Legal Niches

Pakistani: Infinity Ward Botched Karachi Map

By John Keefer

Many game companies strive for realism when creating games based on real-world locales. Topography, architecture and landmarks are given detailed consideration and review. Military games even look at uniforms, weapons and hardware to provide the most realistic experience possible for the gamer.

So how could a company that puts so much effort into those details screw up the language on signs in a map? Apparently that's what happened with the Karachi map in Modern Warfare 2, as a Pakistani reader at Kotaku picked up on the faux pas, noticing that Arabic was used instead of Pakistan's Urdu language.

According to reader Saad:

"Infinity Ward probably thought, 'Oh hey its a Muslim country so Arabic is the language,'" says Saad. "To someone who doesn't know urdu won't be able to tell the difference," Saad explains. "It's like Spanish and English, I guess. Some letters are same, some are different but the words are completely different."

GP: Urdu is nowhere to be found on the map, only Arabic. Someone obviously didn't do their homework and its mistake for a game already wrapped in enough controversy, be it calculated and planned or not.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on December 29, 2009 (boomark / email).