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Censoring Maniac Mansion for the NES
Via Destructoid, an article at the personal site of Douglas Crockford, a gent who worked with LucasArts during the NES days. He takes a look at the silly amount of content censored to get the game Maniac Mansion acceptable for Nintendo and the Nintendo Entertainment System. "'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? ... 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?"
My hamster's frozen.
Maniac Mansion was one of the hands-down best adventure games out of all that LucasArts ever produced.
:-(
Anybody ever see the TV show? I never could, and the internet has very few details on it.
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I read this a year or two ago - it's really funny and nostalgic. OTOH, it shows to what length Nintendo of America would go to back then to project the image of the "Family Computer." Way farther than taking blood sprites out of Mortal Kombat.
This would be the only problem I have with Nintendo. It seemed on the Gamecube that their censorship standards were a little less intrusive. Maybe now that they have the lions share of this generations console market they feel they can reinject their censorship standards.
Eternal Darkness was one of the best games ever on the GC. I can't imagine it would pass the Nintendo censors on the Wii.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Of a game ahead of it's time. Now we're accepting of sleeping with hookers, running them over, and taking our money back in games. But in the early days of Nintendo they seem to of had pretty tight Standards & Practices to get a cartridge licensed.
But times have changed and now you can strangle people with a choking acting thanks to them!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Well in that day and age video games were a new and much smaller market. The NES came out and saved us from the video game crash. As a new product in a market that had just crashed, they had a lot more to lose. Video games were getting enough flak from politicians as it was, they didn't even want to risk something like cannibalism being inferred. (This predates the ESRB and whatnot) Nowadays the market is much more mature and more graphic things are being tolerated.
This isn't Nintendo Japan, this is Nintendo United States of America. The article briefly mentions it, Nintendo of America NOA.
This is an important difference, this story is nothing new, and if you are willing too google a bit you can easily find other examples of NOA censoring games. INCLUDING N games, Nintendo of America EVEN censored Nintendo games from japan. http://www.filibustercartoons.com/Nintendo.php (google NOA censoring) for instance shows several games in their original japanese release and the censored US release.
It is a US thing. Although the rest of the world seems eager to catch up. Remember kids, nudity is bad, violence against those who are different is good, as long as you don't say it out loud.
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I remember reading an article years ago on this very subject. I'm at work, so I can't do the deep research, but I do recall a lot of the content being discussed. Especially the NES SCUMM part, based on LucasArt's SCUMM interpreter.
Any chance this is a ancient dupe? Because I *KNOW* I've seen this being discussed by one of the porters of MM to the NES a long time ago.
It's retrogaming, dude. Of course it's a dupe!
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
So they chose to imply he was sleeping with the bodies? Sickos.
A cannibal passed his brother in the woods.
Never played MM, so I don't know about the context, but the uncensored dialog seem to be more blunt and to the point while the censored stuff leaves more room for the imagination.
Nintendo has gone to absurd lengths to clean up their games, but honestly I think they're free to do as they please. Nintendo is a private company and if they decide they don't want offensive content available on their console its their prerogative. If, as a consumer, I have a problem with that practice, I'll buy a system from a company that doesn't put such restrictions on games. It's not like Nintendo was engaging in thought control or propaganda.
What I do have a problem with, however, is when the government starts deciding what should be censored. It's like the Fairness Doctrine. A lot of people are pushing it in an attempt to control conservative talk radio. That's all well and good, but the irony is that the doctrine came about originally during the anti-communist movement and then actually used against liberal talk shows. So this cuts both ways. You can't say you're for free speech provided it only suits your own opinions and desires. The last thing we need is more government control.
I have the right to dictate what I'm exposed to in my own house in the same way Nintendo can dictate the content for their consoles. Even if I agree that the extent to which Nintendo of America went to clean up their games was absolutely ridiculous. Although, I can't really say it business.
In the NES era and the first half of the Super NES era, Nintendo did not allow content on its consoles that would have been rated M had the ESRB existed. It had to be T or cleaner, or go release it for the C64 instead. Look through the U.S. Virtual Console list: all NES games are E, and all Super NES games are E, E10+, or T.
Mortal Kombat's main competitor at the time was Street Fighter II Turbo, rated T. I'll guess that the original Mortal Kombat for Super NES was T material, given that the Sega Genesis version of MK was rated "MA-13" after having similar censorship applied. MK for Genesis had a blood code ABACABB, but unlike ESRB, Sega's VRC didn't care about hidden content,[1] and this blood code was a system seller for the Genesis hardware. Nintendo learned its lesson and allowed MKII to come with an ages 17+ sticker. Subsequent MK games would carry ESRB ratings.
[1] The nearly identical Sega CD version of Mortal Kombat shipped with blood turned on by default and was rated MA-17.
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