In early 2003, Kate Edwards found herself sitting at the offices of newspaper Al Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, preparing to apologize on Microsoft’s behalf.
“Large room,” Edwards says. “Big round table in the room. No windows or anything. There was a couple of guards standing at the door.”
As she sat with two local Microsoft colleagues, she tried to remember what she’d discussed days before with international senior public relations director 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 trouble when 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.
This week on Polygon, we’re looking at how cultural differences affect media in a special issue we’re calling Culture Shock.
In the weeks leading up to the meeting, Microsoft offended Muslims because its Xbox game Kakuto Chojin: Back Alley Brutal used verses taken from the Islamic holy book the Quran in its soundtrack, and Edwards had flown in to meet not just with newspaper staff, but with representatives of the Saudi Arabian government’s Council of Ministers.
An “entourage” of five people entered, Edwards says, three dressed in traditional Saudi clothing, one 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 big 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 hate 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 probably 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 meeting 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 Middle East, and the potential financial impact a mistake like this could have on other parts of the company.
“That’s when it gets scary,” she says.
Appealing to Japanese players
This all began not in Saudi Arabia or at Microsoft’s headquarters in the U.S., but in Tokyo, where in 2001 Microsoft was building a team to release the original Xbox in Japan.
As part of Microsoft’s efforts to appeal to the local market — which included a marketing campaign showing founder Bill Gates holding a cheeseburger — the team was looking for games to sell Japanese 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 previous 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, party fighter Ehrgeiz, and brawler The Bouncer.
After finishing The Bouncer, DreamFactory broke away from Square, changing its name to Dream-Publishing right as Microsoft was setting up its Xbox group in Japan.
“They were the team 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 pretty much just a small, new Microsoft team 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 project began as a shiny tech demo named Project K-X, then evolved into a full game, with a dark, violent tone and development responsibilities split between Dream-Publishing and Microsoft Japan. On paper, the game checked a number of boxes — it was a new fighting game from a notable developer planned as an Xbox launch title that could show off the hardware’s visual capabilities, similar to what Sega had with Virtua Fighter and PlayStation had with Tekken.
“It was quite a strategic title to have in the lineup,” says Microsoft Japan producer Yoshikatsu Kanemaru.
The game never paid off on its initial promise, though. Development delays led to it missing both the U.S. and Japan Xbox launches, putting it a year behind Team 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 one year,” says Edwards. “It was like, Well, it’s a whole new fighting system, and as you fight you get more bloody and beat up, which at the time was really novel, and it was kind of sold on that whole idea. And it really didn’t live up to those expectations.”
The internal discovery
In early November 2002, Edwards discovered Kakuto Chojin had a bigger problem than reviews or competing with Dead or Alive for market share.
The game was nearing its scheduled Nov. 12 release when 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 team would investigate 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 team 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 Islamic god.
For Edwards and Mustafa, this raised multiple red flags.
“In Saudi Arabia, Islam plays a central role in all aspects of life, and the Quran is revered as the word of God,” says Mohammed Kateeb, then managing director of Microsoft’s operations in the Middle East. “There are strict guidelines around how Quranic verses should be treated — they are recited with great reverence, and hearing them in inappropriate contexts, such as mixed with music or in entertainment, is considered deeply 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 entertainment or violence.”
“It’s like the national anthem,” says Bilal Sununu, then general manager of Microsoft Saudi Arabia, acknowledging the extreme differences in meaning between the two. “You should listen 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 hearing 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 quickly put together a plan, emailing managers at Microsoft’s Middle Eastern subsidiaries to confirm they felt the same way, then using their replies to make a case for why Microsoft should stop 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 strongly 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 quick sampling, we purchased 10 random copies of the game on eBay and tested them. Seven ended up being originals, three fixed.)
The public discovery
Almost three months after Microsoft’s internal discovery, word started getting out publicly 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 Dialogue Network. “[…] As a Muslim, I demand that all competent authorities take this issue seriously and take all measures necessary 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, please stop 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 Middle East, but it was aware that people had imported consoles, with Edwards pointing to “several thousand” registered systems in Saudi Arabia.
Kanemaru even recalls hearing 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 growing climate of Islamophobia in the West that impacted how many at Microsoft viewed the situation, with multiple employees speaking for this story saying tensions between the U.S. and the Middle East came up in their conversations about the game at the time.
This time, Microsoft didn’t stop 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 security team in case “fanatics” decided to attack one of its offices. He points to this as “probably in the top three” of the most sensitive situations he had to help manage over nearly 15 years working at Microsoft.
In one of the meetings that happened that day, Adame says he recalls then-chief Xbox officer Bach going through the numbers of what a recall would cost Microsoft, then making the call to pull the game from stores. Bach says he doesn’t recall the details of the decision. Fries recalls being in similar meetings.
“It was a relatively big deal,” says Fries, then vice president of Microsoft Game Studios. “Any time we had to recall a product, it was definitely something that was coming up to me and we were gonna have a conversation about.”
An internal investigation revealed that the audio file that got Microsoft in trouble had also appeared in other games, including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which Nintendo released in 1998 — and that the composer at Microsoft Japan chose the file because they heard it in Ocarina of Time and liked it, say two people speaking for this story. (In the years since, fans online have tracked down the source of this file, listed as “prayer 1,” to Best Service’s Voice Spectral Vol. 1, a German royalty-free sample CD released in 1995.)
For many at Microsoft, though, their focus wasn’t on using details like that to defend the product, but to maintain lucrative deals in place elsewhere at the company. Microsoft’s success made it a bigger target for criticism, and more willing to speak out when things took a wrong turn.
“A lot of reporters in the news at that time used 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 one in the market. We had a lot of government contracts. We had a lot of 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 nervous that I was using 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 sell products all over the world. We don’t want to piss anyone off.”
Microsoft went public with news of the recall on Feb. 6, 2003, issuing a statement apologizing for what happened. It pulled the game from stores in the U.S. and Japan — despite the Japanese version shipping later and having the audio fixed prior to release — and canceled a planned European release.
“My big takeaway from this was that gaming is like every form of entertainment in this respect — it is intensely cultural in nature,” says Bach. “If you want to be successful in a market, you need to respect that culture.”
Ripple effects
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 help but be disappointed by how the situation played out.
Despite the negative critical reception and low sales prior to the recall, Kanemaru remains proud of Kakuto Chojin, citing the combat system inspired by DreamFactory’s work on Tobal No. 1 and the team’s extensive 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 also 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” when players compete in person and that he’d want a potential sequel to also be released in arcades.
“With every title you want to be able to build out a franchise, so once 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 whole genre for us, for the Japan team at least,” he says. “So that of course was a disappointment, for us and Ishii-san at Dream-Publishing.”
Back to the start
Back at the conference room at Al Riyadh in 2003, Edwards is sorting through what the government official meant when he said he doesn’t hate Americans.
It turned out he was comparing Americans to the British and the French, she says, referencing the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that split up the Middle East after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Then, Edwards says, the official looked down at the legal pad he’d brought with him and started rattling off questions that weren’t quite as friendly.
The first question, as Edwards recalls:
“‘Why did Microsoft open its first Middle Eastern office in Israel and not an Arab country?’
“And so the two 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 Islamic 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 eventually turned to Kakuto Chojin, at which point she gave her prepared explanation about games being big projects with a lot of moving parts, and how her team 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 — obviously I didn’t understand it,” says Edwards. “It felt like it was a little bit heated. There was kind of some going back and forth 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 basically 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 five years leading up to that point, Edwards had been running the geopolitical strategy team 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 recall 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 every 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 sort of analysis on many of the industry’s biggest games, from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.)
“It was the Kakuto Chojin issue that got them to understand,” Edwards says, “because I got a call from Robbie a few 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 great idea.’”
The post The Xbox game that made Microsoft apologize to the Saudi Arabian government appeared first on Polygon.
