I don't know what's more disturbing about this story - the developer's convoluted answer to the question - or the fact that someone (or someones) spent time playing this game and entering in offensive words to discover this little "gem."

This sounds to me like a case of CYA with a really strained explanation. I mean, really, who knew the word "sambo" was another name for a gourd used in Ecuadorean cuisine? Besides Ecuadorians that is.

I think the more likely explanation is that this slipped by their QC department and this is their explanation for this embarrassing gaff.

On that note - Tom, kudos for your use of "strange fruit" double entendre in this piece. Billie Holiday would be proud. : ]

I can only hope the explanation is an honest one, because it seems to me "sambo" invoking a watermelon was probably a joke added to the game that they forgot to remove before going gold. Interestingly, Sambo was only added to the list of alternative names for the fig-leaf gourd on Wikipedia today.

And. . .I call BS on this article. A 6 year old wouldn't accept that explanation. I'm very against the whole PC culture we live in, but something seems very off about that explanation. Almost like they were scrambling to find a reason behind everything. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but 'm a cynic.

I think they hate black people. In fact, not just those but also homosexuals, women, atheists, pretty much any minority. A cousin of a friend tells me that the original design was a game where you entered a derogatory remark and got an item related to the minority, like the less formal word for "prostitute" would then give you an ironing board, and you had to match them up.

It's only later in development that they realized that summoning words was also fun without racial slurs and they scrambled to get them all out - but they left the sambo reference in as a secret reference to the game's origin.

Oh yeah...now i cant wait to get this! Sambo..haha..that is truly classic!

It would have been better if "sambo" created Andrei Arlovski.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambo_(martial_art)

While it seems an absurd answer, it does actually make some sense if you consider how the games lexicon works. It's not like they have 20,000 unique objects in the game. They have a much smaller collection of objects, most with a bunch of synonyms that the user can type in. It's entirely possible they just used a thesaurus for some of them.

PERSONALLY. I see this as nothing but people trying to find a reason to hate something. It happened with Pokemon and Christians( no offense to Christians, I am one). I saw at one point, a Xeroxed stack of border lining a book of why pokemon was evil "oh, some might say bellsprout is a pokemon named as such as it looks like a bell and it is a plant, but that's not the case.." and it spent, over a PAGE of backwards referencing, cross referencing, abstract theories, relating it to Buddha, and there for, not christian, so..evil (Southern Christianity is..fairly backwards like that...)

I may just be spitting out too much of my own theories on humanity when I say that humans simply want to find something to hate to give themselves some sort of self gratification, but, I think someone just wanted to find something to hate, or thought they might get money out of it by a court case for racism.

And truth be told, I have never heard this term used. I grew up in South Carolina, one of the most racist states there are, on both ends, it simply never came up in the many many colorful metaphors and insults I had heard in my high school. And lets not throw out how many objects and words are in the game's database.

if I write in the word Cracker, does that make me a racist? Would it spawn Carrot top for him to do comedy? or does it simply add in a cracker to toss at the dinosaur for him to eat a tasty dry bread of sorts instead of me?

My final say on this is...It's a game, its not racism, the only racism in it, is what YOU make of it. I say to all of you that see this as racism, go to a Therapist, and ask for an ink blot test.

@Balance of Power: Who knew this this meaning of the word? At a wild guess, I'd say the developer who's spent the last year or two trawling through dictionaries looking for every damn word ever used, to put into their game.

Seems like they'd have a pretty damn good chance of knowing absurd meanings of words.

Could we please find something *real* to get offended about now?

Up until this article, I honestly hadn't heard of sambo as anything other than a Russian martial art. And I've lived in the south for most of my life.