Sony Decapitates a Goat: Daily Mail Gets Upset

Just when we thought the advertising mavericks over at Sony Computer Entertainment were getting all conservative and that in their ‘third’ age, they go and cut the head off a live goat and encourage people to eat its innards.

At a launch party in (where else) Athens, Greece, to celebrate the launch of the awesome must-buy PS2 exclusive God Of War II, guests were invited to reach into the innards of a freshly slaughtered goat in order to try a little offal.

An interesting delivery method for canapés, we’ll grant them that.

SPOnG can only presume that it is some sort of Greek tradition to serve up offal in a dead goat, although yesterday’s Mail on Sunday front page headline news didn’t seem to take this view, screaming, “Slaughter: Horror at Sony's depraved promotion stunt with decapitated goat”.

So the Mail on Sunday, unsurprisingly, was up in arms about the PR stunt and reported that guests "threw knives at targets and pulled live snakes from a pit with their bare hands. Topless girls added to the louche atmosphere by dipping grapes into guests’ mouths, while a male model portraying Kratos, the game’s warrior hero, handed out garlands."

Clearly the newspaper’s editor was of the opinion that it was a fairly slow news day and perhaps was not aware of other things going on in the world. Perhaps, for instance, he had missed the fact that there had been a major earthquake in Kent where hundreds of peoples lives were irrevocably damaged.

No, a picture of a dead goat tied into an anti-videogaming piece was of course far more important to him! SPOnG notes that the Mail’s reporter also took the opportunity to detail previous apparent gaming scandals. “PlayStation 2 game Manhunt was banned by High Street stores in the UK after it was linked to the murder of a 14-year-old Leicester boy,” claimed the Daily Mail.

In actual fact, this was not the case. Manhunt was voluntarily taken off the shelves by two retailers due to to their concerns about their own family image.

The images from the party – one of which you can see right here - were due to be published in the next issue of the Official Playstation Magazine 2, due out tomorrow. However, Future Publishing has been forced to recall 80,000 copies of Official PlayStation 2 today which carried more of the controversial images in its news pages.

SPOnG has spoken with the publisher of OPM2 this morning, Matthew Pierce, who didn’t wish to comment about the whole page-removing furore, other than re-iterating the official Future line, which is that, "We appreciate our readers may have found the coverage of Sony's European God of War II press launch distasteful, so we have taken the decision to have the offending images removed from copies destined for the UK newsstand with immediate effect."

When we asked Matt if we could have the entire set of offending pics, to present to our readers for them to make up their own minds about the issue, he politely declined to give them to us.

It appears that around 2000 subscribers copies containing the decapitated goat pictures have already been sent out. If anybody out there has one of these, then please feel free to post scans and comments in the forum below.

Sony, meanwhile, has issued an official apology, claiming that, "It has come to our attention that at the God Of War II launch showcase, an element of the event was of an unsuitable nature. Sony does not condone or sanction any inappropriate behaviour by its staff or sub-contracted staff. We are conducting an internal inquiry into aspects of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put into place measures to ensure that this does not happen again."

The truly magnificent God of War II was released in the UK last Friday.

It’s one of SPOnG’s games of the year to date. Buy it immediately if you haven’t already. Read our full God of War II review right here.

(UPDATE - you can see SCEE's response to this news right here).