Overcooked, the fantastic local co-op game about running a kitchen and shouting at your pals, eventually secured an age rating of 'E for Everyone' in the US, but a cheeky little bum on its logo almost had this family-friendly title slapped with a more mature recommendation.
Just a few weeks before the game launched, co-developers Phil Duncan and Oli De-Vine received an email from the ESRB, the organisation responsible for age ratings across the US, Canada and Mexico. It had concerns about the partial nudity on display.
"I was out at E3 making onion soup with the press and Oli was back in the UK frantically fixing the last few bugs for cert," Duncan explained to Eurogamer. "We got the email just before we were due to upload our launch trailer which told us that the only thing holding us back from an 'E for Everyone' rating in the States was the tiny cartoon bum in our logo. The logo which was of course all over our website, twitter, facebook and the trailer."
As you can see in the accompanying GIF, the original design included one of the game's chefs hanging from the logo by his feet, with his buns very much on display.
There are a few key differences between the 'E for Everyone' rating and the next highest, 'Everyone 10+', but in this example, the ESRB were concerned about the game's use of "minimal suggestive themes".
"We had to frantically paint over the little bum," said Duncan. "Update the logo everywhere we could think of and re-edit the trailer from the hotel in the middle of the night. The t-shirts we had printed for conventions are the only things remaining which still display the illicit cleft."
I hosted a Q&A with the two developers at last week's EGX Rezzed and I'm happy to report that both Duncan and De-Vine were wearing their original T-shirt designs. They claim the studio only had the budget for an initial run of T-shirt prints, but I like to think that somewhere at the bottom of their hearts, this was a small act of defiance.
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