The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (73 page)
Authors: Steven Kent
Boone and Tobias named their game
Mortal Kombat.
The name probably referred to the background story about mortals entering a fighting tournament
against beings from another dimension; but critics would later say that it came from the game’s “fatality” moves. Each match in
Mortal Kombat
was for the best of three falls. When a combatant was defeated the second time, he or she would stand in a swaying stupor for a few seconds, allowing the victor to finish the match with special signature moves called “fatalities.”
Other fighting games had this thing where you would get dizzy, and the other guy would get a free hit on you, and you had to accept the fact that you were going to get hit. We hated the idea of being the guy who’s dizzy, but it was great to be the guy who was walking up to go beat the crap out of him, so we moved that to the end of the fight where damage was already done. We had this dizzy animation, and then at one point somebody suggested, “Let’s make it gruesome.” And everything just kind of built on that. It became a huge part of the game. We didn’t know that was going to be such a big attraction. It just happened.
—Ed Boon
Fatalities ranged from Kano wrenching his opponents’ hearts out of their chests to Scorpion pulling out their spines and skulls. These were not the kind of graphic cinematic sequences you might see in a movie—they were fast with a splash of animated blood and no kinds of incisions. Knowing how to perform
Mortal Kombat
’s fatalities became a sign of prestige around arcades because they were not easily executed. Once you won the fight, you had to get within range of your opponent and then know special combinations of joystick moves and buttons to punch. When the game first came out, some arcade goers would stand around watching other people, in the hope of catching a glimpse of one of the fatalities.
At the time, we thought these button and joystick combinations were going to be so hard to do that nobody would ever figure them out. I think the first time we put
Mortal Kombat
out at a test location, in that first weekend somebody found it.—John Tobias, former game designer, Williams/Bally/Midway
The fighting game craze had already revived the arcade business when Williams began shipping
Mortal Kombat.
The game was an instant hit, easily eclipsing
Street Fighter II
in overall popularity with American audiences.
At the time that
Mortal Kombat
was released, Acclaim Entertainment had a contract for the exclusive rights to the home-console versions of Williams arcade games. The partnership would prove very profitable for both companies. Under cofounder Greg Fischbach’s leadership, Acclaim had set up the biggest and best sales networks of any of Nintendo’s third parties.
Acclaim put great quantities of effort and money into the
Mortal Kombat
license, creating a $10 million marketing campaign and stocking nearly $40 million worth of inventory. Acclaim’s designers created authentic versions of
Mortal Kombat
, complete with all of the special moves, for both Genesis and Super NES.
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Super NES, with its multiple processors, was particularly well suited for
Mortal Kombat
, and the game looked and moved very much like the arcade game. It was not, however, tailor-made for Nintendo’s entertainment standards.
I guess it was June 1993 that Nintendo of America was confronted with
Mortal Kombat
as a home video game that Acclaim was doing. We had game standards that we were enforcing all along. We made a list of what you can and can’t do: “No excessive blood and violence and what not.” “No sex.” Applying those standards to
Mortal Kombat
, we told Acclaim [designers] that they would have to tone down their version of
Mortal Kombat
, which, I believe, was going to come out in September of 1993.We spent a whole summer screwing around, trying to decide how to handle that issue. Ultimately, we decided that the death moves or finishing moves would have to come out.
Acclaim kept coming back and saying, “Look, we’re going to make the Sega version, and it’s going be right in line with the coin-op game. Having a toned-down version for Nintendo … Do you guys really want us to do that? Does that really make sense?”
—Howard Lincoln, former executive vice president, Nintendo of America
The home version of
Mortal Kombat
was released in September 1993, and the sales went through the roof. Over the life of the product, Acclaim sold approximately 6.5 million
Mortal Kombat
cartridges. The Genesis version, which included the original arcade fatality moves, outsold the edited-down Super NES version by nearly three-to-one, propelling Genesis hardware sales to new levels. Not only did the decision to remove the violence hurt sales, it also offended many Super NES owners. According to Howard Lincoln, Nintendo received thousands of angry letters, including a few letters from parents, warning Nintendo not to censor their children’s games.
Nintendo made a terrible blunder from a marketing standpoint in putting out a sanitized version of
Mortal Kombat.
Sega kicked their butt on that; probably sold 4 times as many units of
MK1
bloody than Nintendo did
MK1
sanitized.—Tom Zito, founder, Digital Pictures
I remember saying to Fischbach and to Rob Holmes [also of Acclaim], “I can guarantee you with
Night Trap
and now
Mortal Kombat
, we’re all going to end up in front of Congress.”—Howard Lincoln
I think that all of this stuff that happened with the Senate was really orchestrated by Nintendo.
—Tom Zito
A great deal of debate surrounds the events that led up to the 1993 joint hearings that investigated the marketing of video game violence to minors. People at Sega and Digital Pictures claimed that Nintendo encouraged the hearings to stop Sega’s runaway sales. Some people claim that Nintendo director of communications Perrin Kaplan initiated the debates over game violence when she delivered a speech to National Organization of Women in the fall of 1993.
Others claim that Nintendo representatives went to Washington, D.C., and showed several people in Congress tapes of violent games, in the hope of stirring up trouble for Sega.
I think Nintendo had taken such a trouncing that they decided to sort of go for broke and attack Sega. And they made these tapes up that showed
Night Trap
and showed
Mortal Kombat
on Genesis versus Nintendo. They hired a lobbying firm, and the lobbying firm basically started going around banging on doors to see if they could find a congressman who would be interested in taking this up as a cause. And I think that Nintendo was hoping that the public would be so outraged at what Sega was doing versus what Nintendo was doing that there would be pickets in front of every Toys “R” Us store, saying, “Don’t buy Sega products.”—Tom Zito
The official account of the events that led up to the hearings is that U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman (Democrat of Connecticut) became concerned about video game violence when Bill Andresen, his chief of staff, told him about a hot new game named
Mortal Kombat.
Andresen’s nine-year-old son wanted a copy of the game, but Andresen, having heard that it was “incredibly violent,” did not want to purchase it for him. Out of curiosity, Lieberman suggested that they get a copy and see what it was about.
I was startled. It was very violent and, as you know, rewarded violence. And at the end, if you really did well, you’d get to decide whether to decapitate … how to kill the other guy, how to pull his head off. And there was all sorts of blood flying around.
Then we started to look into it, and I forget how I heard about
Night Trap.
And I looked at that game, too, and there was a classic. It ends with this attack scene on this woman in lingerie, in her bathroom. I know that the creator of the game said it was all meant to be a satire of Dracula; but nonetheless, I thought it sent out the wrong message.—Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, United States Senate
Once he saw
Mortal Kombat
and
Night Trap
, Senator Lieberman became concerned about the peddling of what he considered the equivalent of R-rated materials to children. He did some reading and found surveys that showed pre-Genesis demographics, with the average player being a seven- to twelve-year-old male. It should be noted that the 16-bit generation was only a few years old, and Sega was only beginning to gather data that showed the shift Genesis had brought to the market. It should also be noted that although only 10 percent of the games on the home market were violent,
Street Fighter II
and
Mortal Kombat
were huge sellers and fighting games seemed to dominate the market.
Having come to the conclusion that video game publishers were marketing violence to children, Senator Lieberman decided to see what his constituents thought. He asked parents in his home state of Connecticut about the games. Their answers gave him cause for further concern.
I started to talk to people in Connecticut about it. Part of what I was hearing back from parents was that they didn’t know what was in the game. Either there was a generational gap, which meant that they really didn’t know how to use the machines, or they just didn’t take the time. In a lot of these games, as you probably know, you have to spend a little time playing until you get to the so-called good parts.
—Senator Joseph Lieberman
As to allegations that Howard Lincoln approached him, Senator Lieberman always insisted that Nintendo did not contact him to initiate the inquiry into the video gaming world. But he also remembers meeting with Howard Lincoln once the plans for the hearing were in place.
He certainly didn’t initiate the process; in other words, we went to him. We went to the industry. I had not heard about Howard Lincoln before we planned the whole thing. In fact, to be very honest about it, and there’s nothing wrong with it, once the hearings were announced, I saw Slade Gorton [U.S. senator from Washington] on the floor of the Senate one day on a vote and he said, “I just got a call from the folks from Nintendo, which is real important in Seattle.”
I later learned that they had played this enormous and incredibly sort of civic role in helping Seattle to keep the baseball team there. So anyway,
Slade was all tied in with them and he said, “There’s a guy named Howard Lincoln who you’ve called to testify. Do you mind speaking to him or having your staff speak to him?”—Senator Joseph Lieberman
As Senator Lieberman proceeded to arrange a hearing on the marketing of video games, Nintendo, Sega, and other companies found themselves in an untenable situation. They did not have their own lobbying organization. Many belonged to the Software Publishers Association, the same trade organization that represented Microsoft and WordPerfect. Their relationship with SPA, however, was shaky. Interactive entertainment companies, especially video game manufacturers such as Sega, Nintendo, and Electronic Arts, had long felt like the black sheep of the SPA community. The bulk of SPA’s membership was made up of “serious” software companies that did not consider video game manufacturers legitimate members of the computer industry, and the top executives at the game companies did not expect to receive sufficient support during the hearings.
Senator Herb Kohl (Democrat of Wisconsin), chairman of the Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, and Senator Lieberman, chairman of the Subcommittee on Regulation and Government Information, presided over the hearings that officially began on December 9, 1993. The proceedings started off on a strange note. One week before the hearings, Bob Keeshan, a.k.a. Captain Kangaroo, held a press conference in which he stated that “It would be hoped that software manufacturers would understand their role in a nurturing society and exercise that accompanying responsibility to commercial-free speech.”
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Keeshan did not participate in the hearings but submitted a prepared statement that was aimed at both the legislators on the panel and parents, reminding them of the responsibility to nurture their children.
Then, a few hours before the hearings began, representatives of several large game manufacturers sought to partially defuse the bad publicity by announcing that the industry had decided to endorse a rating system. The announcement was well timed, and several senators referred to it throughout the meetings.
Most of the hearing was taken up by the testimonies of expert witnesses from two panels: one consisting of experts on education and child psychology and
the other made up of industry executives. The expert panel consisted of Parker Page, president of the Children’s Television Resource; Dr. Eugene Provenzo, Jr., of the University of Miami; Robert Chase, vice president of the National Education Association; and Marilyn Droz, vice president of the National Coalition on Television Violence.
Page led the panel testimonies, citing the limited research that existed in the early 1990s into the effects of violent games on the children who played them. He finished with three recommendations for the industry: (1) that the federal government fund independent research projects into the effects of violent games and that the results of the research, along with a game-rating strategy, be made available to parents; (2) that future advertising should reinforce, not undermine, game ratings; and (3) that a voluntary industry-wide cap be placed on how much violence is allowed in games.
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