ESRB Pulls Dark Sector and The Darkness Trailers

In an e-mail received by Game Freaks 365, Take-Two has been forced to add age gates to their trailer of The Darkness. From a different publisher (D3), two trailers for Dark Sector are being pulled completely. Take-Two has a history of run-ins with the ESRB. First in 2005, Rockstar was forced to shortly pull Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (PC, PS2 and Xbox) off of the market after it had been re-rated as Adult Only for the “Hot Coffee” sex mini-game found in the game’s code. Just last week, the company got news that Manhunt 2 for the PS2 and Wii would be banned in Britain and would receive an Adult Only rating in the United States.

“We recently received a ruling from the ESRB stating that the two officially released Dark Sector gameplay montages have been deemed to contain excessive or offensive content; and to this end are not to be available for download or viewing, regardless of being placed behind an age gate. In order to comply with this ruling, the ESRB has requested that the two Dark Sector gameplay montages be pulled immediately upon receipt of this notice and no longer made available for view by consumers,” one of the statements said, referring to the upcoming PS3 and Xbox 360 game.

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In a separate statement, we were informed that, “The ESRB requires that all trailers for Mature and Adults Only rated games be appropriately age-gated. Game publishers that do not comply with the age gate requirement are subject to enforcement actions by the ESRB. All trailers for titles rated Mature or Adults Only MUST be behind an ESRB compliant age-gate with NO EXCEPTIONS.” (Emphasis not added.) In this case, the game affected was The Darkness for PS3 and Xbox 360. Due to limited bandwidth allocation, we do not host game trailers on this site, but for sites that do, they will be required to ask a person’s age in order to comply with the ESRB.

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