Controversial games of the past.
Controversial games of the past.
I'm just sitting here thinking about all the hoopla around palworld right now and I was wondering what other titles out there have been in the controversy filled category in the past few years/decade? I can think of a few, but my game interests are kinda narrow.
What are some of your picks?
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Showing my age here, but the OGs of Doom, Mortal Kombat and GTA turned all the millennial gamers into murderous sociopaths who can't tell the difference between video games and reality. That's after Dungeons & Dragons turned us into murderous sociopaths who can't tell the difference between board games and reality. If I recall correctly, the hoopla around all of that made national news in the States.
There used to be an institution in Germany, abbreviated BPJM (I will spare you the full German name) that checked if games are in need of being restricted due to excessive violence. They curated a public list of games that were only acessible for age 18+ to purchase. You can imagine what this list did for young teenage gamers, it was the forbidden fruit, the Streisand-effect before the Streisand. I played those games before I was 18 and that rating had a bit to do with that. It was colloquially called the Index and so any game that would make it to the Index would be highly sought after by gamer teens.
In other news this institution is the reason why there were some specific changes in a few games for the German market. From what I remember, Command and Conquer ( yes the RTS, not just FPS games went on there) had to change the color of blood for the human soldiers which became robots/cyborgs whatever in the German version.
Don't forget Soldier of Fortune 2 where they replaced all humans with robots and invented a whole new backstory.
Humans created robots, robots staged an uprising, killed all humans. Robots took over the lifes of humans because that was all they knew. That's why there were robot druglords, robot hobos, robot police men, robot scientists, and so on.
This is not a joke.
No, no, no, Dungeons & Dragons turned us into devil worshipping heathens. The murderers all came from videogames.
I thought rock 'n' roll did both a long time ago. Who would Charles Manson have become without the Beatles' White Album and Helter Skelter?
Right you are. I have fallen to the sway of various evils so many times that I get them mixed up.
I'm old enough to remember the OG Mortal Kombat controversy. If I recall, the Sega and SNES versions were different. I believe the SNES version had no blood and the Sega one had blood.
IIRC the Sega version had the blood hidden behind a code.
It's crazy the controversy that game caused, considering how tame it is compared to what has come out since. But the first MK opened the floodgates to graphic violence in games.
On the menu for the Genesis version Down, Up, Left, Left, A, Right, Down. Opened up the cheat menu.
Burned in to my head as a Sega kid growing up.
Oddly enough, doom and Wolfenstein was never controversial in my circles, but we weren't allowed to play the terminator game. It was very willy nilly. I think quake was a bit of a nono as well, but counterstrike was fine.