Video games are one of the most prominent forms of media in today’s world. As with other forms of media, video games often face the threat of censorship – the altering or removal of content to appease a certain audience. While censorship in video games is often difficult to spot, it is most notable when games are localized for different regions. In the past few years, the amount of censorship in the gaming industry has risen, and a new question has risen alongside it: Should video game censorship be tolerated?

Censorship started to appear very early in the history of video games. The earliest home video game systems, most notably the Atari 2600, didn’t require any sort of licenses, leading to a barrage of games with extremely poor quality being released and, ultimately, the infamous video game industry crash of 1983.

When Nintendo brought back the popularity of gaming with the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, they avoided the mistakes Atari made by requiring developers to obtain a license before releasing games on the system. While this helped control the amount of shoddy games in circulation, it also created gaming censorship. If Nintendo didn’t like the content of a game, they could force its developers to make changes or deny the game’s release.

During this time, censorship mainly occurred in three different ways: graphical changes, plot or dialogue changes, and games being denied released. Graphical changes normally were very minor, such as statues of nude women in “Castlevania” being covered with cloth and items like blood and cigarettes being removed from enemy sprites in “Earth Bound.”

A more extreme case of graphical changes was in “Bionic Commando,” which originally released as “Hitler’s Revival: Top Secret,” featuring a revived Nazi party as the game’s main villains. When this game was released internationally, all Nazi symbols were replaced with eagle crests to avoid any controversy.

This game also fell victim to plot changes: the now-censored Nazis were referred to as the “Badds,” and Hitler was renamed “Master-D,” despite his appearance remaining unchanged.

Other examples of plot and dialogue changes in games during this time include “Punch-Out!!,” which had a fighter’s favorite drink changed from vodka to soda, and “Contra,” which was renamed “Probotector” and had all humans replaced with robots to avoid implications of murder.

These alterations made to games were the result of Nintendo wanting to market to kids; at the time, video games were thought of as mere children’s toys.  

Certain games, however, would be denied international release altogether for fear of failure. Notable examples included “Mysterious Murasame Castle,” which had visuals that were deemed “too Japanese” for an American audience, and the previously mentioned “Earth Bound,” an English version of the Japanese “Mother,” which had been prepared for distribution but was cancelled at the last minute because Nintendo wanted to shift their marketing focus to their next console.

One of the most infamous cases was “Super Mario Bros. 2.” While the first game was a huge success, this follow-up was deemed too difficult by Nintendo’s American branch. Fearing that this difficulty would affect sales, they instead reskinned a Japanese game, “Doki Doki Panic,” with “Super Mario” characters and released this as the sequel, an event that is still to this day considered odd.

“It baffles my mind that they wouldn’t even consider giving it a worldwide release…simply because of difficulty,” said Brax Langley, a gaming fan who regularly live streams his game play under the alias “ahbeef.”

Several arguably more difficult games would go on to become successes, disproving Nintendo’s theory that difficulty affects sales.

While censorship was common during the NES era, things would change during the lifetime of Nintendo’s next system, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). During the start of this era, Nintendo still censored games in the same fashion it had done previously: graphics were altered (i.e. champaign consumption was removed from “Super Mario Kart,” and a naked character was covered with pajamas in “EarthBound,” the English version of “Mother 2”) and plot details were changed. A bar full of drunken customers in “EarthBound” was changed to a café, and all Nazis were replaced with English-speaking soldiers in “Wolfenstein 3D.”

However, things were different this time as Nintendo had to compete for control of the industry with a successful rival, SEGA’s Genesis. While each system had its own games, they also shared certain games, including “Mortal Kombat,” a port of an arcade game notorious for its realistic depictions of gore.

When it was ported to home consoles, the Genesis version kept the gore intact, but not the SNES version; this censored version replaced all blood with sweat. The Genesis version would go on to greatly outsell the more kid-friendly SNES version, with this event going down as one of Nintendo’s biggest losses during its rivalry with SEGA.

But “Mortal Kombat” wasn’t done affecting the history of gaming censorship. The game’s violence led to congressional hearings regarding government regulations of video games and, ultimately, the establishment of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which provides age ratings for games sold at retail. After this establishment, the amount of censorship in video games greatly diminished.

Developers no longer needed to worry about inappropriate content getting in the wrong hands due to the rating system, which led to more controversy as games began to push the limits of what could be considered acceptable. Most notably, the criminal activity portrayed in “Grand Theft Auto” and the gun violence in “Call of Duty” resulted in heavy backlash from anti-video game activists.

While games intended for mature audiences didn’t fall victim to censorship, family-friendly companies such as Nintendo continued to alter content, albeit in relatively small ways. Examples of these small changes include the removal of Muslim chants in “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time,” the removal of slot machines in “Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver” to prevent encouraging gambling, and a recall of “Mario Party 8″ in the UK due to the use of the word “spastic,” an offensive word in this region.

Nintendo also continued their practice of denying release to games they felt wouldn’t sell well outside of Japan, either due to their Japanese art styles, as was the case with “Captain Rainbow,” or due to dealing with controversial topics, such as “Mother 3,” which dealt with mature themes like death, animal cruelty, and sexuality. Many fans expressed and still express their desire for these games’ localization, but Nintendo has been reluctant to do so.

Moving forward to today, gaming censorship seems to be on the rise for two reasons: increased sensitivity in regards to political correctness and rising violence around the world. Ryan, a GameStop employee with ties to game developer Bethesda, notes that those games censored are “almost always shooters, especially in (the US).” She adds that role-playing games are commonly censored to do sexual content.

This sensitivity towards sexual content was what led to censorship in “Bravely Default.” Released in 2012, this Japanese role-playing game had several characters’ ages raised and several revealing outfits covered up when it was released internationally. Fans were outraged about the fact that a game rated T (ages 13 and up) had been altered to be family-friendly, making “Bravely Default” one of the first modern games to receive heavy backlash for censorship.

After “Bravely Default” sparked outrage against gaming censorship, fans focused their attention on Nintendo Treehouse, Nintendo’s American localization branch, for censoring content with no reasons given other than political correctness.

Many of the games used as evidence against Nintendo Treehouse were guilty of the same removal of revealing clothes that had been seen in “Bravely Default,” but other changes and removed features were also discovered. For instance, “Xenoblade Chronicles X” had a breast size option removed from its character creator, “Fire Emblem Fates” had a mildly sexual minigame removed, “Bravely Second” had a Native American costume replaced with a cowboy costume, and “Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE” had several hundred lines of dialogue rerecorded to reflect age changes and other story tweaks.

Of these games, “Fire Emblem Fates” received the most of this backlash after it was discovered that much of the game’s dialogue was not properly translated from Japanese, but rather replaced with childish jokes and propaganda meant to push the translators’ personal agendas.  

This extreme censorship led many to boycott the game, including Trinity senior Conor McClure, an active member of the gaming community and strong opponent of gaming censorship.

McClure said, “I didn’t want to give Nintendo a bit of my money and make them think I was supporting their self-censored game.”

This sudden backlash against gaming censorship can be largely attributed to the current widespread use of the internet. Langley recalls that he didn’t notice the issue discussed much until the late 2000s, observing that “more people could give their opinions on it because of the internet.” The discussion of gaming censorship has also created a divide among the gaming community: those that are against gaming censorship and those that think it isn’t that big a deal.

“I think it’s a very major issue,” McClure said. “In an effort to prevent controversy, gaming companies are willing to censor games made by themselves or others. It’s really damaging the games they are trying to make, and it’s really damaging the gaming industry.”

McClure’s key argument is that companies should not be able to determine what is acceptable for a mass audience.

“That’s why we have the rating system,” he said. “It is no one’s responsibility but yourself to determine what is offensive or not. It is no one’s responsibility period to determine what is acceptable for others.”

McClure sees the cultural divide between Japan and America as a major area of gaming censorship.

“Japan is different from many other nations, and that often shows in their media,” he said, referring to the more revealing outfits given to preteens in Japanese media due to the country’s lower age of consent. “Deciding that something another culture deems completely normal and causes little to no observable problems is unacceptable because you believe it makes people uncomfortable is absurd. Not only that, but also deciding what media people are allowed to consume on a completely subjective standard is a serious limit on free speech.”

On the other side of the argument, Langley said gaming censorship is no longer a big issue.

“We’ve come a long way since games were radically altered,” he said. “It’s really not that big of a deal anymore. We’re not missing out on very much whenever changes are made to a game for a worldwide release. What we are missing out on is not important enough.”

Langley, however, does think that censorship is a problem when games are denied release altogether, citing “Dead or Alive Xtreme 3,” a game that wasn’t released in America due to its portrayal of woman, and “Starfy,” a kid-friendly game with an extremely Japanese art-style, as examples of the negative effects of censorship.

He said, “(Censorship) is tolerable, just to fit certain cultural views better. When (companies) take important content out, or just not give us games at all, that’s a problem. It really depends on the context of the game, when it came out, etcetera.”

While McClure and Langley are on opposing ends of the argument, Ryan is somewhere in the middle; she believes that censorship is acceptable at some times, but not others.

“There are certain games that I feel aren’t too bad, while some of them are,” she said. “I think (censorship) is important. There are games where I feel they’re doing a bit much.”

Ryan sees the ESRB as an important part of the whole discussion. “Every time there’s a new issue happening in our country, it seems like the ESRB tries to protect children and young adults. (Censorship happens) to protect parents that are more concerned and worried about their children.”

Despite the many differing opinions on censorship, it seems that it rarely impacts video game sales.

“Usually if a child wants a rated M game, they will always find a way to get it,” Ryan said, referring to the ESRB’s mature rating.

Children will always be able to get hold of inappropriate content as long as it exists, and when inappropriate content is censored, sales still are not impacted. “Bravely Default” sold well enough to get a sequel, “Bravely Second,” which was also popular, despite the censorship in both games.

“Fire Emblem Fates” was the best-selling game in the Fire Emblem franchise, despite the boycotting among fans. There have been a few instances, however, where censorship does impact sales, such as the previously mentioned “Mortal Kombat” censorship and the more recent “Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE,” which failed to turn a profit. But ultimately it seems censorship doesn’t have a huge impact on sales.