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.
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GameDaily orders up a pizza and checks out the new TMNT game on the Xbox 360. Will this game make gamers come out of their shells? Want to see more TMNT content? Checkout http://www.gamedaily.com/tmnt/xbox-360/game-main/5770/
Order of Ecclesia mixes up the action with a female protagonist and a new glyph-based weapon system, but is it a direct descendent of the bloodline?
The history of the bitter feud between Atari and Nintendo. Play Value Episode “Atari vs. Nintendo” Dan: Nintendo and Atari, you would think these two video game pioneers would be the best of friends. But you really should not invite them to the same dinner party. Jeff: Atari was synonymous with video games for a long time, the way that Nintendo is now, and uh they fell off there throne. They made some miscalculations, they made some bad decisions and they weren’t the number one guy anymore Josh: But Nintendo took on Atari’s role and Nintendo’s success just like fueled the fires again, and gave Atari this last glimmer of hope that they could be back on top of the industry. Libi: Atari released the 7800, in an attempt to compete with Nintendo. And when that didn’t work out, Atari decided to drop the whole console thing, and said hey; alright we are just going to make games for Nintendo instead. Jeff: One of the reasons Atari fell from grace in the first place is just so many games were coming out it was impossible to keep track of what were the good ones and what were the ad ones. And the bad ones were so overwhelming that people just started to think that’s what videogames are, they are garbage. Libi: Nintendo wanted to reassure its customers that they were going to get good games from them. So what they did was decided to put the Nintendo seal of quality on their games. And then limited other companies and told them hey you can only make five games a year for our console. TJ: So you have to pick the five best games, because we are not going to flood our console with crappy games. We saw what it did to Atari, we have seen the past and we don’t want that. We want to have some kind of quality control. Jeff: So Nintendo says no more than five games a year, and in order to ensure that happens they put a security system in Nintendo called the 10 NES code. And what it is, is kind of a lock and key system. Where there is a special chip in the Nintendo games that matches a special chip inside the Nintendo. And if both aren’t present a game doesn’t start. Josh: When a cartridge was put into the console they communicated, and it was like this is a real game, this isn’t a real game. If it was a real game you could play it, if it wasn’t a real game, meaning authored by Nintendo, it wouldn’t play. Libi: So by limiting companies to only creating five games a year for their system, they really did ensure that they got the best games from those companies. Jeff: The companies didn’t like being limited to five games a year. But because they were, you see some of the games that come out here are some of the best games ever. Capcom is releasing Mega Man, Bionic Commando, Ghost and Goblins. Konami is putting out stuff like Contra, stuff like Castlevania, Metal Gear, and Gradius. There are just so many great games that even today they still make sequels to. Because they were so good that even twenty years later people still want Castlevania's because of those first few. TJ: Ok when Atari gets this news that Nintendo’s only going to allow them five games Atari is like wow, wow, wait a minute. We invented video games, w invented the home console. You’re not going to limit us to five. Dan: Nintendo says listen, you guys were first, we respect that but you got to play by the same rules as everybody else. Atari was not happy with this at all. TJ: It’s all on ego. Atari couldn’t stop third party providers from making crapware for their system. So when Nintendo tries to do it they are like wow, we couldn’t do it, what makes you think you can do it. Oh you guys add a secret code, damnit why didn’t we come up with secret code? Jeff: Atari wants special rules they want to put out more games, Nintendo says no. This goes back and forth for months, finally Atari says fine. So Atari through there subdivision Tengen, puts out three games, RBI baseball, Gauntlet, and Pac Man. And that is going to be the end of it. We will just keep moving and see how it goes. Maybe we will put out more games, maybe we won’t, you know? No big deal. TJ: Now this is were the story gets good. Because secretly Atari as a plan. All the Atari execs sit around and say ok, we are going to play by the rules. We are going to give them their five games, but we are going to break this code, we are going to find out what this secret Nintendo code is. Josh: Atari at first tried to hack the system. Bought a bunch of NES’s cracked them open gave hem to their best programmers. Monitored how the software interacted with the software in hopes of finding that unique little trigger that they could then bypass when they made their own game. Jeff: You know they tried to look at it and see what information was being sent back and forth. They were like we will steal this the correct way. But when that failed they were like alright, ok we will just take it from the copy right office. TJ: Atari goes to the copyright office and they submit a request to see the Nintendo code. Well the copy right office, fine why do you need to see the code? Atari said we are sued by Nintendo and in order for our legal team to create a proper defense we have to see what this code is, so that we can then fight this legal battle. Copyright office doesn’t know, so what do they do, they release the code to them. Jeff: This isn’t like one rogue Atari employee who is trying to rung Nintendo. This is an entire corporation, committing a major crime, really a very elaborate scheme to try and break the rules and then try to change them retroactively. TJ: So now Atari is sitting on the secret Nintendo code, and then in turn they sue them for 100 million dollars. They sue them for 100 million dollars because they have been monopolizing the industry. Dan: Nintendo they weren’t going to take this lying down, they said we are going to take this to the street. This is a street fight. So they went to all the toy retailers and they said listen. We got this tiff going on with Atari we will tell you what’s going to happen. If you carry any of their stuff, then you’re not going to get anymore Nintendo stuff, so no matter who wins these lawsuits. Nintendo still wins, Nintendo for the win. The fact is that Nintendo just owned the market, they dominated toy stores, and they are accounting for half of a store like Toys R Us’s profits. The court case took awhile to drag on but the results are just meaningless. Because Nintendo just bullied Atari out of stores. They had that much clout. They kind of were operating like a monopoly. There are warehouses full of games that people would have bought, but no ones going to sell them because they didn’t want to upset Nintendo. Josh: I mean basically Atari now needed to win this lawsuit against Nintendo. Everything rode on this, because they weren’t making any money in the market place with these games. Jeff: What happens next, because they so clearly stole it in a, a sneaky and underhanded way. I mean kind of like a Boris and Natasha style plot. Because of the way they got this they don’t do very well in court. Josh: Atari brought a fair and valid antitrust argument to bear. But completely ruined there credibility by engaging in theft, in copyright theft. TJ: But it never even got to that. Case was dropped, they settled out of court. Atari ultimately paid Nintendo something for stealing from them, and then Atari disappears. Jeff: Eventually the code was cracked as all codes are, and one person was making games, Wisdom Tree who put out some classics like Sunday Fun Day. Libi: And basically they hacked a secret code and they made Bible games. And so Nintendo heard about it and they were like man, do we really want to sue these guys. You know we are trying to tell parents that games aren’t the devil, but then we are trying to sue a church, un uh, I don’t think so, Tj: Nintendo in the true fashion of the Bible decided that they were just going to turn the cheek on this one and let Wisdom Tree do there thing. Jeff: This whole story is the beginning of a lot of bad blood between Nintendo and Atari, and it would continue for many years. But it was never really a big deal, just because Atari was never any competition. Atari always wanted to be, what Sega would eventually become, which is a real second company, with a real strong chance at dethroning the king.
