Top 10 Lists: The Top 10 Pre-ESRB Games That Would Make Game Raters Cry

Today, nearly every kind of visual content has a ratings system associated with it -- movies, television and video games all have an affiliated ratings board geared toward helping inform the public of the type of content in certain games. These groups don't ever (in the United States) ban content altogether, but they do have the power to grant ratings that basically ban games from normal commercial sales in stores. But none of these groups were created preemptively in case content ever got out of control -- they were created in response to increasingly controversial content. That naturally means that controversial movies and TV shows came before their rating systems, and the same can be said for video games. Before the days of the ESRB, all games were distributed together evenly, regardless of content. With the advent of some particularly violent games, that had to change, and the ESRB was born -- but some games from before the ESRB's creation really didn't have any place in the organization's early system. These games are partially responsible for the organization's creation, but all are the types of games that would make the early ESRB raters cringe. What might be most amusing about some items on this list is that while they directly led to the creation of the ESRB, they would be mild by today's standards.

What we'll quickly find on this list is there are two distinct types of controversial games that appear on this list: there are games whose visual content is disturbing, and there are games whose implied content is even more disturbing. Which is more disturbing? Personally, I find extremely disturbing implied content to be more disturbing than less-disturbing content that's actually seen, and such that's the order this list will be geared toward. The first game on this list, though, isn't really in either of the categories. The premise isn't that disturbing, as the premise doesn't make sense whatsoever -- and the graphics aren't that disturbing because, realistically, how disturbing can Atari 2600 graphics possibly be? Bachelor Party, one of the worst games ever released, is nothing more than a version of the popular game Breakout -- except instead of a ball, you bounce a naked man around the room, and instead of blocks, you hit naked women. That's pretty much all there is to the game -- for some reason a bunch of naked women are hanging around waiting for a naked man to bump into them so they can disappear. Maybe this game wouldn't make game raters cry -- more like make them turn their heads and ask "wait... what the heck?"

The ESRB doesn't technically rate arcade games, but the 1992 release Lethal Enforcers was a part of the hearings that led to the creation of the ESRB nonetheless. By today's standards, the game would be considered a pretty standard arcade shooter -- but the acceptance of the genre has developed over time, and when Lethal Enforcers was released that had not yet happened. The controversy around Lethal Enforcers revolved around two elements that would've shocked the earliest ESRB raters: first of all, the game used an actual physical mock-up of a gun. Not one of those sci-fi-looking light-guns that were released with Duck Hunt for the NES, but a more realistic revolver-shaped one. The gun behaved like an actual gun as well, requiring players to reload after 6 rounds. Again, these features are considered absolutely standard by our standards, but the earliest ESRB raters would see this as far too close an imitation of real-world violence and gunfire with the realistically-sculpted gun and reloading behavior. But more important than the imitation of a gun was what was done with it -- players not only used the gun to shoot enemies, but also innocent bystanders. This was not encouraged, but the very notion of aiming and shooting at an innocent women with a realistic gun would be enough to send early ESRB raters over the edge. Over time, this has become far more accepted and standard, but it carried a very controversial early reputation.

Possibly the two most publicized controversial games that led to the formation of the ESRB are Doom and Mortal Kombat, and the first appears here. Doom featured some of the most violently graphic content yet seen in video gaming, and its setting and use of decidedly satanic themes only pushed its controversial reputation over the edge. Analyzed objectively, Doom doesn't have any truly disturbing themes -- it's the graphic nature of the game that leads to its reputation. The game supplied some of the most violent images in gaming of its time, with blood and gore to go along with plenty of satanic images and audio elements. What would send ESRB raters over the edge with Doom is not only the visible blood and gore, though -- it's the fact that Doom was the first popular first-person shooter, and similarly to Lethal Enforcers, could be said to simulate the killing of actual individuals. Many groups claimed around its release that it would be used for training to commit actual crimes, and the subsequent shootings at high schools around the country only exacerbated these thoughts. Numerous independent studies would later indicate that there was no correlation between violent video games and school shootings, but the reputation had already been established. Again, the crucial thing that made Doom itself so controversial was that it was the first game of its kind -- while the excessive gore and blood did play a role in creating the ESRB, there's a good chance that any first-person shooter would've invoked similar fears.

Every top ten list needs that "This game doesn't reeaally fit, but..." entry, and here's the one for this list. Unlike every other game on this list, Thrill Kill was sent to the ESRB for rating -- and would've received an Adults-Only rating had it ever hit the market. But it didn't -- its parent company, Virgin Entertainment, was bought out by Electronic Arts, who objected to releasing such a violent game. Maybe this game is the only game that actually DID make ESRB's raters cry -- the content in it was truly gruesome. Just look at some of the characters: there's Belladonna, a leather-clad dominatrix armed with a cattle prod who takes audible pleasure from pain; there's Cleetus, whose weapon of choice is a severed leg which was censored to "only" spew blood after he wins; and Judas, a legless pair of conjoined twins. The back-stories of these characters took the disturbing content to a whole other level too, featuring rape, torture and plenty of gruesome deaths. This game took disturbing content to a new level -- I'm ranking it as low as #7 solely because it actually did receive an ESRB rating, but in reality its graphical content was as disturbing as anything on this list, and the concepts behind the game were pretty terrifying themselves.

The most graphically violent game to precede the creation of the ESRB was undoubtedly Mortal Kombat -- or, to be unnecessarily specific, Mortal Kombat's 'fatalities'. On the whole, Mortal Kombat was a pretty violent game -- definitely more violent that its predecessors in its own genre such as the Street Fighter games. But that on its own wouldn't have caused the controversy it did without the fatality system. Fatalities were a somewhat disturbing concept coupled with very graphic displays; they took place when a player had already beaten their opponent, implying that the match was over and the opponent had been defeated, making the additional violence inherently a bit senseless as it did not have a role in winning the round -- it was almost like an ultra-violent reward for winning. But the true controversy came from what the fatalities were, and how graphically they were displayed. All fatalities were shown in all their gruesome graphic glory, and the moves themselves were incredibly disturbing: some of the worse ones included having your heart ripped out and eaten; being set on fire and burned to a skeleton; falling into a pit full of spikes; having your head punched clean off; and the most infamous one, having your skull ripped out of your body with the spinal cord still attached. These fatalities themselves are incredibly gruesome ideas, but what pushed the game's controversy to the point of inspiring the creation of the ESRB was the graphic display of each of them.

Here's the perfect example of a game based on a gruesome idea but without the graphical backing. By appearances, Death Race was an incredibly mild race. Hit the little sticks with your block while avoiding the squares. That's about as mild as it can get. But what made the game controversial was the behind-the-scenes implication to what was being done -- your block was a car, the sticks were little gremlins, and the squares were their tombstones. The original title for the game, Pedestrian, implied something even more dire -- your objective is literally to run down pedestrians in your car. The controversy that surrounded Death Race (earning it the first organized video game protest, a documentary on CBS , and numerous magazine exposés), was based solely on this underlying story, and truly shows the power of suggested content. Graphic violence is one thing, but what really strikes a chord in our minds is what's really being done, even if we don't see it. The visual portrayal serves only for shock value while it's the actual event that truly stirs something in our hearts. Death Race might be graphically pretty mild, but any rater who has to ask "Wait... the objective is to run down defenseless pedestrians?" would surely doubt the sanity of the game developers.

The top four games on this list are pretty difficult to sort, and even now I'm not certain I've done it the proper way. Games #1 and #4 are extremely different from the rest of the games on this list because not only do they feature extremely gruesome implied events, but they actually use photos and videos of actual people. In Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, first of all, the vast majority of the game is played with still photographs on the screen of the game events. Using actual photos of actual people adds a certain human element to it that is really rather terrifying, removing a certain level of "oh, it's just a game" from it. The game revolves around two romantically involved characters and the female character's boss, who attempts to rape her over the course of the game. Visually, the game is probably the most graphic game on this list -- it features full censored nudity in addition to the extremely ridiculous themes it deals with. But by far what makes the game the most shocking is the usage of real photographs of real humans. It definitely adds some significant shock value to the game, which is only mitigated by the still nature of those photos. The top game on this list goes a step further and incorporates full video, but the use of real people in general is enough to make ESRB raters pause.

I'm not going to describe these games. I just can't. I've tried my best to describe the game content in a non-graphic way, to give you just a glimpse of how bizarrely unnecessary they are, to make it humorous, to make it so only an adult audience would even understand what I'm talking about, but I just can't. There is no way to talk about games by this devilspawn company in any vague terms that would do justice to the ridiculous content of them. Formed from the proverbial ashes of the equally terrible game company Mystique (who was responsible for the #10 and #1 games on this list), Playaround continued Mystique's trend of creating needlessly sexual games for the Atari 2600. What's possibly most ridiculous about the products of this company isn't that the content itself is all that disturbing -- they didn't produce anything that compares with anything from Thrill Kill graphically. The disturbing part is that someone would even think to create games based on the concepts these games revolve around. People were PAID to create these games. I just... man, I can't even talk about it. The very existence of these games simultaneously disproves evolution and creationism -- neither an intelligent creator nor survival-of-the-fittest could possibly produce the type of organization that would create total junk like this. My entire worldview has legitimately been thrown into jeopardy based on the existence of these "games". These games wouldn't just make ESRB raters cry -- they'd make them gouge their eyes out. Now I need to bathe and confess to a priest just for acknowledging the existence of these devilspawn products. But first I have to write about another Mystique game, which itself isn't as bad as the other products I'm alluding to here, but reached a more significant audience.

From the maker of Bachelor Party and several other games I refuse to dignify by naming is Custer's Revenge. There are two reasons I talk about Custer's Revenge by name unlike the previous set of games: first of all, it's easier to talk "around" the graphic nature of Custer's Revenge, whereas the other games were impossible to describe adequately without venturing into anatomical terms that I don't want to mention. Secondly, Custer's Revenge was much better known. The game featured a character named Custer. Custer stood naked at the left side of the screen. On the right side of the screen was a naked Native American girl. The objective of the game was to cross the screen to the girl, dodging arrows, and thrust in the girl's direction a few times. You can figure out what the implication there was. Once again, this is an example of the fact that in our minds, it's the theme being modeled that is often more shocking than the visual depiction itself. I haven't conducted the scientific poll, but I personally believe that if you asked a suitable body of people, most would say that a game with very graphic displays of realistic violence against a non-helpless enemy would not be as bad as a game that simulates raping a woman, no matter how crude, comical or uninformative the graphics were. It's the idea that strikes a chord with us, and were the ESRB raters presented with this eyesore, I have no doubt they would die a little on the inside. The content of Custer's Revenge is likely by far the most offensive (even the other sexually-explicit games released by Mystique suggested that everything was consensual), but the graphic nature of the #1 feature bumps it to first...

Like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, Night Trap uses real footage of real humans -- but in this case, it's actual video files rather than simple still photos. The game follows your attempts to save several young women from a predator in a house. To do so, you set up hidden cameras -- sensing why this game is so terrible? -- to catch the predators in the act and spring a trap. Essentially, the game follows you through rooms where your partner is trying to dodge these predators, and it's up to you to set and trigger the right traps. Depending on what you do, you'll get different pre-selected video clips. The game doesn't have the censored nudity of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, but the video nature of the game more than makes up for it. The characters of the game stare right out into the screen and plea for your help in saving their lives, and if you fail you witness their death and their blood being drained by the predators. The cinematography isn't terribly realistic, but the very fact that there is the appearance of a real person -- not an animation -- who died because you failed to save them is absolutely shocking. There are numerous other elements of controversial contention about the game -- the scandalous (at the time) outfits, the graphic displays of violence against women (three men in masks strangling a woman in a skimpy nightgown), and the option given to the player to betray your partner at the game's end -- but by far the most terrifying aspect of the game, bumping it up to #1 on this list, is the very personal notion that a person died because of your inability to save them. No matter how much of a game it is, there's something impactful about experiencing that idea, even in fiction.

Perhaps the most ironic aspect of games inspiring the creation of the ESRB, though, is that the rating board's creation basically legitimized some of the more violent content. In its effort to avoid accusations of censorship, the ESRB does not prevent any content, and it's only the most extreme content that earns the top rating. The vast majority of created games earn a rating that lands them in stores, which actually serves to legitimize them. Complaints leveled against their content are nearly moot as a ratings board has analyzed and assessed the game's content according to its rules, and the game bares the rating clearly. The violent content of Mortal Kombat and Lethal Enforcer pales in comparison to the things seen in Gears of War and the most recent Grand Theft Auto games, but the presence of that rating more legitimizes their content as having a place in the industry. That's not to say it's a bad thing -- without the ESRB, even more gruesome games might be available -- but there's definitely something to be said about having that "gatekeeper" to the industry that says what games are acceptable enough to be distributed and which aren't. The ESRB walks a tight line -- they have to keep adult content off the shelves without being accused of overly censoring, and as much criticism is often leveled against them, they usually seem to get it right. Fortunately, however, their existence means that trash like Custer's Revenge never pollutes our GameStop shelves ever again.

List by DetroitDJ (09/24/2009)