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Nintendo's Maniac Mansion Censorship Explored
Thanks to Video-Fenky for a new feature illustrating the Nintendo censorship affecting the NES version of Maniac Mansion. These comments were originally written up in a 1993 issue of Wired, and an unedited prototype NES cart of the classic point n' click adventure has been found to show the changes - though "Nintendo didn't catch the old 'blow up the hamster in the microwave' trick (it was removed in the European version)", changes include editing Nurse Edna's suggestive speeches ("I should have tied you to my bed, cutie!"), and switching graffiti in the bathroom from "For a good time EDNA 3444" to "Call EDNA 3444".
Nintendo (until recently?) has always taken a stand to produce kid friendly games (aka no adult games)..
This kind of censorship is expected from them.
I still think that's why most gamers still go with the PS2 or Xbox..
ChiefArcher
Although I was only an early teen, or pre-teen when Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle came out, I thought the dialogue was hilarious. I'd love to see a third in the series, or a remake of the first two, with updated graphics and voice acting... as long as it kept the point and click interface. Would anybody else like to see a remake of some of the more memorable games like Maniac Mansion?
"It's better to have a gun and not need it than need a gun and not have it." ~ Christian Slater, True Romance
Not surprising.. really shouldn't come as a shock to anybody, since 1993 was when Nintendo was still in a position of power..
That seal of approval actually meant something, but alas, the gamers have grown up..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
that they dump this prototype to a rom file so that everyone can enjoy MM how it was truly meant to be enjoyed on nes. Or you could just play it on scummvm like a normal human.
NJ Local Music Scene
Nintendo thinks its perfectly acceptable for kids to play a game with short, fat Italians run and jump around a hallucinogenic fantasy world eating MAGIC mushrooms to aquire bizzare super powers. But kids calling a toothless old hag for a "good time" is wrong compared to gross rampant drug use in the Mario franchise?
Time to come clean Nintendo or all these kids will send their Betty Ford clinic bills to you!
(This comment isn't intended as a flame, or troll, but a suggestive criticism question aimed at editors)
./ subscriber)
./ games section receives about 30 comments an article (roughly 1/5th to 1/20th of normal articles) so if nobody responds, I understand, but I'd like some feedback from the editors please.
Why is this news now, when the game came out 13 years ago, and the wired article came out 11 years ago? Is there nothing else in the queue worth publishing? (I'm not a
Albeit interesting, it's not "news" but if this is what's getting posted, maybe I should start submitting more articles to generate traffic. The
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/
I always found it odd that the NES port (no pun) for Bards Tale had you ordering Grape Juice at the pub instead of ale or spirits. I really wouldn't mind the kid friendly stuff on the games provided they give the option to play the original version.
Does anyone have any example of CURRENT games that have had the same type of censorship? Now that the demographic of console players has shifted to early 20s, I don't think that it will happen as much. Hell Nintendo never released real scare games, but as of late we have seen the Resident Evil type game rearing its head. Might be a little too late though.
http://www.tomandemily.com
I had a hidden mail order nintendo game that was strip poker. I was only 10 back then and man I was the coolest kid on the block that got invited to all the "all day nintendo parties" which normally consisted of Dragon Warrior, Metroid, Supermario 3, and Strip poker.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
I still have my pre-sensored version of the Maniac Mansion cart. This was one of my all-time favorite games since it allowed you to explore a large area somewhat freely, as opposed to the level hopping like most games of that time. I still load this cart up just to blow up the hampster in the microwave!!!
This game has always had me stumped on one thing though: There is a key in the living room on the first floor that sits on top of the chandeleer: how do you get this key?? I have a hunch that its for the dungeon, which would be great because once you lose one kid to the dungeon, you will always have only two (since one kid has to push the lose brick to get the other out).
I still have the first release of Maniac Mansion on the NES. Complete with exploding hampster.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
For those of you who prefer not to have a maximized browser window and find you can't scroll left on this story's linked site, know that it is a problem with the interaction of the stylesheet setting the width of the content after the middle of the browser window was determined for centering with HTML, which isn't revised. In this particular case, if your window is less than 780 pixels wide, some content will be clipped off the left side of the window and inaccessible (can't scroll there).
I've modified my userContent.css client-side stylesheet to include center { text-align: left ! important } as well as *[align] { text-align: left ! important } (as it also triggered by other tags) until such time as the sites using this style cease to exist (or a version of Mozilla comes out that doesn't suffer from this problem and can either be installed under Redhat 6.2 or my workplace upgrades me to Redhat 9).
I know I'm off-topic, but I'm trying to be informative. Sites using the stylesheet properties width and position need to address everything and not expect HTML-based presentation like <center> to do the right thing anymore in browsers that support CSS.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It works fine in my mozilla install.
Apparently this article is part of the return of tsr, which rocks. tsr did tsr's NES Archive until he put it on hiatus in January 2000. He hasn't touched it since and it looks like this site is like the second coming. Very cool.
Schnapple
Nintendo stopped censoring after the Mortal Kombat 1 debacle. Sega created the Video Game Rating Comission and marked Mortal Kombat as adult, while Nintendo censored it. MK on the SNES sold very poorly compared to the Genesis version.
When MK 2 was ported, Nintendo didn't censor it in the slightest. They let the ESRB ratings (the renamed VRC that would rate all games on all platforms) Ever since then, Nintendo's policy has been to let things through unaltered, and let the ESRB ratings tell the tale.
I'm surprised you're so ignorant of it. Or maybe I'm not, if you think Nintendo only makes "kids" games.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Untrue, this is the main reason that this censorship DOES happen now.
In Brave Fencer Musashi, the Japanese release has a part in which there's someone pounding on the door to the Inn late one night because he wants pork chops. In the Japanese version, he's getting drunk at night, and the implication was that he was an alcoholic ignoring his daughter.
When you get through the dungeon, you find the store owner at the bottom, who apparently "had too much caffeine". He's all redfaced, but apparently, they thought that was good enough.
Another example, although not as well known or contemporary is "Neo Hunter". It was based off of an Orson Scott Card novel, and in the game, all the player has to shoot with are stun bullets.
You have a stun pistol, a stun machine gun, a stun shot gun, and my favorite, the stun rocket launcher. You also have stun grenades. All this was done to try and get a rating below "T", but it didn't. The ESRB still slapped a "T" on it.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
Had long forgot of that little guy. Remember the Tengen baseball games that lacked the official NOA Seal? I even think there was a disclaimer in an issue of Nintendo Power advising gamers to avoid those games!
Sorry, off track again.
i wonder had Jaleco/Lucas ignored the censorship, and decided to forgoe the seal of approval would the maniac manson title have done so well? Probably not, as it wouldn't have had NOA behind it, and if anyone remembers the RBI Baseball (Tengen)games, they were decent, but didn't sell all that well.
Nintendo did invent censorship?
I wasn't aware of a lot of these points. It'd be nice if there was an archive of these changes, somewhere. I did know about the porno mag in FF4, but I figured it was Square's idea to remove the developer's room.
The OOT thing is very interesting. I think I have the revision 1 in cart form (as well an OOT bonus discs), so I'll try comparing those to see.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Your points about alcohol and nudity are valid, but those regarding religious references are questionable, and Ocarina of Time is another matter entirely. Ganondorf's blood was made green for the European release; this particular shift in hue has occurred in countless games for all major platforms for the same reason, and anyone wanting to sell games in Europe has rather little say in the matter. Nintendo removed the Muslim references as the developer of the game; the issue was not what Nintendo the licensor would permit on its console but what Nintendo the developer was willing to release, and it is hardly the first or last developer to remove religious references for a Western release. Square did this back in the 8-bit era and continues to this day.
Another censorship: It's Metal Gear tradition that Snake always has his cigarettes with him at the beginning of each mission. They didn't censor this for the NES games, but in this post-tobacco lawsuit world, the Game Boy Color version of Metal Gear Solid (actually Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, but that's another story,) which I just played a few hours ago, has apparently renamed Snake's cigarettes to the "Fogger," mostly keeping it because it's useful for detecting infrared censors. I'm sure any idiot could figure it out, though, since the "fog" comes from Snake's mouth.
Final Fight was changed so that the women getting beat up were punk style men. The ending in one of the mech games originally had the leader of a Japanese business commit suicide (good in Japan, bad in America). Final Fantasy games were SEVERELY censored as well. Nintendo has been censoring things since day one, and it nearly cost them during the SNES days.
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