Replay: The History of Video Games (38 page)

* * *

The first day of the Senate inquiry into video games was set to take place on the 9th December 1993 just eight days after Liberman’s press conference with Captain Kangaroo. Ahead of the hearings Nintendo, Sega and the other video game publishers in the firing line suddenly realised just how poorly connected they were in Washington, D.C.. While many of them belonged to the Software Publishers’ Association, its focus was on supporting business software companies such as Lotus and Microsoft rather than video game publishers. With the political pressure mounting, Sega and Nintendo found themselves forced together to try and come up with a strategy for tackling the hearings. The two harboured conflicting views of what should happen. Sega, with its more teenage audience, wanted an age rating system so it could carry on publishing games featuring violence. Nintendo, on the other hand, saw little need for an age rating system as it had its own family friendly policies that it applied to all games released on its console. But with the pressure on, the US’s leading game companies agreed to back an age-rating system that would be managed by the industry itself in the hope of defusing the row.

This opening gambit took some of the heat out of the situation, but the proponents of video game restrictions at the hearings still tried their best to land some blows on the game makers. Marilyn Droz, vice-president of the National Coalition on Television Violence, asked Senators how they would feel if their teenage daughter went on a date with someone who had just played
Night Trap
. Eugene Provenzo, the University of Miami professor who had already annoyed the game business with his critical 1991 book
Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo
, also made the case for intervention. Drawing on his research, Provenzo told the hearings that 40 of the 47 games he examined for his book were violent. Video games were also “overwhelmingly” racist, sexist and violent, he added.

There was some truth in Provenzo’s claim. Female and black video game heroes were a rarity and this absence was still pronounced years later as a 2001 report by US children’s charity Children Now discovered. Children Now’s report revealed that women accounted for just 16 per cent of playable human characters in the 10 most popular games of 2000. It also reported that 58 per cent of playable male characters were white but that if they had excluded sports games the proportion would have been much higher. “Video games do seem to do worse than other mediums, particularly when it comes to the representation of women,” said Patti Miller, director of the charity’s children and the media programme. “The lack of racial diversity in video games seems to be on a similar level to that of US TV.”

It wasn’t just a matter of ignoring women and black people. A few Japanese games had descended into racist stereotyping of black people, partly because the country’s more homogenous racial make-up meant such racism was rarely confronted. For example, the 1989 role-playing game
Square’s Tom Sawyer
, based – somewhat ironically – on the Mark Twain’s novel
The Adventurers of Tom Sawyer,
portrayed black characters as ‘blackface’-style caricatures with giant lips. It was never released outside Japan. Many Japanese games did, however, seek to avoid portrayals of race aogether, through the use of ‘mukokuseki’ characters that are drawn in such a way to obscure their racial origin, so that while they could viewed as white or Asian, they were neither.

In the West the racism in video games was more subtle and behind-closed-doors, with some game publishers pushing designers to ‘whiten’ the skin tone of black characters or remove them entirely. “It all boils down to money,” Shahid Ahmad, a British Asian game developer, told
Edge
magazine in 2002. “Publishers believe that games with black or Asian characters could lose them money, although they won’t openly say it.”

Homosexuality, meanwhile, remained largely taboo in video games throughout the 1980s beyond Japan’s yaoi, or boys’ love, titles. The few that did mention the subject usually did so in a negative way. It took until the 1995 adventure game
The Orion Conspiracy
for the subject to be tackled in a less prejudiced way. Created by UK developer Divide by Zero and published by Domark,
The Orion Conspiracy
cast the player as a father who travels to a space station to investigate the death of his son. While searching for the truth, it emerges that the son was gay. “When I first read the script I was quite surprised,” said ‘Tardie’, an artist who worked on the game. “It was a very daring thing for Domark to do. The gay character was embedded into the game and you found out about it as you questioned people and discovered more about your son. It got quite charged as the father did not know, so you got to see how he handled it.”

* * *

The real battle in the Senate on the day of the hearing, however, was not between the proponents and opponents of restrictions on video games but between Sega and Nintendo. It did not take long for the bitterness between the two video game giants to bubble to the surface and soon Washington’s finest were watching Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln and Sega of America vice-president Bill White Jr. engaged in their own verbal equivalent of
Mortal Kombat
.

Lincoln used Nintendo’s earlier decision to force Acclaim to remove the gore from the Super NES version of
Mortal Kombat
, as a stick to beat its commercial rival with. He said Nintendo had lost money by sanitising its version of
Mortal Kombat
and had even received angry letters and telephone calls from children demanding the violence before proudly adding that
Night Trap
would “never appear on a Nintendo system”, ignoring how the lack of a CD drive meant the Super NES was technologically incapable of handling such a game. White countered that Sega had an older audience demographic to Nintendo, a claim echoing the underlying message of his company’s ‘Sega does what Nintendon’t’ advertising campaign: Sega is for cool teens, Nintendo is for children. He added that Sega had already introduced age ratings on its games voluntarily and that it wanted other companies to adopt its system.

Lincoln stuck the knife in. He dismissed Sega’s age ratings system as a panic measure introduced when the controversy about
Night Trap
started and refuted White’s assertions that the video game industry was now catering for adults rather than children. White started listing the violent games available on the Super NES and showed the Senators a Nintendo light gun. Lincoln described
Night Trap
as “outrageous”. White defended it by pointing out that the player has to try and stop the vampires only to get slapped down by Lieberman who interjected: “You’re going to have to go a long way to convince me that that game has any moral value.” Lieberman watched the pair tearing chunks out of each other with amazement.

Nintendo and Sega weren’t the only people in the games business divided by the controversy. The game developers who worked on
Mortal Kombat
and
Night Trap
were also divided over how to react to the row their creations had started. “I felt like we were being attacked by a bunch of people who were mostly ignorant of what they were attacking,” said Tobias. “Watching the news coverage at the time, you’d think that
Mortal Kombat
was created by some evil corporation. Anyone who knew me or Ed personally knew that our intentions weren’t anything other than ensuring our players were having fun.”

Rob Fulop, who had designed
Night Trap
while it was still part of Hasbro’s NEMO project, found the experience harder. “The scandal was kind of silly and it was also deeply embarrassing because friends of mine, my parents, and my girlfriend didn’t really get games. All they knew was a game that I had made was on TV and Captain Kangaroo said it was bad for kids,” he said. “I fell out with my girlfriend because I thought it was completely bullshit.”

But while he thought the inquiry was nonsense, after nearly 15 years of game making, Fulop had begun to worry about the message video games were sending out to children. “I grew up in a generation where you watched TV, that’s all we did. TV was basically 30-minute stories and always had a happy ending. Whatever the problem, in half an hour the problem was worked out,” said Fulop. “You tell that story to kids 20 million times and they grow up believing everything will work out. That was my generation. You believed everything would work out because of TV. Now think of video games – the message is no matter what you do you always lose. You never ever, ever, ever, ever win. Once in a million you win, but most of the time you never win. Unless you can find the cheat, so what does that teach you? I think that’s created a whole different culture – a very fatalistic ‘what’s the point?’ attitude. It’s a personal philosophy, I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

The controversy surrounding
Night Trap
and the reaction of his family and friends inspired Fulop’s next game: “I decided that the next game I made was going to be so cute and so adorable that no-one could ever, ever say it was bad for kids. It was sarcastic. It was like what’s the cutest thing I could make? What’s the most sissy game I could turn out?”

A shopping mall Santa Claus gave him the answer. “I would go at the end of the year to see Santa Claus at the stores and he would tell me exactly what kids wanted,” said Fulop. “He knows better than anyone because his job all day is to ask them what they want. You want to know what’s going to sell, go talk to Santa. I did that every year. I went that year and he said the same thing that was popular every year was a puppy and has been for the last 50 years.”

Fulop’s plan to make an adorable game and children’s Christmas wishes for puppies came together to form 1995’s
Dogz: Your Computer Pet
, one of the first virtual pet games.
[3]
Dogz
installed an enthusiastic cartoon puppy on the player’s computer that was housed within a playpen window but could be stroked or taught to do tricks. Fulop’s goal was to make players grow attached to their virtual puppy: “The dogs follow your mouse and they can’t wait to be petted, you do a mouse click and they come running over, it was their biggest excitement. People get attached to pets because they need you. You’re needed. You come home and this thing is in your face…if you’re not there you know it’s going to be very unhappy or it could die. I don’t think a virtual pet is any different.”

Fulop’s company PF Magic played on this attachment to encourage sales of the game. “It was sold the same way real puppies are sold,” said Fulop. “We’ll give it to you for 10 days and then ask for it back. You give a puppy to a kid and ask for it back five days later – see what he says. In sales this is called the puppy dog close. We gave you five days’ worth of food and after five days you ran out of food and if you want more food you’ve got to call us and give us $20 and we’ll give you a lifetime’s supply of food, otherwise your puppy dies or you have to delete it. And who can delete it? It’s cruel, it’s a little puppy and you won’t feed it.”

Fulop’s ploy worked like a dream and
Dogz
became a huge success, eventually becoming the starting point of the long-running
Petz
series of virtual pets.

* * *

With evidence about the relationship between video game violence and real-life behaviour inconclusive, the Senators closed the hearing by telling the video game industry to return to Washington on 4th March 1994 to report on its progress with creating an age rating system.
[4]

In the three months between the hearings and the industry’s return to the Senate, the US video game industry reorganised itself. The country’s leading game companies quit the Software Publishers Association and formed the Interactive Digital Software Association headed by veteran Washington lobbyist
Douglas Lowenstein. After several weeks of rows, the industry also created the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). The ESRB’s job was to manage the industry’s new age-ratings system. Sega also stopped distributing the Sega CD version of
Night Trap
in January, although America’s leading toy stores Toys R Us and Kay-Bee Toys had already stopped stocking it because of the Senate hearings.
[5]

The game industry came out of the controversy with more than just a lesson in how to handle politicians. It had also learned that violence and controversy sells. Sales of
Mortal Kombat
and
Night Trap
soared during the hearings.
Night Trap
in particular had gone from a poorly selling Sega CD title to a game that was selling 50,000 copies a week at the height of the row. When Zito’s Digital Pictures released
Night Trap
on the PC to coincide with Halloween 1994, its advertising campaign embraced the scandal: “Some members of Congress tried to ban
Night Trap
for being sexist and offensive to women (Hey. They ought to know).”