COMM 344: Doom and The ESRB.

Recently, Night Trap made the news. From having 203 copies traded into a game store, to how Kickstarter almost brought us an HD remaster. Night Trap is a strange game. For all it's innovation in full motion video, for the star power of Dana Plato of Diff'rent Strokes, for all the half-naked teenagers and PG-13 level violence, no one seems to care about Night Trap. Maybe it's because the game is generally considered terrible, or how full motion video in games didn't take off, but it begins to feel like Night Trap would be forgotten completely in a different world.

But that world is one where Senator Joe Lieberman never saw the violence and sexuality of Night Trap, The spine-ripping of Mortal Kombat, and the demon-killing bloody good times of Doom. That is a world where congressional hearings never lead to the creation of the ESRB.

Night Trap doesn't get much more sexual than this. (Digital Pictures/SEGA via Wikipedia)

At the time, Mortal Kombat and Doom had the most realistic visuals of any game on the market, and Night Trap was little more than an interactive movie. Games were experiencing a frightening amount of visual realism, which, when mixed with blood and breasts, creates a bit of a controversy stew.

Night Trap on it's own couldn't have this. The game wasn't particularly violent, nor was it particularly sexual. Worse things happen on TV every week. Mortal Kombat couldn't have done this on it's own. It was primarily an arcade game, and home versions were typically censored.

But Doom? Doom was it's own controversy. It didn't need the rare Sega CD that Night Trap needed. It didn't need a pocket full of quarters at a local mall like Mortal Kombat. Doom came on two floppy discs, and the first third of the game was free. All you needed was a DOS computer with an IBM 386 processor and 4 MB of ram. This was a lot more common than the Sega CD, and free is certainly cheaper than 25 cents every time you die. Confounding the problem was that id Software, the developers of Doom, encouraged people to share their shareware copy with friends.

Doom difficulty select. (id Software via GiantBomb)

Other games could argue that they weren't ulta-violent.  Doom couldn't. Hard mode on Doom was titled "Ultra-Violence".

It was great that the ESRB came along from this. No longer did gaming have to fear the stigma of being an industry for children. The ratings that the three games responsible received? M for Mature. In the modern day, the most revered games share that rating, and mature content isn't all shotguns, demons, and nightgowns. Games like Bioshock and The Last Of Us are mature for reasons beyond their violence, and without the path to violence that Doom helped to pave, they may never have happened.

And of course, Doom's modding community, which I'll cover in my next post, means that Doom can continue to get even more brutal.