Running one of the most popular games on Earth can have its downsides. Every minor flaw will get picked to death, people will hassle you endlessly about expansions and sequels, and that time you accidentally violated the actual Geneva Conventions suddenly becomes a matter of public scrutiny.
Apparently, that’s what happened to Among Us back in 2020. In a post to Twitter yesterday evening, the official Among Us account let slip a “fun fact” about the game’s development: “after the game got big in 2020 [Innersloth] had to change the colour of the MedBay cross,” because the game had unintentionally “violated the Geneva Conventions Act by making it red”. Thus the now-familiar blue crosses that adorn the game’s medical bay walls, in complete non-violation of myriad international peace treaties.
The devs aren’t exaggerating, either. It’s all there in black and white in the provisions of the Geneva Conventions: You can’t display “the emblem of a red cross with vertical and horizontal arms of the same length on, and completely surrounded by a white ground” without the express permission of the authorities.
To be fair, they clearly don’t really mind so much when you’re doing it in a tiny Steam game no one’s heard of—like the two years that Among Us was available but not hyper-popular—but it becomes more of an issue when you’re running one of the biggest games on the planet.
Among Us isn’t the only game to run afoul of this law, either. A reply to the original tweet from No More Robots’ Mike Rose says that the publisher has “failed console cert on THREE different games for this exact thing” in the past. It looks like that might be how Among Us got caught out, too: The account replied, “this may in fact be how [Innersloth] discovered this”. Several other games have had to hurriedly change things after launching with the icon, including Doom, Stardew Valley, and Prison Architect. Honestly, I never realised international human rights law was so easy to violate.
