Developer: Valve Corporation
Publisher: Valve Corporation
Release Date: 20 November 2009

The Left 4 Dead series involve up to four players (dubbed “The Survivors”) to battle it out against “The Infected”, a group of undead zombies that have taken over several environments. During the mission, The Survivors are able to upgrade to new weapons along the way, and help and protect each other as well. An uncut version of the original L4D was passed MA15+ despite being specifically targeted at adults. The next year, gamers found out that Valve intended to do a sequel and they thought that Left 4 Dead 2 was going to be passed MA15+ by the Classification Board, again unedited.

Sadly, this wasn’t the case. On September 15, 2009, The Board rejected the game as they were concerned with “depictions of decapitations, dismemberment, wound detail, and piles of bodies lying about the environment.”, yet this type of content was already present in the original game. Valve immediately submitted an appeal against the RC decision. The review did not take place until October 22, 2009. In the meantime, an edited version of the game was passed MA15+ (Strong bloody violence) on October 07, 2009. This was basically a severely watered-down version that has the offending content removed. On the 22nd, the appeal failed due to “insufficient delineation between the depiction of general zombie figures and the human figures”. The fact that the uncut version was rejected a second time means that Australians are unable to play the game as it was originally intended.

The Australian version of L4D2 was not only slammed by gamers who were determined to import the game from an international seller, but gaming sites also gave negative reviews of it. IGN even went one step further and posted a video of the Australian version of the game, showing everyone just how censored it really is. For those who found importing to be difficult, all they needed to do is to buy an Australian copy and go to a web site that would enable them to unlock the restricted content. This type of method is useful for German citizens who regularly get censored versions of games.

This ridiculous decision by the Boards could have been avoided if an R18+ rating existed for video games in Australia. If this was the case, then games like this would have made available only to adults. As it is right now, there is no way to protect children from games that carry inappropriate content, and that needs to change.