Too Violent? Water It Down

So. This is actually one of the few cases where an American made game gets itself censored just because of its content and that game is Mortal Kombat released back in 1992. Now I don't think have to go into too much detail on what Mortal Kombat is or that whole violent video game debate that is still going on today because of everything this one game started up; I feel like at this point it's kind of common knowledge on those. But the whole violent video game debate didn't start up in 1992, it was actually during 93 with the release of the console ports of this game, specifically the Sega Genesis version of this game.

Left is the Genesis, Right is the SNES

Mortal Kombat had already been released on arcade machines in 92, a full year before that whole debate and when it was time to bring it into the home console market, the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis were two big consoles of their time, those were the logical choices. However, Mortal Kombat being a game with over the top gore and somehow a ninja being able to lift someone's head off with the spine intact, that definitely had to get censored for the home console market. Nintendo being the family friendly company of course messed around with the games code and changed the color of the blood to be sweat and changed some of the fatalities to make so the target doesn't really die. The Sega Genesis version, though inferior in sound quality and video, there was a series of button inputs that put the blood and gore back into the game. Which was what started the debate when parents saw kids doing this. Nintendo probably wanted to avoid any of the controversy that game might brought as well wanting to maintain being the family friendly video game company. The changes done as well as preventing the code to add the blood and gore back was most likely to ensure that nothing would happen to ruin their credibility to the market. Not just the Western one, literally all of them.

Here's a little part of the 1993 senate debate.