LegitHyperbole said:
So you could have been a wee five year old and buy Doom? Would the sales people ever raise and eye brow or just slap the game through the til...? Even Leaisure suit Larry and Murder Death Kill? |
At five years old, you weren’t likely to be buying video games, and if you were playing them, it was because one of your parents (most likely your father) had them. MDK was released after the ESRB was in place.
No, they didn’t have ratings stickers in the USA until Sega came up with their own ratings in the early 90s in response to increased threats from Congress to regulate the industry and possibly arrest people. Nintendo simply censored anything they thought might be objectionable in the USA (and some things still slipped through, such as the ending cut scene from Bionic Commando). The ESRB largely came into existence because of Mortal Kombat, an arcade game where Sub-Zero ripped people’s spines out, and Congress members from both parties started making not too subtle threats against video game executives. American consumers didn’t care until it became a full blown moral panic.
Nintendo probably welcomed the ESRB because they felt they could release an uncensored version of Mortal Kombat 2 without getting too much heat from Congress. The first game was censored in varying degrees on both SNES and Genesis but blood was completely cut from the SNES version, which cost Nintendo a lot of sales.
Last edited by SanAndreasX - on 14 July 2025
