2003 Law and Order Game Pulled Due to Picture of Murdered Toddler

A four-year-old game is being voluntarily pulled from store shelves due to the discovery of a CCTV image of murdered toddler James Bulger shown in a cutscene. Law & Order II: Double or Nothing (PC), the second game in a series of Legacy Interactive titles based on the hit TV show, has been withdrawn from sale by the company after Denise Fergus--the mother of James Bulger--called for stores to take action. A spokesman for Ms. Fergus told the BBC that she did not want her son's death to be used as a "form of entertainment." The photo--which shows Bulger being lead away from a shopping center by ten-year-olds Robert Thompson and John Venables--can be seen posted on a detective's wall during a cutscene in the game (pictured above, top right). Shortly after the picture was taken, the two-year-old Bulger was brutally tortured by the boys, before being killed and left for dead on a railroad track. The grotesque nature of the murder combined with the young age of the killers shocked the British public in 1993. The two boys were convicted, sentenced to eight years in prison, and given new identities upon their release in 2001. "It is something that she feels quite strongly about, that images of James should not be used and abused in this way as if he is some kind of public property," said Chris Johnson, spokesman for Ms. Fergus. "It is as if it dehumanizes James and it seems like his death enters into some kind of myth or legend." The developers of the game quickly responded to the controversy. "Obviously the game was out almost five years ago and this is the first time we knew anything about it otherwise we would never have put it out," replied a spokesman for Legacy Interactive. "We are sorry and we didn't mean to hurt anybody. We will remove the picture and can only apologise to the family." A community member of the Something Awful forums who claims to work for Legacy Interactive has apparently already completed work on a patch for the game's movie files. "Ironically, that was the second Law and Order game we made, and the first one had the exact same movies with the same picture in the corner but no one seemed to notice," the poster--going by the name Linguica--noted, adding that he had also removed the photo from all other titles in the series.