One of the biggest releases of the year has been delayed because music lyrics in a background song could have caused offense to Muslim players. Sony is now hastily recalling all copies of LittleBigPlanet that had been sent to retailers and manufacturing new discs of the PlayStation 3 blockbuster without the offending music track.

"During the review process prior to the release of LittleBigPlanet, it has been brought to our attention that one of the background music tracks licensed from a record label for use in the game contains two expressions that can be found in the Qur'an," Sony said in a short statement. "We have taken immediate action to rectify this and we sincerely apologise for any offence that this may have caused."

LittleBigPlanet was set for release in Australia on Thursday. A Sony Computer Entertainment Australia spokesman said the company does not yet have a new release date for the game but is confident the delay will be reasonably short.

A post on the official PlayStation forums from "Yasser" says "we Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Qur'an deeply offending (sic)" and that it was not the first time that games had contained material offensive to Muslims. He said the offending musical track was in the first level of the third world in the game (Swinging Safari) and featured Arabic words from the Qur'an translated as "Every soul shall have the taste of death" and "All that is on earth will perish".

LittleBigPlanet features around 20 dazzling platform-leaping obstacle courses to explore, plus dozens of other fun challenges. But the game's biggest drawcard is that users can make their own creations with the wonderfully easy-to-use tools. The finished results can be posted online for others to enjoy.