The Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts finds itself in the middle of a racism charge, though the designers (5th Cell) insist they are innocent and that no offense was meant.

The deal: Scribblenauts allows players to input words that spawn objects within the game. With over 30,000 words in its dictionary, players have a lot of options. One of those options is “Sambo”. Typing the word Sambo spawns an object that looks like a watermelon.

Most people under 30 probably have no clue that Sambo is considered a racially insensitive word. 5th Cell insists the word can be defined as a “fig leaf gourd” that just happens to look like a watermelon in the game because of the re-purposing of artwork. Creative Director Jeremiah Slaczka claims he had never even heard the word Sambo used as a racial term, which isn’t that hard to believe, as the word hasn’t been around for a number of years.

So, what is it about the word Sambo that has people upset?

It started in 1899 when a children’s book was published called The Story of Little Black Sambo. There was nothing about the book that was inherently racist, but that didn’t stop people from adopting the word Sambo as a derogatory term. People had problems with some of the illustrations, uncomfortable with how dark Sambo’s skin-tone was. Later editions of the book softened the tone, but the plot never changed because the story was not racist.

None of this controversy prevented a chain of restaurants opening in the 60s and 70s called Sambo’s. It used characters from the book as promotional items and chugged along with nearly 1,200 restaurants until people started complaining once again about the racial insensitivity of the character’s depiction. This controversy mushroomed until Sambo’s was forced to close every restaurant, with the final door closing in 1982.

That was pretty much the end of the Sambo controversy…until now.