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?"

Comments

Important thing to note, Nintendo AMERICA

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:Important thing to note, Nintendo AMERICA

[Ravenger]

I worked on SNES games back in the 90's and had to abide by NOA's restrictions. I wish I'd kept the document they gave us, because it was hilarious.

You couldn't have characters drinking alcohol. If a character went into a bar, they weren't allowed to drink alcohol or order alcoholic drinks.

Characters couldn't pray. They had to 'meditate'. Churches weren't allowed, but 'Temples' were.

You couldn't tell a player to 'kill' anything. Assassinate, terminate, destroy, and defeat were all ok, but not 'kill'.

You couldn't show blood splats. One game I worked on had tiny characters that when they fought had little tiny red clouds near them to show them fighting. We had to change it to yellow dust clouds. Of course when Street Fighter came out that had blood splats, but they were allowed to, while we weren't.

Re:Anyone know a good way to defrost a hamster?

[uvsc_wolverine]

Fool! You have to have Bernard get the keys from the inside of the door of the fat guy's room, give the keys to the guy in the ski mask, use the crowbar you get from the guy with the ski mask to get the quarter stuck in the gum, get another quarter from the pay phone, use both quarters in the magic fingers bed to shake the fat guy off of it, get the sweater he was sleeping on, hit the vending machine with the crowbar and take all the quarters, then take the sweater and put it in the dryer using all of the quarters from the vending machine, then have Laverne get the hamster out of the ice machine, microwave him and get the sweater out of the dryer and put it on him so he's not cold!

Wow...I am so sad that I remembered all that...