On 9 December 1993 two US senators, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, held a hearing on violence in video games and showed clips from two of them: Acclaim’s Mortal Kombat, in which the winner of a fight could tear out the loser’s heart, and Digital Pictures’ Night Trap, a Sega CD game made of filmed footage of a house full of young women and the hooded intruders who come for them. The senators’ message, as Computer Gaming World’s editor reported it, was that the industry should “create a viable and consistent ratings system or be ready to have the government intervene”. What made the hearing memorable was not the senators, though. It was Nintendo and Sega, the two console makers, attacking each other in front of them. Seven months later the industry came back to Congress with a ratings board of its own, the ESRB, and its ratings have been on game boxes in North America ever since.
Fast facts
- Hearings: 9 December 1993; 4 March 1994; a joint Congressional hearing on 29 July 1994
- Senators: Joe Lieberman (Democrat, Connecticut) and Herb Kohl (Democrat, Wisconsin)
- Games on show: Mortal Kombat and Night Trap
- Industry witnesses: Howard Lincoln for Nintendo, Bill White for Sega
- Outcome: a trade body, the Interactive Digital Software Association (April 1994), and the Entertainment Software Rating Board, whose ratings were in the shops for Christmas 1994
How it began
Edge, looking back in 1998, found three different accounts of how the hearings came about. Lieberman’s own, which he gave to the magazine, began with a conversation with his chief of staff, Bill Andresen, whose son Chris, then nine, wanted Mortal Kombat: “His friends have it, and he wants it! I said, ‘Let’s get one of these things and look at it.’ I was startled. It was very violent and, as you know, rewarded violence.” He told Edge the year before that what worried him was “the extra dimension of the kids being involved in the violence. Kids playing these games are participants. Kids watching TV at home are observers.”
The two games had reached the shops only weeks before. The home versions of Mortal Kombat went on sale in September 1993, and Nintendo’s had replaced the blood with grey “sweat” while Sega’s kept it behind a code. Sega had already rated both games through its own Videogame Rating Council, set up that summer, an independent panel of experts in education, child development, psychology and film: Mortal Kombat was MA-13, for players aged 13 and over, and Night Trap was MA-17. Nintendo had no ratings; it had simply refused to publish the gore.
The hearing of 9 December
The senators treated the games as a problem for parents at Christmas. Edge recalled that video games were described at the hearing as “the nightmare before Christmas”.
Then the witnesses turned on each other. David Sheff’s history of Nintendo, Game Over, describes a rivalry everyone had assumed but nobody had seen so plainly:
Though it always had been assumed that Nintendo and Sega hated each other, the hearings brought their conflict right out into the open for everyone to plainly see. Nintendo’s Howard Lincoln showed the differences in the versions of Mortal Kombat for each company’s systems. Sega’s Bill White — formerly a driving force behind Nintendo’s NES marketing — showed that, while Nintendo may have pulled the blood and gore out of its Mortal Kombat, it left in the violent fighting and put it out for all ages.
Lincoln told the senators that “Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system”. White’s reply was that Sega, unlike Nintendo, had told parents what they were buying: “Sega had already instituted a rating system for its own games, and Mortal Kombat carried a rating suggesting play for those over age 13.” The argument even extended to the hardware. According to Sheff, Lincoln attacked a light gun sold for Sega’s machine, the Justifier, and White answered by producing Nintendo’s own bazooka-shaped Super Scope.
Sega’s argument was that its audience was no longer children. Sega of America’s president, Tom Kalinske, wrote in Sega Visions soon afterwards that the average Genesis player was 19, the average Sega CD owner 22, and that 72 per cent of the Sega CD market was over 18. Ken Williams of Sierra, whose Leisure Suit Larry 6 carried the same over-17 warning label as Night Trap, watched the hearing on C-SPAN and thought the argument had failed: “Sega’s arguments fell on deaf ears.” He wrote that a Sega representative “was told by a Congressman, in no uncertain terms, that Sega should clean up its act or Congress would do it for them.”
Night Trap’s side
The people who made Night Trap said the senators had misread it. Tom Zito, the president of Digital Pictures, wrote in the Washington Post that the hearing had shown “only 30 seconds of nightgown in 100 minutes of video”, and argued later that “these guys actually said in the hearing that the object of the game was to stalk and kill women. That is clearly not the object of the game.” Zito said he had been in the room, ready to testify, and was not called. Its designer, Rob Fulop, told Retro Gamer in 2007 that “there was a lot of misinformation and it was very unfairly dumped on.”
Sega withdrew the game from American shops in January 1994. Bill White explained that it “was developed as a parody of vampire melodramas. It became clear in December that the parody was misunderstood… For these reasons Night Trap was withdrawn from the market in January.” In Britain the same game carried a 15 certificate and stayed on sale, although Edge reported that Boots and Toys “R” Us had at first refused to stock it. Edge’s Mega-CD chart for March 1994 had it at number four.
The industry answers
The senators backed their warning with a bill. Sega Visions told readers in the spring of 1994 that Lieberman and Kohl were “sponsoring video game rating legislation”, and several states, including Connecticut, Florida, Washington and Michigan, were considering rating laws of their own. The companies had begun meeting at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and at the Senate hearing of 4 March an industry committee chaired by Jack Heistand of Electronic Arts announced that a rating system would be in place by the end of the year. Lincoln later remembered the first meeting of the industry’s leaders: “there were a lot of knives on the table that day - we certainly had ours.”
In April 1994 the companies formed the Interactive Digital Software Association. On 29 July it showed a joint Congressional hearing the new system: an independent Entertainment Software Rating Board, led by Arthur Pober, formerly of the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, with five age categories. The IDSA expected about 45 per cent of that Christmas’s new games to carry them. Sega’s own ratings were retired in its favour.
Not everyone in the industry was pleased. Computer Gaming World complained in June 1994 that the plan backed by the senators had been drawn up by the console companies “without significant input by personal computer-based publishers”, and that a panel reviewing every game in full before release would cost PC players “in terms of time, money and content”. A rival scheme aimed at computer games, the Recreational Software Advisory Council, was launched that October; it described a game’s violence, sex and language on a scale instead of giving it an age.
What followed
The ratings themselves became the next battleground, most loudly in 2005, when hidden sex scenes found in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas brought calls from Senator Hillary Clinton for an investigation (see ESRB). California went further than the senators of 1993 and passed a law against selling violent games to children. In 2011 the US Supreme Court struck it down, ruling that video games are protected speech under the First Amendment.
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 115, February 1994, p. 8: Johnny L. Wilson’s editorial on the hearings and the senators’ warning. Issue 119, June 1994, p. 12: Wilson on Lieberman and Kohl’s ratings plan and the PC publishers. Issue 125, December 1994, p. 14: the Recreational Software Advisory Council’s ratings.
- C-SPAN, “Video Game Violence”, 9 December 1993 (public record of the Senate hearing). https://www.c-span.org/program/senate-committee/video-game-violence/129470
- Edge issue 46, June 1997, pp. 60–61: Lieberman on how his interest began and on “participants” and “observers”; the hearing of December 1993 and “the nightmare before Christmas”.
- Edge issue 66, Christmas 1998, p. 81: the three accounts of how the hearings began, and Lieberman’s, with Bill Andresen and his son.
- David Sheff, Game Over: Press Start to Continue (GamePress, 1999), with new chapters by Andy Eddy: the rivalry at the hearing, Bill White and the rating, the light guns, Tom Zito’s Washington Post article and his later interview, the IDSA in April 1994, and Lincoln’s “knives on the table”.
- Sega Visions, August/September 1993, p. 88: the Videogame Rating Council and its MA-17 category.
- Sega Visions, April/May 1994, pp. 8–12: the industry committee, the Winter CES meetings, the announcement of 4 March, the state bills, the senators’ legislation, the Videogame Rating Council and its ratings; Tom Kalinske’s open letter; Bill White on Night Trap’s withdrawal; Ken Williams’s guest editorial.
- InterAction (Sierra On-Line), Spring 1994, p. 6: Ken Williams’s full article, including Leisure Suit Larry 6 and Sega’s warning label.
- Sega Visions, October/November 1994, p. 4: the joint Congressional hearing of 29 July, the IDSA’s members, Arthur Pober and the Entertainment Software Rating Board, the 45 per cent estimate, and the end of Sega’s own ratings.
- Retro Gamer issue 44, 2007, p. 78: Rob Fulop on Night Trap and the hearings.
- Edge issue 5, February 1994, p. 49: Night Trap as a 15-certificate game in Britain, and the retailers who at first refused it. Issue 6, March 1994, p. 19: the Mega-CD chart. Nintendo Magazine System issue 11, August 1993, p. 99: reader’s letter on Night Trap’s 15 certificate.
- Edge issue 153, September 2005, p. 75: Hillary Clinton’s call for an enquiry into San Andreas’s rating. Issue 232, October 2011, p. 32: Steven Poole on the Supreme Court’s ruling against the Californian law.
- Jimmy Maher, “The Ratings Game, Part 2: The Hearing”, The Digital Antiquarian, April 2021 (web, secondary): the date of the hearing and Lincoln’s testimony on Night Trap. https://www.filfre.net/2021/04/the-ratings-game-part-2-the-hearing/