ethical conduct, not something to be trivialized in the context of amusement or violence.”

“It’s like the national anthem,” says Bilal Sununu, then general manager of Microsoft Saudi Arabia, acknowledging the utmost differences in meaning between the two. “You should perceive to it until the end.”

Meanwhile, the game — with Asad front and center on the box art — was on its way to stores across the United States. Edwards recalls proceeding there were 75,000 copies manufactured and about to be released.

Edwards and Mustafa felt Microsoft needed to halt the game’s release, so Edwards rapidly put together a plan, emailing managers at Microsoft’s mediate east subsidiaries to confirm they felt the same way, then utilizing their replies to make a case for why Microsoft should halt the shipments in progress.

According to Edwards, Microsoft executives met her partway, going ahead with the copies that had already been manufactured but replacing the audio file for subsequent copies. Edwards says she powerfully resisted this. Robbie Bach, Ed Fries, and Shane Kim — who ran Microsoft’s Xbox division and first-party games group — say they don’t remember the details of this decision

(As a fast sampling, we purchased 10 random copies of the game on eBay and tested them. 7 ended up being originals, 3 fixed.)

Almost 3 months after Microsoft’s interior discovery, word started getting out publically about the audio file — first on Arabic message boards, then through news outlets like Al Riyadh and a letter from the Saudi Arabian government addressed to Bill Gates.

“Woe unto them, how was this game able to enter Muslim lands, how dare they do this, Allah forgive us, these games are for youth and children whose morals are affected by these games,” wrote user flowerqueen on the Palestine dialog Network. “[…] As a Muslim, I request that all competent authorities take this issue seriously and take all measures essential against Microsoft to hold them accountable for this repugnant act and their mockery of the religion of Islam and the word of Allah Almighty.”

“Shop owners, delight halt selling the game immediately, print this page and distribute it to shops, you will be rewarded,” read a fax sent to local stores. Microsoft wasn’t selling the Xbox in the mediate East, but it was aware that people had imported consoles, with Edwards pointing to “several thousand” registered systems in Saudi Arabia.

Kanemaru even recalls proceeding that Microsoft’s U.S. office received a package containing anthrax in response, though six people who worked for Microsoft say they weren’t aware of a situation involving anthrax, with most being skeptical of the claim.

In the background of all this was a increasing climate of Islamophobia in the West that impacted how many at Microsoft viewed the situation, with multiple employees speaking for this communicative saying tensions between the U.S. and the mediate East came up in their conversations about the game at the time.

This time, Microsoft didn’t halt partway in its response.

Adame, who assisted with crisis management at Microsoft, remembers attending multiple meetings the day the company discovered the issue had flared up, and says he alerted Microsoft’s safety squad in case “fanatics” decided to attack 1 of its offices. He points to this as “probably in the top three” of the most delicate situations he had to aid manage over nearly 15 years working at Microsoft.

In 1 of the meetings that happened that day, Adame says he recalls then-chief Xbox officer Bach going through the numbers of what a callback would cost Microsoft, then making the call to pull the game from stores. Bach says he doesn’t callback the details of the decision. Fries recalls being in akin meetings.

“It was a comparatively large deal,” says Fries, then vice president of Microsoft Game Studios. “Any time we had to callback a product, it was definitely something that was coming up to me and we were gonna have a conversation about.”

An interior investigation revealed that the audio file that got Microsoft in problem had besides appeared in another games, including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which Nintendo released in 1998 — and that the composer at Microsoft Japan chose the file due to the fact that they heard it in Ocarina of Time and liked it, say 2 people speaking for this story. (In the years since, fans online have tracked down the origin of this file, listed as “prayer 1,” to Best Service’s Voice Spectral Vol. 1, a German royalty-free example CD released in 1995.)

For many at Microsoft, though, their focus wasn’t on utilizing details like that to defend the product, but to keep lucrative deals in place elsewhere at the company. Microsoft’s success made it a bigger mark for criticism, and more willing to talk out erstwhile things took a incorrect turn.

“A lot of reporters in the news at that time utilized to make money by just criticizing Microsoft,” says Sununu. “And to us as Microsoft at that time, we always had to react. […] We were number 1 in the market. We had quite a few government contracts. We had quite a few ties with the Ministry of Education. And hence, we had to take action and we had to show the public that we’re taking action.”

“When I would talk to Bill [Gates and then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer], they were tense that I was utilizing the Microsoft brand at all,” says Fries. “You know, if I did something for a game that affected Windows or Office, it could do billions of dollars of damage, right? […] Microsoft’s a global company and we sale products all over the world. We don’t want to piss anyone off.”

Microsoft went public with news of the callback on Feb. 6, 2003, issuing a message apologizing for what happened. It pulled the game from stores in the U.S. and Japan — despite the nipponese version shipping later and having the audio fixed prior to release — and canceled a planned European release.

“My large takeaway from this was that gaming is like all form of amusement in this respect — it is intensely cultural in nature,” says Bach. “If you want to be successful in a market, you request to respect that culture.”

Following the recall, Microsoft and Dream-Publishing went their separate ways. Kanemaru says Dream-Publishing had already been paid, so the decision didn’t financially impact the team, yet he couldn’t aid but be disappointed by how the situation played out.

Despite the negative critical reception and low sales prior to the recall, Kanemaru remains arrogant of Kakuto Chojin, citing the combat strategy inspired by DreamFactory’s work on Tobal No. 1 and the team’s extended balancing efforts. “Due to the recall, people have forgotten about the game,” he says. “It’s a shame all this work went to waste.”

Some were besides hopeful for a follow-up.

In a 2003 Famitsu Xbox Perfect Guide interview, Ishii expressed interest in a sequel, saying that fighting games only “come to life” erstwhile players compete in individual and that he’d want a possible sequel to besides be released in arcades.

“With all title you want to be able to build out a franchise, so erstwhile the title was pulled and people had time to process it, I think that was the biggest disappointment,” says Microsoft Japan supervisor James Spahn. “It wasn’t so much that, Hey, we’re not going to get extra royalties. It was, There’s not going to be a sequel.”

Spahn says that it became harder to get another fighting game off the ground as well.

“It just kind of nixed the full genre for us, for the Japan squad at least,” he says. “So that of course was a disappointment, for us and Ishii-san at Dream-Publishing.”

Back at the conference area at Al Riyadh in 2003, Edwards is sorting through what the government authoritative meant erstwhile he said he doesn’t hatred Americans.

It turned out he was comparing Americans to the British and the French, she says, referencing the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that divided up the mediate East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Then, Edwards says, the authoritative looked down at the legal pad he’d brought with him and started rattling off questions that weren’t rather as friendly.

The first question, as Edwards recalls:

“‘Why did Microsoft open its first mediate east office in Israel and not an arabian country?’

“And so the 2 gentlemen from Microsoft on each side of me were whispering in my ear, saying, ‘Don’t answer that. You’re only here to talk about the game.’ So I’m kind of almost pleading the Fifth. […] So I just said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m only here to discuss the game.’

“Next question: ‘Why did Office 97 release in Hebrew before Arabic?’

“‘Only here to talk about the game.’

“‘Why did Outlook release the Judaic calendar before the muslim calendar?’

“It is question after question after question all related to those kinds of issues, many of which were before my time or things I had nothing to do with.”

Edwards says the conversation yet turned to Kakuto Chojin, at which point she gave her prepared explanation about games being large projects with quite a few moving parts, and how her squad tried to catch all cultural mistakes yet couldn’t always do so — being careful not to go into the details of Microsoft initially choosing to ignore her advice. She says she closed out her explanation with an apology, saying Microsoft would work to do better.

“They broke out into a conversation after my explanation, and they were speaking in Arabic, which — evidently I didn’t realize it,” says Edwards. “It felt like it was a small bit heated. There was kind of any going back and distant there. And then the main gentleman turned to me and just said, ‘Thank you for your time,’ and then they all got up and [went] out the door.

“Then we left, and of course I asked my Microsoft colleagues to debrief me as to what just happened. And they said, ‘Well, they were fundamentally discussing whether your answer was sufficient.’ And I’m like, ‘Sufficient for what? What would have happened if it wasn’t?’ And they were like [shrugs] ‘I don’t know!’”

For about 5 years leading up to that point, Edwards had been moving the geopolitical strategy squad and increasingly wanting to do more with games — yet she says she hadn’t been able to convince executives like Robbie Bach to make it a regular part of the process.

After the callback and everything that happened with Kakuto Chojin, though, she says that attitude changed — which ended up leading to a shift in process, where Edwards’ group started analyzing all first-party game Microsoft released. (Edwards even turned game culturalization, as she calls it, into a career, later leaving Microsoft and continuing to do the same kind of analysis on many of the industry’s biggest games, from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to Indiana Jones and the large Circle.)

“It was the Kakuto Chojin issue that got them to understand,” Edwards says, “because I got a call from Robbie a fewer weeks after that happened where he said, ‘Hey, you know that stuff you’ve been telling us to do? Let’s talk about how we can make that happen.’

“I’m like, ‘Yeah, let’s do that. I think that’s a large idea.’”