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

Re:The only problem.

[king-manic]

Things were a little different back then. Stamping a DVD is much cheaper than burning ROMs. Nintendo doesn't produce the games for you like they used to, so even if they wanted to censor things they would have a harder time today since they aren't the gatekeeper. Nintendo licenses the products that come for the wii. If they don't like your game, you don't get a license. It wasn't because Nintendo stamped the games, it was because Nintendo controlled licensing. They are still the gate keepers because unlicensed products aren't as widely distributed. Normally through some deals with large retail chains. IE. "if you don't sell unlicensed items we'll sell you Wii's 5% cheaper" or "Sorry, I have no shipments for you this week, but I think we might if you stop selling item X". Normally the licensing is for Quality, GUI uniformity guides, and feature utilization. For instance the tacts on wii waggle, achievments for the 360 and the tilt control for the ps3. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are more likely to license your game if you enable those features. All 3 also have rules for GUI too (A is for accept, B is for cancel) ( O is for accept X is for cancel) etc...

But should Nintendo see a point in censoring they might go back.

Re:BERNARD MOTHERF*CKING BERNOULLI

[Spazmania]

What you didn't know is that its based on an MMOG they created in partnership with Quantum Computer Services in the late '80s. Imagine Maniac Mansion with no fixed plot, about 100 times as large and with hundreds of other players in the game.

Quantum canned Habitat after the pilot test in order to recover space on the mainframe for AOL 1.0.