My boyfriend’s latest project has been setting up a RetroPie, an emulation station you can make with a Raspberry Pi. One of the first games we tried playing on it was Mortal Kombat 3. I was somewhat familiar with the game having played it on a MegaJoy II controller (a Famicom clone) as a kid, but understandably I don’t have very clear memories of it as it was just one game among others and certainly not my favourite one. When you start the game, a disclaimer pops up on the screen warning the player about the amount of violence in the game. Mortal Kombat 3 was released in 1992 so the graphics don’t really allow for a very realistic portrayal of violence, and from the perspective of a modern-day player I found the disclaimer quite amusing at first. However it did pique my curiosity and I decided to look into it a bit more. This led me on a discovery of the first controversial video games and how they caused moral panic back in the day when they were released.
 |
| Death Race |
It could be said the first video game to cause such controversy was Death Race, released by Exidy in 1976. It was an arcade game in black and white with a bird’s eye perspective. The player controlled a car and the objective was to drive over ”gremlins”, small stick figures that appeared on the screen. When driven over they would let out a scream and turn into a cross symbol the player had to avoid for the rest of the game. It was claimed to promote excessive violence.
The working name for the game was ”Pedestrian”, that suggested the gremlins were actually originally visioned to be humans. Death Race was also the first arcade game to feature a human-shaped target. Just a year before the game's release the cult movie Death Race 2000 had come out, and the similarity in the name and the content didn’t go unnoticed. The film is about a dystopian future and a cross-country road race where contestants get points for running down and killing pedestrians.
 |
| Mortal Kombat |
The first game in the Mortal Kombat series was released in the arcades in 1992 and it was an instant success. Violence was used as a selling point and it was especially evident in the use of "fatalities", brutally violent moves the player could use to finish off their opponent but that did nothing for the actual gameplay. In 1993 the game was released for home consoles and worried parents called for a censored version. The console version that was released on Sega Genesis was indeed censored, but you could easily access the uncensored content by typing in the code "ABACABB". On Super Nintendo only a censored version was released, with the blood recoloured gray and some of the most graphic fatalities removed. On Nintendo the game had better music, bigger sprites and more colours, but the Sega port sold way more.
 |
| Doom |
Another controversial game I remember from my childhood is Doom. I used to watch my dad playing it on our PC. This was a time long before we had internet and the only thing I personally did as a kid on that computer was playing with MS Paint. Oh, the memories. While watching my dad play Doom I remember the thrill of waiting for the monsters to appear, but I guess I didn't really pay attention to the violence since I have no memories of it whatsoever.
Doom was released in 1993 by id Software, and even if it wasn't the first first-person shooter it did set the standard for the genre for years to come. The game ran on DOS, it consisted of three episodes and was distributed as shareware. Due to the game's popularity Microsoft also commissioned a port for Windows 95. Doom sold approximately 2-3 million copies in six years and was played by 10 million people within 24 months of its launch.
Doom shocked parents with its blood, violence and creepy themes. After all the whole game is set on one of the moons of Mars where the player has to fight against monsters straight from Hell with weapons such as guns and chainsaws. The first-person perspective makes the player a very clear part of all the violence that was going on. Again, it might not seem like much to us now, but as the game was on of the firsts of its kind the impact was understandably big. And it certainly didn't help Doom's case when it was found out that the killers of one of that time's worst high school shootings were avid players of Doom.
Development-wise Doom was revolutionary with its meticulously designed levels, multi-player option and a free set of modding tools that was provided for the players to modify and create their own levels in the game. It could be argued the controversy made Doom all the more popular, as any kind of hype surrounding a game.
The society has come a long way from the early times of video games. For example nowadays we might be talking more about game addiction or minority representation in games rather than violence. But surely as long as there'll be games there'll be controversy around some of them.
Sources / further reading:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2011/05/05/the-history-of-mortal-kombat
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/06/29/violent.video.games/index.html
https://www.museumofplay.org/blog/chegheads/2012/05/death-race-and-video-game-violence
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27620071
https://www.ibtimes.com/doom-turns-20-we-take-look-games-history-1505336
https://www.nbcnews.com/technolog/knee-deep-history-20-years-doom-2D11722313
It's interesting to think about how "numb" we've become to violence in video games (and movies etc) since even the goriest games don't have much of an impact these days. If I see someone IRL bleeding more than a little, I lose feeling in my legs. Maybe (& probably) one day video games become so realistic that they can shock us again like that.
ReplyDeleteI think you have a fair point there! It seems most of us are not so easily shocked by things like that anymore. Let's see what happens in a few years when VR games develop a bit further...
Delete