China Completely Lifts 14-Year Ban on Game Consoles

The amazing thing about video games is that they allow you to escape your mundane life and spend a bit of time in many different worlds. Maybe you want to spend a bit of time as a plumber who fights turtles to save a princess.

Admit it, this is a crossover we all want to see.

Or maybe you’re a space marine fighting to save humanity from evil aliens or a lone warrior wandering the globe in search of worthy opponents. But, perhaps, what you didn’t know was that until the near future, you could defy a real life police state with video games.

Did you ever play a game too highly rated for you and feel like a rebel when you were a kid? Did you feel like you were getting away with something? Well that’s nothing compared to what it was like to play video games in China until now. Due to concerns about damaging the development of children, it has been illegal to build or import video game consoles in China for the last fifteen years.

‘We’re going to need a bigger sheet.’

This is all set to change, however, as China’s ministry of culture declares that the ban will be universally lifted. This will allow foreign and domestic companies to sell consoles anywhere in China. This isn’t quite a bolt out of the blue however. The ban had been relaxed slightly last year, allowing foreign companies to build and sell consoles in Shanghai’s free trade zone.

Of course, due to certain other factors, you may not get the chance to take on Chinese players in online games just yet, but it’s certainly a blow for certain groups that argue that video games are the route of all evil. After all, if the world’s largest Communist state has decided that video games are okay, you can’t argue that those guys are too soft.