The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World

by Steven Kent

  I guess it was June 1993 that Nintendo of America was confronted with Mortal Kombat as a home video game that Acclaim was doing. We had game standards that we were enforcing all along. We made a list of what you can and can’t do: “No excessive blood and violence and what not.” “No sex.” Applying those standards to Mortal Kombat, we told Acclaim [designers] that they would have to tone down their version of Mortal Kombat, which, I believe, was going to come out in September of 1993.

  We spent a whole summer screwing around, trying to decide how to handle that issue. Ultimately, we decided that the death moves or finishing moves would have to come out.

  Acclaim kept coming back and saying, “Look, we’re going to make the Sega version, and it’s going be right in line with the coin-op game. Having a toned-down version for Nintendo … Do you guys really want us to do that? Does that really make sense?”

  —Howard Lincoln, former executive vice president, Nintendo of America

  The home version of Mortal Kombat was released in September 1993, and the sales went through the roof. Over the life of the product, Acclaim sold approximately 6.5 million Mortal Kombat cartridges. The Genesis version, which included the original arcade fatality moves, outsold the edited-down Super NES version by nearly three-to-one, propelling Genesis hardware sales to new levels. Not only did the decision to remove the violence hurt sales, it also offended many Super NES owners. According to Howard Lincoln, Nintendo received thousands of angry letters, including a few letters from parents, warning Nintendo not to censor their children’s games.

  Nintendo made a terrible blunder from a marketing standpoint in putting out a sanitized version of Mortal Kombat. Sega kicked their butt on that; probably sold 4 times as many units of MK1 bloody than Nintendo did MK1 sanitized.

  —Tom Zito, founder, Digital Pictures

  Judgment Day

  I remember saying to Fischbach and to Rob Holmes [also of Acclaim], “I can guarantee you with Night Trap and now Mortal Kombat, we’re all going to end up in front of Congress.”

  —Howard Lincoln

  I think that all of this stuff that happened with the Senate was really orchestrated by Nintendo.

  —Tom Zito

  A great deal of debate surrounds the events that led up to the 1993 joint hearings that investigated the marketing of video game violence to minors. People at Sega and Digital Pictures claimed that Nintendo encouraged the hearings to stop Sega’s runaway sales. Some people claim that Nintendo director of communications Perrin Kaplan initiated the debates over game violence when she delivered a speech to National Organization of Women in the fall of 1993. Others claim that Nintendo representatives went to Washington, D.C., and showed several people in Congress tapes of violent games, in the hope of stirring up trouble for Sega.

  I think Nintendo had taken such a trouncing that they decided to sort of go for broke and attack Sega. And they made these tapes up that showed Night Trap and showed Mortal Kombat on Genesis versus Nintendo. They hired a lobbying firm, and the lobbying firm basically started going around banging on doors to see if they could find a congressman who would be interested in taking this up as a cause. And I think that Nintendo was hoping that the public would be so outraged at what Sega was doing versus what Nintendo was doing that there would be pickets in front of every Toys “R” Us store, saying, “Don’t buy Sega products.”

  —Tom Zito

  The official account of the events that led up to the hearings is that U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) became concerned about video game violence when Bill Andresen, his chief of staff, told him about a hot new game named Mortal Kombat. Andresen’s nine-year-old son wanted a copy of the game, but Andresen, having heard that it was “incredibly violent,” did not want to purchase it for him. Out of curiosity, Lieberman suggested that they get a copy and see what it was about.

  I was startled. It was very violent and, as you know, rewarded violence. And at the end, if you really did well, you’d get to decide whether to decapitate … how to kill the other guy, how to pull his head off. And there was all sorts of blood flying around.

  Then we started to look into it, and I forget how I heard about Night Trap. And I looked at that game, too, and there was a classic. It ends with this attack scene on this woman in lingerie, in her bathroom. I know that the creator of the game said it was all meant to be a satire of Dracula; but nonetheless, I thought it sent out the wrong message.

  —Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, United States Senate

  Once he saw Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, Senator Lieberman became concerned about the peddling of what he considered the equivalent of R-rated materials to children. He did some reading and found surveys that showed pre-Genesis demographics, with the average player being a seven- to twelve-year-old male. It should be noted that the 16-bit generation was only a few years old, and Sega was only beginning to gather data that showed the shift Genesis had brought to the market. It should also be noted that although only 10 percent of the games on the home market were violent, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat were huge sellers and fighting games seemed to dominate the market.

  Having come to the conclusion that video game publishers were marketing violence to children, Senator Lieberman decided to see what his constituents thought. He asked parents in his home state of Connecticut about the games. Their answers gave him cause for further concern.

  I started to talk to people in Connecticut about it. Part of what I was hearing back from parents was that they didn’t know what was in the game. Either there was a generational gap, which meant that they really didn’t know how to use the machines, or they just didn’t take the time. In a lot of these games, as you probably know, you have to spend a little time playing until you get to the so-called good parts.

  —Senator Joseph Lieberman

  As to allegations that Howard Lincoln approached him, Senator Lieberman always insisted that Nintendo did not contact him to initiate the inquiry into the video gaming world. But he also remembers meeting with Howard Lincoln once the plans for the hearing were in place.

  He certainly didn’t initiate the process; in other words, we went to him. We went to the industry. I had not heard about Howard Lincoln before we planned the whole thing. In fact, to be very honest about it, and there’s nothing wrong with it, once the hearings were announced, I saw Slade Gorton [U.S. senator from Washington] on the floor of the Senate one day on a vote and he said, “I just got a call from the folks from Nintendo, which is real important in Seattle.”

  I later learned that they had played this enormous and incredibly sort of civic role in helping Seattle to keep the baseball team there. So anyway, Slade was all tied in with them and he said, “There’s a guy named Howard Lincoln who you’ve called to testify. Do you mind speaking to him or having your staff speak to him?”

  —Senator Joseph Lieberman

  As Senator Lieberman proceeded to arrange a hearing on the marketing of video games, Nintendo, Sega, and other companies found themselves in an untenable situation. They did not have their own lobbying organization. Many belonged to the Software Publishers Association, the same trade organization that represented Microsoft and WordPerfect. Their relationship with SPA, however, was shaky. Interactive entertainment companies, especially video game manufacturers such as Sega, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts, had long felt like the black sheep of the SPA community. The bulk of SPA’s membership was made up of “serious” software companies that did not consider video game manufacturers legitimate members of the computer industry, and the top executives at the game companies did not expect to receive sufficient support during the hearings.

  Senator Herb Kohl (Democrat of Wisconsin), chairman of the Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, and Senator Lieberman, chairman of the Subcommittee on Regulation and Government Information, presided over the hearings that officially began on December 9, 1993. The proceedings started off on a strange note. One week before the hearings, Bob Keeshan, a.k.a. Captain Kan
garoo, held a press conference in which he stated that “It would be hoped that software manufacturers would understand their role in a nurturing society and exercise that accompanying responsibility to commercial-free speech.”2 Keeshan did not participate in the hearings but submitted a prepared statement that was aimed at both the legislators on the panel and parents, reminding them of the responsibility to nurture their children.

  Then, a few hours before the hearings began, representatives of several large game manufacturers sought to partially defuse the bad publicity by announcing that the industry had decided to endorse a rating system. The announcement was well timed, and several senators referred to it throughout the meetings.

  Most of the hearing was taken up by the testimonies of expert witnesses from two panels: one consisting of experts on education and child psychology and the other made up of industry executives. The expert panel consisted of Parker Page, president of the Children’s Television Resource; Dr. Eugene Provenzo, Jr., of the University of Miami; Robert Chase, vice president of the National Education Association; and Marilyn Droz, vice president of the National Coalition on Television Violence.

  Page led the panel testimonies, citing the limited research that existed in the early 1990s into the effects of violent games on the children who played them. He finished with three recommendations for the industry: (1) that the federal government fund independent research projects into the effects of violent games and that the results of the research, along with a game-rating strategy, be made available to parents; (2) that future advertising should reinforce, not undermine, game ratings; and (3) that a voluntary industry-wide cap be placed on how much violence is allowed in games.3

  From the start, an issue that came to the forefront of the hearings was concern about realistic-looking characters in games. Street Fighter II and even Eternal Champions, an especially violent fighting game for Genesis, were seldom if ever mentioned in the hearings. Neither were Doom or Wolfenstein 3D. The emphasis throughout the hearings was placed on games with digitized human images, that is, Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, and, toward the end of the hearings, Lethal Enforcer. Even the launch of an arcade game from Strata titled Time Killers, in which players hacked off each other’s limbs with swords, saws, and axes, went unnoticed.

  The next panel member, Dr. Eugene Provenzo, Jr., was well known to video makers, having published a book called Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo, which took a critical look at the impact that video games had on children. “Video games are overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist,” he testified.4

  Now, if the video game industry is going to provide the foundation for the development of interactive television, then concerned citizens, parents, educators, and legislators have cause for considerable concern and alarm. During the past decade, the video game industry has developed games whose social content has been overwhelmingly violent, sexist, and racist—issues that I have addressed extensively in my research.

  For example, in Video Kids, I explored the 47 most popular video games in America. What I found out was that violence was the main theme. Of the 47 most popular games—this is based on Nintendo Power polls, industry polls—40 had violence as their main theme. Of these 47 games, 13 included scenarios in which women were kidnapped and had to be rescued; i.e., the idea of women as victims. This represents a total of 30 percent of the games, a number which is even more revealing when we take into account that 11 of the 47 games were based on sports themes such as car racing and basketball.5*

  —Eugene Provenzo, professor of social and cultural foundations of education, University of Miami

  The most telling testimony came from Robert Chase of the National Education Association. Chase warned about the instinct to censor materials and cautioned against it, while at the same time decrying the level of violence in some games. Throughout his speech, Chase stood firmly behind the idea of a rating system that would provide parents with “appropriate tools for making reasonable judgments.” Then he made a statement that would later be echoed by much harsher and angrier critics.

  Electronic games, because they are active rather than passive, can do more than desensitize impressionable children to violence. They actually encourage violence as the resolution of first resort by rewarding participants for killing one’s opponents in the most grisly ways imaginable.6

  —Robert Chase, vice president, National Education Association

  The last member of the panel was Marilyn Droz, whose testimony sounded more like an emotional plea than anything else. In the course of her testimony, Droz stated that “Girls are very offended by the lack of games for them to play” and that “playing video games has become a macho boy thing.”

  The video industry has done the same thing that the movie industry has done. They have confused children’s desire for action with violence. My 23 years of working with children directly has proven to me that children want action, they want excitement. They do not need to see the insides of people splattered against the wall to understand. You know, they need action, but they do not need to find murder as a form of entertainment.7

  —Marilyn Droz, vice president, National Coalition on Television Violence

  Once Droz finished her testimony, Senator Kohl asked the members of the expert panel what they would say to the industry panel if they had the chance. Page said that he would ask about marketing techniques and encourage game makers to focus on action rather than violence. Provenzo said that “by manufacturing games such as Night Trap,” the game companies were “endorsing violence.”8 He went on to say that there was an obligation to make good games and to stop confusing violence for entertainment. As a closing remark, Provenzo called for guidelines for parents—the rating system that Senator Lieberman had advocated from the start.

  Given his chance to speak, Robert Chase said that he would leave them with a message of responsibility. Finally, Droz called for a ratings panel that included people from outside the industry. “I feel to allow them to police themselves when they have already demonstrated that they are out of control,” she said, “is like leaving a classroom in charge of the troublemaker.”9

  Senator Lieberman asked Eugene Provenzo for examples of the video game racism he cited in his testimony and in his book.

  In interviews with children, what I found was that they talked about the ninjas as being bad. Then you asked them about who ninjas were, and they were sort of like the Japs and the Chinese. It turns out that they perceive Asians, any Asians, as being extremely violent, as being dangerous, as being evil. It is operating at a very basic level and at times simplistic.

  It carries over into other areas as well. There are depictions, I believe, although it is hard to prove, but my perception of homophobia operating in terms of how certain types of women are portrayed.10

  —Eugene Provenzo

  Throughout the question-and-answer period, the one game mentioned most was Night Trap. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota started to comment that the committee had the testimony of Tom Zito, “who is not with us,” when Zito interrupted him from the gallery, yelling, “I’m here, sir. I called, but there was no time to give a statement.”11

  Reading the transcripts of the 1993 hearings, it is hard to believe that anybody had ever actually played Night Trap. Few people bothered to acknowledge that the goal of Night Trap was not to kill women but to save them from vampires. Players did not even kill the vampires—they simply trapped them in Rube Goldberg–like booby traps. Nearly everyone who referred to Night Trap mentioned a scene in which a girl in a rather modest teddy is caught by the vampires and killed. The scene was meant to show players that they had lost and allowed too many vampires into the house. When this was pointed out to Marilyn Droz, she responded:

  Oh, it makes me feel a lot better that if you are a loser, you are dead? No, it doesn’t. We are dealing with self-esteem here. There are many magazines out there on the market like the several I brought in here today. These magazines are filled with game tips on how to play the ga
me. In no time at all, children become winners and kill, and their kill ratio goes up. It tells them the secret codes and exactly what to do to become successful in murder.

  My statement to people who feel that there is some value to these games is that if the Pentagon was to ever have suggested years ago that we put video games that teach children how to aim guns and train them at the age of eight to be soldiers, and ever invented a game to put in homes of young boys to train them to be in the military, I can’t begin to tell you … you know what kind uproar there would be in this country if our government was to start training early killers.12

  After interviewing the panel of experts, the senators turned their attention to a panel of industry representatives that included Howard Lincoln, executive vice president of Nintendo of America; Bill White, Jr., vice president of Sega of America; Ilene Rosenthal of the Software Publishers Association; Dawn Wiener, president of the Video Software Dealers Association; and Craig Johnson of the Amusement and Music Operators Association. The battle that was about to transpire was, if nothing else, bizarre.

  Howard Lincoln led off by stating that Nintendo was “just as concerned about the issue of violence, whether in the movies, television, or video games, as anyone in the room.”13 Having made the decision to edit the violence out of the Super NES version of Mortal Kombat, Lincoln entered the proceedings with an air of innocence. Senator Lieberman even offered Lincoln an air of courtesy that was not extended to the people from Sega.