2007: The Year in Games

Join us as we take a look back at all the big stories that made 2007 one of the most exciting yet for games.

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June

It's around June that the games industry goes into its annual summer slumber. Weekly game releases drop to nearly nothing, which is just as good, since people buy fewer games as well (or is that vice versa). But June was made interesting this year by Rockstar, or more specifically, its controversial sequel to violent action game Manhunt.

What would turn into something of a media fiasco started off with the British Board of Film Classification deciding to reject Manhunt 2 for what it called an unrelenting and bleak tone and extended scenes of gratuitous violence - not far removed from what most people would have said about the original Manhunt.

This time was different though. Not long after the BBFC came down on Rockstar, so did ratings bodies around the world, including in Europe and in the US. Essentially, Manhunt 2 was banned in most major regions.

As remarkable as the Manhunt 2 affair was, it wasn't the only controversial item to hit the mainstream press during June. Sony ran afoul of the Church of England, which took umbrage with Sony and developer Insomniac's decision to set a part of PlayStation 3 launch game Resistance: Fall of Man inside Manchester Cathedral.

Manchester is a city that in recent years has been plagued by gun crime, and church officials were appalled at Sony's tactless treading over people's emotions. Sony of course the matter quite differently. The heart of the matter seemed to rest on how Sony had come into the technical knowledge required to build the level in the first place.

Things were starting to look up for Sony in its more traditional area of expertise. After defying expectations and breaking records at launch, the PlayStation 3 crossed the million mark in Europe during June. There was still much negativity buzzing around the console. Sir Howard Stringer, the incoming head of Sony, said that all the PlayStation 3 needed was time.

It wasn't all bad news for Rockstar either. The second trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV arrived in June, helping boost the already stratospheric profile of the long-awaited next game in the series. Whether the game would be out by its promised October date was brought into question though after an analyst speculated that Rockstar would miss the big day.

Probably the most unexpected news of the month was that Sega was working on a role-playing game based on its blue mascot, Sonic The Hedgehog. As if the premise wasn't strange enough, it was also revealed that the game was being developed by RPG powerhouse BioWare, the team behind Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

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