But with the pair’s talents finally being used to shape a video game experience worthy of the series name, South Park: The Stick of Truth was faced with a reality that the show’s developers rarely encounter - censorship. Fans in Europe and Australia will experience some scenes of the game differently than those in North America, and Matt Stone has explained why the shift to gaming brought harsher control, and why the team didn’t let it alter their vision.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the series to find that The Stick of Truth would include some truly offensive and disturbing imagery (read our review), even if an element of interactivity has now been added to the proceedings. The writing duo took every effort to bring the same level of writing and story the show enjoys to the game, and succeeded. But for scenes involving alien probing, and a trip to an ‘Unplanned Parenthood’ clinic, it proved too much for censors overseas.

Speaking with The Guardian, South Park co-creator Matt Stone explained that the show is able to tackle issues that would have been off-limits even years ago - something that the success of graphic, mature TV shows in America proves. But when it came to the game, the team was forced to acknowledge that games are a different matter entirely:

The team, as they tend to do, found a way to turn the potential controversy or censorship into yet another joke, replacing the scenes in question with text screens explaining to European players what should have been shown in its place. In other words: getting around censorship by not showing audiences something offensive, but explaining it nonetheless (something censors found acceptable).

“It’s not that big a deal. It doesn’t change things that much, but we weren’t going to change the game downwards somewhere and just not tell anybody. You’ll see how ridiculous that is.”

So for a creative team that courts controversy with abandon, and takes on nearly every moral or political issue others are afraid to even approach, does it seem foolish to have to censor a video game for large portions of the world? Stone gives his thoughts on why games elicit a different standard from some censors:

Luckily, the writers managed to turn the censorship into a joke itself, but where do you fall on the issue? Do you think the interaction required in a game changes the idea of what’s acceptable, or do you feel there is a double standard at work, considering what the censors allowed to stay in the game? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

“There are things that make people more uncomfortable in an interactive world, definitely. But that said, what we had in the game, we could have shown that on TV pretty easily, especially now.”

South Park: The Stick of Truth is available now for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Follow Andrew on Twitter @andrew_dyce.

Source: The Guardian