South Park: The Stick of Truth Interview

The Guardian has interviewed South Park co-creator Matt Stone about the recently released South Park: The Stick of Truth, with questions covering subjects such as the game’s censorship, Stone and Parker’s involvement into the development of the title, and more. Here’s a snip:

When South Park first hit TV there was a huge moral panic around the show – 17 years later, how has the American public’s conservatism changed? Are there things you could make jokes about then that you can’t now?

No, it’s all the other way. It’s crazily more permissive than when we started. The standards were much, much higher when we started out.

You go back and watch the first season of South Park and it’s pretty slow and not the best written and junky-looking, but it would almost play on Nickelodeon at this point.

There are dirty words but, conceptually, we couldn’t have covered the material that we do now. And yet, in the first year, that’s when we were getting all the calls from the network and we had to fight for it, and that’s when we were on the cover of magazines that said: “Don’t let your children watch”.

It’s hilarious, people would probably show it to younger kids now. I think things have loosened up and, generally, I think that’s pretty good. It’s a lot of the reason why television has become so dominant right now.

Part of it is proliferation of channels and being able to do more shit on American TV. Look where the Breaking Bads of the world go now.

That would not have been a mass-marketed thing back in the 90s.

In Europe and Australia, some scenes in the video game have been censored.

I was told that Australia has different standards. They have their own ratings system, as does Europe, so I was told that we had to submit it for ratings and they come back and tell you this will pass, this won’t. Ultimately, the full version of the game is in North America, so at least that version is out there, but anywhere it’s censored [in the other version], we just put in little black cards explaining what has happened.

It’s not that big a deal. It doesn’t change things that much, but we weren’t going to change the game downwards somewhere and just not tell anybody. You’ll see how ridiculous that is.

How do you feel about that?

It does feel like a double standard, a little bit. We weren’t willing to change the content, but also it doesn’t ruin the game it’s like 40 seconds’ worth of the whole game. As long as we could make a joke out of the fact that they made us cut this, that was fine.