Sex and violence in video games is a potent issue and has been for quite some time. Play Value Episode “Controversy” Josh: Any time any kind of new artistic medium emerges there is always controversy, people thought that radios were rotting kid's minds, then it was comic books, then it was TV, then movies. There are people that thought the jitterbug was going to be the downfall of society. Everything brings controversy with it and videogames are certainly no exception. TJ: There has always been controversy in games and it all starts in the 30s and 40s with pinball. The way that you play pinball was there were no pads like you play now, you put a ball in and shook it around until it went in the right pocket and it paid out. So pinball was essentially a game of chance, gambling. Libi: So in order to other words take a hit at the Mafia, pinball became illegal. And then the New York mayor at the time LaGuardia went so far as to take pinball machines down to the river, slash them within ax and then shove them into the water. Jeff: In 1976 New York decriminalized pinball and almost immediately after, literally months later the first controversial video game comes out. Dan: No sooner was pinball legalized then video games took their place, the torch was passed and they aware now public enemy number one. Parents up in arms, legislators angry as hell, why is that? It is a game called Death Race. TJ: And the object of Death Race was you are driving around and running over Gremlins, well running over Gremlins kind of looks like running over people in the 70s because graphics were really bad. Josh: All you can see is a pixelated head, a pixelated body, pixelated legs, and pixelated arms, which do anyone looks like a person. So parents started to object. Libi: The woman who is at the forefront of emerging protest was Ronnie Lamb, a housewife, PTA member, and she led protest marches, went on Phil Donahue, was really active in getting arcades banned from malls. Dan: It wasn't really the videogames themselves that where the problem most of the time. No parents thought that Frogger was going to corrupt their kids it was the environment they were playing these games in. It was dark sweaty rooms full of machines, and kids standing in front of them. The creepy old guy with the crotch mounted coin changer and the leer in his eye that was the real problem. Josh: Kids would skip school to hang out at arcades; parents just viewed the institution of an arcade as a public menace. Get rid of them. Jeff: What is interesting here is that Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari, sees this and that is what inspires him to open Chuck E. Cheese, a place with safe games where people can bring their kids and they will have a good time. Dan: They are well lit, they are well supervised, you can bring the kids there and the parents can be there. In fact Nolan Bushnell made more money with Chuck E. cheese than he ever did from Atari. Jeff: And if death race is the first videogame controversy than the first controversy at home on the consoles is Custer's Revenge. Where General Custer dodge's arrows to go rape an Indian woman, but apparently some people thought that that was not OK. Josh: This game was retarded, and it was a slap in the face against everybody pretty much, from the people to take it in the game, to women, to people playing a game. You now, it was not even classy porn, they deserved a protest and a protest is what they got. Dan: Now after the big videogame crash of 1983 the issue kind of went away, because they were not a lot video games around. Occasionally one would pop up, like there was Commando Libya, where at the end of the level all the bad guys that you beat you lined them up and shot them against the wall. Josh: And then there was NARC which came out in the late eighties, which you were NARCS killing drug dealers, and you're blowing them up and body parts are being strewn all over the screen. Needles are being injected and thrown into your leg, and other words it was awesome. The way that Midway got around the ultra violence in it was positioning it as an anti-drug game. Jeff: And it's really, really very funny to me that they were preaching an anti-drug message with extreme, extreme amounts of violence. Dan: But for the most part things were nice and calm. Nintendo prided itself on being very family friendly and the industry largely policed itself. TJ: Sega then decides to give consumers the things that Nintendo does not, you know a violent, dirty, gritty type games. Then Mortal Kombat comes out. Dan: Incredibly gory, incredibly violent, and of course incredibly successful, now both Sega and Nintendo wanted to take the game and put it on home systems. Josh: Mortal Kombat looked better on the Super Nintendo I would argue, but it did not have blood. It did not have the decapitating moves. The Genesis had the full thing. Jeff: It is all about the blood, that is the trademark and the fact that everyone knows that it is in the Genesis version makes the Genesis version outsell the super Nintendo one 4 to 1. Dan: So it may seem like a win for Sega, but of course it came back and get them on the ass, because whenever you do something that Mom does not like you end up in front of a congressional committee and that is where the videogame industry ended up, and front out of Joe Lieberman and all these other congressmen. Jeff: Society at this point is still kind of wrapping their head and around the idea that it is not just children playing video games. Today it was pretty accepted that games come out that are clearly for 18 and over but it was not always that way. Libi: Congress called Sega to task for their ultra violence version of Mortal Kombat and another game called Night Trap which is almost really a B-movie it has got vampires chasing co-eds in pyjamas around at a slumber party. Jeff: And it is really no worse than you would see on USA up all night, but just the fact that it was on a Genesis and not a VCR made all the difference. Sen. Byron Dorgan: About two months ago I saw the video game Night Trap for the first time; it is a sick disgusting video game in my judgment. Dan: And the ultimate outcome of all of this is that they created the ESRB a ratings board for video games. Kind of like the MPAA for movies, it is voluntary but all of the games have these ratings. Jeff: One of the genres that probably attracted the most controversy was the first person shooter, a lot of people look at them as almost murder simulators and of course it does not help when Columbine happens and it comes out that the kids were playing Doom and into Doom. TJ: And so now there is a link being developed between these school shootings, which now to start to happen more regularly. It seems like more and more school shootings are happening. Jeff: And then of course Doom is followed by games like Duke Nukem, and Quake and all of these games have to try the top each other in violence. TJ: And that is kind of brings us up to today, they has never really been a resolution. Every few years a study is done that say a games causes kids to kill, games do not cause kids to kill. So I think that that is an ongoing battle that will continue for the history of gaming. Jeff: After Columbine the controversies there, but nothing really comes of it ages kind of spirals around. Until, one of the Grand Theft Auto spin-offs, San Andreas, when it turned out that somewhere deep, deep in a game there was a sex scene that was never completed but left on the final disk. Dan: Some hidden footage somewhere in the game with some fully clothed 3-D characters hopping up against each other in a bed. It was not anything worse than you would see on Adult Swim but parents and congressmen and politicians were outraged. Jeff: Hillary Clinton makes a huge deal out of this, she is threatening to shut the game companies down, she is threatening to do things that she does not even have the right to do but she is making a big stink. Dan: How did the videogame industry solve this problem? Well they held a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's re-election campaign and mysteriously no further hearings were ever held. Hmm. TJ: And the one constant and all of this is that controversy in games means sales. Jeff: It is the same with films, and books and with music. It is just the best free publicity you can get. Libi: You know all the concerned parents and the governing boards might want to raise a fuss a little less often if they do not want their kids rushing to stores to buy these games. Jeff: The bottom line is that they can regulate and they can market these things all they want, but it is up to the parents to keep track of what their kids are playing. If parents did their job the government would not always have to step in.
The story of an upstart leather company that took on a corporate titan.. Play Value Episode “Colecovision” Dan: Now a lot of kids growing up had an Atari 2600, they had a Nintendo maybe even had a Sega Genesis, but not everybody had a Colecovision. If you did I salute you, you are a true video game fan. TJ: You did not see too many Colecovision’s, you had one friend who had one, but still everyone knows what a Coleco is. Jeff: Like all the important video game consoles the Colecovision started in Hartford Connecticut with a leather company. TJ: Coleco stands for Connecticut leather company, Co le co that is where the name came from. Jeff: They started out in the leather industry, and in the fifties they started making above ground pools, in the sixties that kind of turns into a business where they’re making foosball tables and tabletop hockey games. Then in the seventies finally they started developing video games. Dan: Beck in 1976 they started the Telstar line, and this is a line of basic boxes that you would hook up to your TV and they each played one game. They had a shooting game and they had a pong knock off but then Atari came out with a system where you could use interchangeable cartridges a brilliant idea. You could play different games on the same box, and that was how the Telstar was buried. Jeff: After Atari comes in and captures the entire home market Coleco said is what is left? They start developing some of the world’s first a handheld video games. The most famous of which was electronic quarterback. Josh: They also maybe solid state little mini arcade games that people loved. TJ: They had Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders. Jeff: Which are great for taking home, and they are full size arcade machines if you have any tiny people around. Josh: But Coleco was waiting trying to make its next move to get back into the home market in a big way. Jeff: What nobody realized it is about Atari’s Technology is that there’s so much competition in the video game place that it was getting a little old. And Coleco comes in with this brand new system. It is five years later technology wise which is enormous amount of time; it is an entire generation of video game consoles. This is the difference between a Super Nintendo and a PlayStation. TJ: Even though the Atari 2600 is five years old at the time it does not matter because Atari has so many games and so much money. Dan: Atari is the 800 pound gorilla of the video game industry and any good arcade game that comes along Atari locks up the rights and home version, so where is Coleco going to find an in? TJ: They scour the arcades and find the cult classics that Atari missed, these great games that Atari just never picked up like Zaxxon, Mr. Do. Josh: The other thing they did it, which is crazy is they created an adapter that you can actually play Atari games on the Coleco vision. Dan: It had never been done before and it had never been done since. If you had tried to pitch an idea like this today your lawyers head would just explode. Josh: The last piece of their planned to launch this in a big way, they needed to have a secret weapon and Coleco’s secret weapon was Donkey Kong. TJ: In 1981 Donkey Kong is the second big as arcade game in the world. Pac Man is number one, and Donkey Kong is made by this real small Japanese company no one had heard of it at the time called Nintendo. Dan: Nintendo wanted to get a home version of donkey Kong into living rooms across America and they said that we are a small guy, lets partner with another small guy like Coleco and maybe we can help each other out and take a little bit of the wind out of Atari sails. Jeff: The two small companies at the dance, they see each other from across the room, they lock eyes and the rest is history. Libe: So in July of 82 Colecovision comes out with Donkey Kong and it happens to be a really great translation of the arcade game. Dan: Now keep in mind that this is only after two months that Pac Man came out for the Atari 2600 and that was a complete debacle, completely terrible. So in one step they are already making the head guy look bad. Jeff: Donkey Kong for all intensive purposes was the Mario of Colecovision, the only problem is that it was about to throw a barrel at them and they did not know it, and they were nowhere near the hammer. Josh: Very close to when their about to launch they got a very not so nice call slash letter from Universal Studios and it was the equivalent of a cease and desist. Jeff: We are on the eve of the launch of the Colecovision, it is about to come out and Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal here is about it and says hey, Donkey Kong, King Kong, guerrilla, that is kind of similar, I could probably make money on this. TJ: He goes after both Nintendo and Coleco and he says look you have 48 hours to provide me with all of the receipts from all of your sales of Donkey Kong related material and you have to destroy all of your inventories and any kind of Donkey Kong related merchandising that you have. If you don’t, we’re going to sue you. Josh: Coleco, they were a company that had been around for a long time but they were not a huge company. They immediately buckled. Jeff: Nintendo, Donkey Kong is this huge hit for them, this huge hit and they’re not willing to settle as easily. Josh: Through a little digging Howard Lincoln of Nintendo of America found that only a few years earlier Universal had brought a lawsuit that actually disproved their claim to the copyright. TJ: In 1975, which is just seven years earlier, Universal Studios does a remake of King Kong, starring Jeff Bridges of the movie Tron fame and Jessica Lang. Josh: To bring that film to market they actually had to prove that the rights to King Kong have lapsed and it had become public domain. TJ: So basically Universal Studio seven years ago is in court proving that King Kong is public domain, and nobody owns the rights to it, now they’re doing a complete 180. Jeff: Universal kind of gets caught in there own lie and they’re forced to pay Nintendo 1.8 million dollars for a frivolous lawsuits, just for wasting that the American legal systems time, Nintendo’s time, your time, you’ve had to hear about the story now. TJ: And all Universal Studios was trying to do was scare these two little companies into giving them free money and it backfired. Jeff: Universal flat out abused the legal system; they flat abused it much like Donkey Kong would abuse Mario. TJ: So thanks to Nintendo, Coleco comes out with a DK cartridge, it ships with the Colecovision and now the Colecovision is on its way. And Donkey Kong was not the only great game that was going to come out on Coleco; there was Montezuma’s Revenge, Miner 2049’er. Jeff: Games like a Gateway to Apshai, the first home RPG. TJ: Rocky, Popeye, Pit Stop, I mean the list goes on and on. Dan: But unfortunately they got into the business at exactly the wrong time. 1982 was cool, 1983 that was when the whole home gaming business fell apart. TJ: And the big video game crash happened and swept Coleco, Atari, and everyone else off of the map. Jeff: It looked like Coleco was going to be the next big thing, just kind of bad timing. TJ: So after the big video game crash of 1983 the public has moved on to personal computers, they do not want anything to do if your games anymore so Coleco responds with two products, one is a huge success and the other is a huge failure. Josh: Trying to compete with the influx of personal computers and this interest with that they came out with the Adam. Jeff: Unfortunately they were really rushing to get it out the door, and about half of the units did not work. TJ: If you have half of your product return as defective then your name is soiled, you’re never going to recover from that, so that is what happened. Jeff: The other product was a huge success, something a little low tec but the Cabbage Patch doll. TJ: The fact that they come up with Cabbage Patch Kids is great, it is a huge success for them. But the problem with having a huge success with a toy is that it is only for one year after that Christmas season people move on. Jeff: You know the next year is replaced by Teddy Ruxpin, in 1986 Teddy Ruxpin is replaced by laser tag, the year after that laser tag is replaced by Nintendo. TJ: So we have come full circle video games at the top, the huge crash, to being on top again, but this time Coleco is nowhere to be found. Jeff: By 1988 Coleco had filed for bankruptcy and so ends the legacy of their great Connecticut leather company. Dan: It was fun while it lasted, sorry you had to go.
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