Censorship Alert: StarCraft 2 Edited for South Korea

In case anyone is not yet aware, South Korea is easily the biggest individual market for the original StarCraft, with about half of the roughly 10 million copies sold in the Korean market. Gamers have continued to play and join competitions to this day despite the game having been released in 1998. The obsession with this game was so all-encompassing that the government had to step in and implement forced gaming curfews in order to get residents to sleep instead of staying up all night playing StarCraft. All that said, it is easy to imagine the level of insane drooling excitement going on in South Korea right now in regards to the impending release of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty on July 27. In that light, it was perhaps a smart move by Blizzard to remove some adult themes from the Korean version of the game, such as references to smoking and vulgar language, in order to release the game with an Age 12 rating. This will enable the game to reach a far larger audience than if the aforementioned parts were left in, and therefore pretty much the whole country can take part in the second installment of their national pastime. I am generally against any form of censorship, but in this case, the edits are small, they don't appear to affect the overall theme of the game, and if they didn't happen, the combined screams of thousands of teenage Koreans would haunt our dreams forever. Good thinking, Blizzard.