Faith Fighter video game goes offline after Muslim ire

The creator of the Faith Fighter online game allowing players to stage fights involving Jesus, Prophet Mohammed and other prophets said it has withdrawn the game after a Muslim protest.

In the game, caricatures of Jesus, Prophet Muhammad, Buddha, God and the Hindu god Ganesh fight each other against a backdrop of burning buildings. God attacks with bolts of lighting and pillars of fire while the turbaned Muhammad can summon a burning black meteorite.

The Saudi-based Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which represents most Muslim nations, said it should be removed from the internet.

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: “After an official statement from the Organisation of Islamic Conference we decided to remove the game Faith Fighter from our site.”

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.