Metal Gear Solid. I was eight but I'd already seen so much worse and much younger like The Exorcist and Robocop, I was quite the jaded eight year old and I found it quite tame asides from the corridor full of dead bodies which freaked me the fuck out. There was no Internet back then so it took me close to three years and a lot of autism to fully piece together and find the info on the context of the themes and the history the game presented before MGS2 came out and the docu channels on TV were all paid and didn't have them, I had to get the context mainly from other media and seperate fact from fiction in ficticious films aswell as finding out about Metal Gear 1 and Snakes revenge without access to the the systems they were on, hoping magazines would do a retrospective and the joy I felt when they did keeps me watching 5 hour long videos on MGS to this day. I played the game over 30 times in those three years and my imagination would run so wild with the lore of this game, I sometimes wish for the day I knew less so Kojima could cause wonder in me like that once again. I'm so glad that my Dad didn't know what he was buying me, thinking video games were for children but I knew very well not to be around when he bought it and the same for films I wanted. It had such a profound effect on my life, I can't imagine who I would be without that game. I may not even be a gamer. Only PBS cosmology and science docs on the BBC and Carl Sagan had a larger effect in the mid 90s.

I have no idea. ESRB didn't exist yet. Might be MK3U? I played games like Splatterhouse in arcades and MK1-2 in arcades and on SNES/Genesis and played Bionic Commando on the NES, where Hitler's head exploded, but I was also watching a lot of gory, R-rated 80s horror films as a kid. I was allowed to rent them with my dad.

There was age ratings though, little stickers they would put on films and games. Here in Ireland there would be a age rating on games as early as Time Crisis released on PS1. 

Not consistently in the USA. NES games and pre-ESRB SNES games didn’t have warning labels (excepting MK2, as mentioned previously.) Bionic Commando didn’t have any warnings, and since it was a cut scene at the end of the game, it got past Nintendo’s censors as well. 

Sega and a consortium of PC game companies did release their own ratings labels in response to increasing threats from Congress, but the ESRB was the industry’s last-ditch attempt to appease the U.S. government. 

Killer Instinct on the SNES I think? 

Not in the US

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?

I was older than 5 when Doom came out, but most people played Doom for free as it was shareware. I was a kid playing Wolfenstein 3D. A lot of arcade games were violent in the 80s and early 90s. As mentioned, Splatterhouse. MK1. Time Killers. Chiller in arcades had gore and nudity. 

Hell, Atari in the early 80s had porn games. Beat 'em and Eatem where the goal was to cum in women's mouths. Porky's is based on the movie. Custer's Revenge, where the goal was to rape a woman. PC had Leisure Suit Larry.

Ninja Gaiden Arcade had a hell of a Game Over screen.

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. 

That's pretty crazy, at least it doesn't show animate the saw slicing in but I have to wonder about Mortal Kombat fatalities. That's wild. 

I was just thinking of Mortal Kombat to Leynos' comment. That's fucking wild. Regardless of being 5, hell being anything less than double digits, That's wild, like seeing some guy pull out another guy spine must have been a shock. I wonder if kids are more fucked up today, the media certainly wants to portray it that way but there's little way to know, they must be with the Internet, they'd have to be. 

The fact that people didn't want the version with no blood says a lot about the time.