Cathedral row over video war game
The Church of England is considering legal action against entertainment firm Sony for featuring Manchester Cathedral in a violent PlayStation video game. — The Church says Sony did not obtain permission to use the interior in the war game Resistance: Fall of Man.
Context & Ripple Effects
This dispute lands on Sony's game division at a bad moment: the unit has confirmed US job cuts, is widely reported to be losing ground to Nintendo, and the company has floated a possible PS3 price cut while cutting Blu-ray player prices earlier in June 2007. A public fight with the Church of England over one of its flagship PS3 titles is the last kind of headline it needs.
The story also extends an arc CNET mapped in early 2006, when games were celebrated for sticking it to 'The Man' — titles deliberately courting institutional outrage. Here the provocation runs into hard limits: the BBC reports Sony used Manchester Cathedral's interior in Resistance: Fall of Man without asking, and the Church of England says it is weighing legal action. Whether sacred and civic buildings count as free material for photorealistic engines is now a live question rather than a subculture joke.
First-order effects
- Sony confronts a threatened lawsuit from the Church of England and a demand to remove or license the cathedral imagery in Resistance: Fall of Man, a marquee PS3 launch title, while its game unit is already cutting costs.
- Manchester Cathedral converts an unpermitted digital cameo into national visibility and immediate leverage over how Sony's flagship shooter depicts its building.
Second-order effects
- Publishers across the industry now face pressure to add real-world location clearance — and potentially fees — to production pipelines, since the Church's claim sets a precedent any cathedral, church, or heritage owner can invoke against unlicensed likenesses.
- Sony must choose between an accommodation with the Church and defending the title legally, a decision made costlier by the division's competitive weakness against Nintendo and the PS3's price sensitivity.
Third-order effects
- If landmark owners consistently assert control over digital recreations, architectural likeness becomes licensable intellectual property, pushing the industry toward standard clearance regimes for recognizable buildings — or toward regulation if voluntary licensing fails to emerge.
- Institutions that once had no seat at the entertainment table gain a durable bargaining role, shifting part of game-world design from artistic freedom toward negotiated permission for anything modeled on real places.
The trend: As game engines render real places with photorealistic fidelity, owners of cathedrals, churches, and civic landmarks are moving from incidental background subjects to rights-holders demanding permission and payment.