JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia – The creator of the Faith Fighter online game allowing players to stage fights involving Jesus, Mohammed and other prophets said on Tuesday it has withdrawn the game after a Muslim protest.
The game is "incendiary in its content and offensive to Muslims and Christians," a spokesman for the Jeddah-based Islamophobia Observatory of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference said.
Italian game publisher Molleindustria said on its website: "Today after an official statement from the Organisation of Islamic Conference we decided to remove the game Faith Fighter from our site."
The Observatory spokesman said the game would serve no other purpose than to incite intolerance. He called on the game's internet host to take "immediate action" by withdrawing it from the web.
Molleindustria said Faith Fighter was meant to be a game against intolerance that used over-the-top irony and a cartoonish style.
"Faith Fighter depicted in a mildly politically incorrect way all the major religions, as a response to the one-way Islamophobic satire of the Danish Mohammed cartoons.
Islam forbids images of Mohammed and a Danish newspaper angered the Muslim world in 2005 by publishing cartoons of the prophet that were deemed offensive.
Molleindustria said: "If an established organisation didn't understand the irony and the message of the game and is claiming it is inciting intolerance, we simply failed."
The game was released more than a year ago and has been played by millions of people on the Internet, it said.
The influential OIC has 57 member countries and represents 1.3 billion Muslims.
