Rockstar Games is no stranger to controversy, with GTA and Manhunt being two of the most controversial series to ever release. However, after being known for incredibly violent and somewhat cynical open-world games, the revelation that the studio was making a game called "Bully" started off a frenzy.
The name alone evoked media uproar claiming that it would be promoting bullying, violence and other anti-social behaviour, so much so that in the UK the game was renamed Canis Canem Edit (which is latin for Dog Eat Dog), although the later Scholarship edition retained the Bully name after everyone had calmed down.
Despite calls to ban the game, Bully environment artist Andrew Wood says Rockstar wasn't too bothered. "Honestly, in the studio, we laughed at all the controversy," Wood tells Retro Gamer (issue 277), "They all made a big deal out of the name 'Bully,' but they didn't know that ultimately, the game was an anti-bullying statement."
And he's right, Jimmy Hopkins may look like and be a bit of a ruffian, but he's a good guy who befriends everyone regardless of social standing and actively fights back against bullies during the storyline, and often times he's actually sticking up for the victims of bullying.
But as the old saying goes, controversy creates cash, as Wood adds: "We loved the attention because it was helping us to sell games. They were freaking out over something they didn't really know anything about." And when you had a prominent anti video game violence campaigner likening the game to real-world tragedies leading to a court case, it is clear that the name alone was enough to have a leaping-off point to project ideas on to, and didn't matter what the game itself was actually like.
"A couple of people had mental breakdowns": Forget GTA 6, Bully's "brutal" 120-hour development weeks might be Rockstar's worst-ever crunch - "the office started to feel like a prison".
