Miyamoto: Violent games may damage “the potential of what games can do”

[Millennium]

venepe said:
I agree. The industry will be at risk of being stereotyped with violence and aggression. It will just narrow the market.

What's with this "at risk" business? It has already happened.

No, seriously. If I had to put a year on it, I'd say it happened in 1992: the year that Night Trap, Mortal Kombat, Splatterhouse 2, and Wolfenstein 3D were all released. These four games came up again and again in the arguments surrounding the censorship of video games and (eventually) the creation of the ESRB. This one year saw an explosion of this particular sort of game onto the market, and the dire warnings of the industry's detractors frankly came only a few years too soon: not only did these games provide a fix for people too young to handle their content, the controversy made them Edgy And Rebellious, which only drove more immature gamers to the style. That same group has more or less dominated gaming ever since.

The industry is really only now starting to recover from that dark time, and then mostly due to Nintendo's efforts. This isn't to say that Nintendo is the only one making anything but testosterone-soaked killfests, but Nintendo is the one that made it acceptable in the mainstream again. One could draw analogies to Wind Waker: certainly Nintendo wasn't the first or only developer to make games in an art style othe than generic photorealism, but they're the ones who made it acceptable.