An accidental glitch in EA Sports UFC 2 prompted the lightweight fighter Khabib Nurmagomedov, who is Muslim, to speak out against his playable character's Christian victory celebration in the game.
Nurmagomedov, one of the UFC's only outspoken members of the Muslim faith, took his frustrations to Twitter on March 19 after discovering his UFC 2 counterpart's victory animation in the game involves him spreading out his arms so that his body forms the shape of a cross. For a guy who abstains from fighting during the month of Ramadan, this seems pretty out of character.
I'm a MUSLIM and not Baptized. Please @EASPORTSUFC edit my after fight celebration. I have a lot of Muslim fans and you have to respect it.
— khabib nurmagomedov (@TeamKhabib) March 19, 2016
EA was swift in their response to the fighter, sending him a DM on social media that Nurmagomedov posted to his Instagram account. Along with a screenshot of the post, the fighter made his own personal statement alongside it:
"I'm Muslim, Alhamdulilah. I have nothing against Christians. Every man in this life has his own way, and my way is Islam. Developers of the game made mistake. Let's be honest, every human being made mistakes, and I'm not holding a grudge. They apologized and promised to fix it. Hopefully, next time they wouldn't make mistakes like this, and take account everybody's religion."
A photo posted by Khabib Nurmagomedov (@khabib_nurmagomedov) on Mar 22, 2016 at 1:38am PDT
As Kotaku pointed out, generally the "celebrations" assigned to players in UFC 2 and other games like it are canned, meaning it can be assumed that Nurmagomedov's character's cross action was most likely an unlucky oversight, and in no way planned. Hopefully, the kerfuffle will induce EA to fix the error as quickly as possible — and teach it to be a bit more careful with the canned animations in the future.
Source: Twitter
