An interesting read about Nintendo in the NES era from one of the guys who worked on porting Maniac Mansion to the NES.

"Now You're Really Playing with Power:

    The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment
System

The Untold Story

   Douglas Crockford

   I was the on-the-edge new-media/technology guy at the LucasArts
   Entertainment Company, a spin-off of George Lucas's Lucasfilm Ltd.
   in Marin County, California. Most of my work was (if I may say so
   myself) "out there", but sometimes I would take on more mundane
   projects to help out.

   One such project was the Nintendo version of Maniac Mansion. This
   was going to be LucasArt's first Nintendo cartridge. It was an
   important project, but the management at Games was overloaded
   and the project was slipping between the cracks. I volunteered
   to manage its completion.

   The original version of Maniac Mansion was designed by Ron Gilbert
   and Gary Winnick. It is a graphic story game, in which you
   manipulate three teenagers in order to save Sandy the Cheerleader
   from Dr. Fred, whose mind is being controlled by an evil purple
   meteor from Outer Space. I didn't contribute much to the original
   version beyond the package slogan: His ambition was to rule the       world.
..one teenager at a time!

   It is usually necessary to make a game run on several different
   systems in order to have access to a large enough audience to make
   it profitable. The process of moving a game to another system is
   called conversion. It is sort of like shooting a movie twice to
   get a Beta version and a VHS version.

   In the course of converting to Nintendo, we had to redesign all of
   the art in order to conform to Nintendo's screen geometry. We also
   made some changes to adapt the game to a younger audience.

   The bad words we removed, meaning that "The meteor is going to be
   pissed" was changed to "The meteor is going to be mad." Howie Rubin
   of Jaleco (the company that was going to publish the game under
   license) advised us the that the baddest bad word is Kill. The
   central activity in most Nintendo games is killing things. The
   image and the act are good, but the word is bad, even if the word
   does not suggest the image or the act.

   The mansion contains a number of arcade video games. One was called
   KILL THRILL. The name had to be changed. Doug Glen, our Director of
   Marketing, suggested that we change it to MUFF DIVER, which I thought
   was a pretty good idea. Unfortunately, I later became aware of the
   NES Game Standards Policy, which stated in part:

   Nintendo will not approve NES cartridges...with sexually suggestive
   or explicit content.

   Yikes, MUFF DIVER had to be changed again. In order to minimize the
   impact on the artwork, I needed to substitute MUFF with another four
   letter word that was less suggestive that could make sense with
   DIVER.  We settled on the word TUNA.

   The standards go on to prohibit depictions of excessive and
   gratuitous violence, which would seem to ban any game in which
   your character met people, killed them, took their money, and then
   bought more weapons. But in fact most Nintendo games are still
   faithful to that theme, so we were unclear as to how to interpret          N
intendo's policy. In the Super Mario Bros games, which are
   considered clean and wholesome, kids routinely kill creatures, and
   the only motivation is that they are there.

   Clearly, interpreting the standard requires skills beyond mine. There
   was stuff still in the mansion that I thought was suspect, but I
   couldn't tell if it was out of bounds. I put it all in a Things in
   Maniac Mansion list. I gave the list to our friends at Jaleco, and
   they told me not to worry about it.

   The way cartridges got made at that time was you submitted a finished
   game to Nintendo with a letter of credit. If they accepted the game,
   they would tell you how many units they would manufacture for you,
   when, and at what price. We submitted Maniac, hopeful that our labors
   were completed.

   A month later we got a report from Nintendo of America's censors:

   NOA has discovered the following problems with this program version:

   1) There are several places in the screen text that could be felt to
   be offensive to NES players. Please ammend [sic] the following:

        "For a good time EDNA 3444"

   This message is written on the wall in the shower in Dead Cousin Ted's
   bathroom. Obviously, you can't have a good time in a Nintendo
   cartridge. We couldn't erase the message completely because phoning
   Nurse Edna is an important event in the game. We changed it to simply
   "Call Edna 3444".

         "getting your brains [sic] sucked out."

   This is from Dr. Fred's first scene with Sandy. Dr. Fred actually says
   "getting your pretty brains sucked out." They didn't state what their
   objection was. Were they afraid that NES players would be offended by
   threats against an innocent woman, or by the mention of a vital body
   part (brain, in this case) or by the horror of brain damage? No, it
   turned out that the problem was that the language was too graphic. I
   was told that changing sucked out to removed made it ok. In the same
   spirit, we voluntarily removed the Disco Sucks poster from the Green
   Tentacle's bedroom. We also modified a medical poster in Dr. Fred's
   office. The caption on a detail of the head had read "Chewy Caramel
   Center." It now reads "Pretty Brains."

   "Well, Mommy, I'm worried about him. Well, Mommy, I'm worried! He
   hasn't eaten in 5 years. YEAH, SO!!! and he's been bringing those
   bodies, and he carries those bodies to the basement at night." [sic]

   This was from Weird Ed's dialogue with his mother, Nurse Edna, in
   which Ed tries to get his mother to recognize the terrible things that
   have happened to his father over the past 20 years. What was
   Nintendo's problem with the dialogue? Was it the brutal exposition of
   parental neglect in the disintegration of an American family? More
   likely, we thought they had a problem with the dead bodies in the
   basement, which was essential to establishing the Frankenstein movie
   parody flavor of the program.

   In fact, Nintendo's interpretation of the speech was that Dr. Fred was
   a cannibal, that he was eating the bodies. That was never our
   intention, so we changed Ed's speech to "He hasn't slept in 5 years,"
   which helps to explain why Dr. Fred is never seen in his bedroom.

   But even if we had intended that Dr. Fred was a cannibal, what's the
   harm? He would have been one under the influence of the evil purple
   meteor. The game recognizes that it is bad, and your mission is to
   rescue him from this unhappy state. Who would be offended?

   We expected to get nailed on Nurse Edna's character. Most of her
   speeches were sexually suggestive. When she locks kids in her dungeon,
   she will now say one of the following:

   "You'll be safe here until the police come."

   "Just wait until I talk to your mother."

   "I have half a good mind to talk to my husband."

   I wanted her to comment on the Nintendo scene, by saying

   "You deserve to die, but I believe it is wrong to take any life."

   but that might be viewed as a religious belief, and so be held to be
   an anathema to racial, religious or ethnic groups. It is ok to seek
   out creatures and destroy them with fireballs, but it is not
   necessarily permissible to say that it is wrong.

   Nurse Edna's obscene phone call definitely had to go. I considered
   replacing it with "No, I don't have Prince Albert in a can, why do you
   ask?" but that still gives kids an example of abusive and illegal
   telephone behavior.

   So instead, we have Edna confuse the caller with Dead Cousin Ted. Edna
   never knew of or never accepted Ted's death. When the phone rings,
   Edna assumes that it is Ted and starts talking. Her number is
   unlisted. Only Ted had it. A natural mistake. This also partially
   explains why Edna's number is written on the wall in Ted's bathroom.

   2) Also, there are several places where nudity needs to be removed:
   the posters in the gym, and the statue in the hall.

   There were two posters in Dead Cousin Ted's room: A swimsuit calendar,
   and a mummy poster. The mummy is in a playmate pose, completely
   wrapped in bandages, no skin visible. We ended up removing both.

   The statue was a classical reclining nude. I told one of the Nintendo
   minions that it was a Michelangelo (the sculptor, not the turtle).
   There was a glimmer of hope that we could keep it if it was really
   art, so I sent Gary to find a book of Michelangelo's work, in the hope
   that he had made a statue that was similar. In fact he had, a work
   called Dawn, for the Medici Chapel.

   Nintendo's minions said we could keep the statue if we did something
   about the crotch. But if they could see pubic hair where there is
   none, what would they see if we tried to hide it?

   We removed the statue.

   3) There is also a reference at the end of the game to an "NES Scumm
   System" that we're not sure we understand. Please advise as to the
   meaning of this reference.

   In the credits, which are shown after the conclusion of the game,
   there are two occurrences of the word Scumm, which stands for Script
   Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion. Scumm is the story game
   development system which was used to produce Maniac. They understood,
   and asked "What is NES SCUMM?" That is the version of Scumm that we
   did for the Nintendo. "Yeah, but it says NES SCUMM. What will people
   think?"

   I don't know what people will think. And we will never know what
   people will think. I took it out.

   They didn't object to the nasty stuff that happens to the hamster. Ron
   suggested that it was just violence.

   People from Nintendo say with pride that even though they are growing,
   the number of letters they receive from special interest groups is
   declining. They insist that their standards are not intended to make
   their products bland, but that is the inevitable result.

   Part of the formal product submission includes a complete listing of
   all of the game text. They scan that for occurrences of the bad words,
   but they are also looking for religious artifacts.

   Nintendo is a jealous god."

I guess I will just bump this once...

Haven't read it yet, but I loved maniac mansion even if I could never figure out how to beat it.

It is a great game, and the sequal is one of the best point in click adventure games of all time (beaten out by Sam and Max hit the road, of course)

Interesting and not surprised. However, Nintendo did miss a few cases of nudity in some games. I'm glad the ESRB handles this now and just rates the games.