On 13 September 1993, “Mortal Monday”, Acclaim released the same arcade game on Nintendo’s and Sega’s consoles, and the two cartridges disagreed about blood. On the Super NES the red spray of Midway’s coin-op had become grey “sweat”, and four of its killing moves had been swapped for tamer ones. On the Mega Drive the gore was hidden behind a cheat code, and Sega’s box carried an age rating instead. Within two months the bloodier version was outselling the cleaner one two to one, Nintendo was fielding complaints that it had made itself a censor, and in December clips of the game were shown at a US Senate hearing on violence in video games. The industry’s answer to that hearing was the ESRB, the ratings board still used in North America.
Fast facts
- Game: Mortal Kombat (Midway, arcade, 1992); home versions by Acclaim, released 13 September 1993.
- The issue: the Fatalities, finishing moves that killed the beaten fighter on screen, and the blood.
- Super NES: blood turned to grey sweat at Nintendo’s insistence; Fatalities renamed Finishing Moves, four of them replaced.
- Mega Drive: blood and Fatalities locked behind a code, A, B, A, C, A, B, B; rated MA-13 by Sega’s own Videogame Rating Council.
- Hearings: 9 December 1993 and 4 March 1994, led by Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl (see Congressional Hearings 1993).
- Outcome: the Interactive Digital Software Association (April 1994) and the ESRB, whose ratings were in the shops for Christmas 1994.
Two cartridges
Players expected Nintendo to soften the game before anyone had seen it. “I heard Nintendo will most probably cut out the fatalities (death moves), and all the blood and stuff. Is this true?” a reader asked Super Play in July 1993. The magazine replied that Nintendo had “traditionally toned down violent games in the past” to protect its reputation, and that it was “quite ironic — after all, the game is spectacularly popular simply because it is so violent”.
The change was Nintendo’s decision, not Acclaim’s. David Sheff’s history of the company says Nintendo “made Acclaim Entertainment — the licensee that published Mortal Kombat in home formats — take the frequent red blood spray that accompanied blows and fatalities in the original arcade game and convert it into gray ‘sweat’”. Nintendo Power’s review in October 1993 set out the rest: “Fatality Moves are now called Finishing Moves and four of them have been replaced from the arcade version”. Instead of tearing out a heart, Kano punched through the chest; Sub-Zero no longer pulled off a head but froze his victim into a crumbling ice sculpture.
Sega went the other way. Computer and Video Games, which reviewed the Mega Drive cartridge first, told readers it would be “free of gore and guts” as sold, but that the programmers at Probe “have included a secret cheat mode that will open the flood gates for the red stuff to flow and, more importantly, the killer moves to be executed”. The code, A, B, A, C, A, B, B on the code screen, became playground knowledge (see Cheat Codes). Sega also put an age on the box. Its Videogame Rating Council, set up that summer, rated the game MA-13, and the rating mattered in some homes: an eleven-year-old wrote to Sega Visions that December that his mother would only buy games rated GA, for general audiences, so he could play Mortal Kombat in the arcade but not at home.
Players chose the blood
Sheff recorded the result: in the two months after Mortal Monday “three million Mortal Kombat games sold, breaking sales records for 16-bit games, and the more violent Sega version outsold the Nintendo version two to one”. Ed Boon, the game’s co-creator, later told Retro Gamer: “When we found out that the blood would have to be replaced with ‘sweat’, we knew that version was doomed.”
Nintendo’s caution did not win it much credit either. Howard Lincoln, then Nintendo of America’s senior vice-president, told the senators in December that the company had “been criticized by thousands of young players for insisting that the death sequences be removed from this game”. Years later he told Andy Eddy that parents had complained too:
Instead of getting a lot of letters back from parents praising our position, we got a huge amount of criticism — not only by gamers, but even by parents saying that we had set ourselves up to be censors. [They claimed] that wasn’t our job, and that they were offended by that.
The Super NES game was not a failure with everyone. When Nintendo Power’s readers voted on the games of 1993, they named it the best overall Super NES game, by five votes. The magazine said it had “rose above the fray” of “all the controversy over Finishing Moves and amounts of blood”.
In the Senate
On 9 December 1993 Senators Lieberman and Kohl held a hearing on violence in video games, and Mortal Kombat and Night Trap were the games they showed. The two console makers used it to attack each other. Lincoln set out what Nintendo had done: “To meet our game guidelines, we insisted that one of our largest licensees, Acclaim Entertainment, remove the blood and death sequences present in the arcade version before we would approve this game.” Sega’s Bill White, in Sheff’s account, replied 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”, while Sega’s version carried a rating for players over 13.
The senators wanted ratings and threatened legislation if the industry did not provide them. At a second hearing, on 4 March 1994, an industry committee promised a rating system by the end of the year. The publishers formed the Interactive Digital Software Association in April, and the independent Entertainment Software Rating Board was shown to a joint Congressional hearing on 29 July; Sega Visions told its readers the ratings would be on the shelves by Christmas. The Congressional Hearings 1993 and ESRB entries tell that story in full.
What Nintendo did next
Lincoln told Eddy that Nintendo had been “hurt in the marketplace by Mortal Kombat” and drew a lesson from it: “There are some things that we just have a hard time with, but in the main I don’t think we’ll put ourselves in another Mortal Kombat situation, and we’ll be much more selective on what battles we do fight.” The sequel showed it. When Mortal Kombat II reached the Super NES in 1994, Nintendo Power announced that it “has it all. All the moves! Fatality, Babality, Friendship” and dismissed the previous year’s fuss: “Anyone who thinks you’ll need a mop to clean up after it is seriously misinformed.”
Sources
- Super Play issue 9, July 1993, Gamefreak letters: the reader’s question about the Super NES version and the magazine’s answer.
- Computer and Video Games issue 141, August 1993, p. 48: Mega Drive review (Probe Software; the gore cheat; out 13 September, “Mortal Monday”).
- Nintendo Power issue 53, October 1993: Super NES review (Finishing Moves; four replaced; Rayden, Sub-Zero, Kano and Johnny Cage). Issue 60, May 1994: Nintendo Power Awards for 1993 (Best Overall, Super NES). Issue 63, August 1994: the Super NES Mortal Kombat II.
- Sega Visions, December 1993: reader’s letter on the MA-13 rating. April/May 1994 and October/November 1994: the industry committee, the hearing of 4 March, the hearing of 29 July and the ratings due by Christmas, as set out in the ESRB entry.
- David Sheff, Game Over: Press Start to Continue (GamePress, 1999), with new chapters by Andy Eddy: Mortal Monday and the sales in the first two months (afterword); the grey “sweat”, Lincoln on the parents’ letters and on Nintendo’s policy, Bill White at the hearing and Sega’s rating (Eddy’s chapter).
- Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, pp. 27–30, “Blood Simple: the history of Mortal Kombat”: Ed Boon on the Super NES version.
- Jimmy Maher, “The Ratings Game, Part 2: The Hearing”, The Digital Antiquarian, April 2021 (web, secondary), an edited transcript of the hearing of 9 December 1993: Lincoln’s testimony on the “blood and death sequences” and the criticism from “thousands of young players”. https://www.filfre.net/2021/04/the-ratings-game-part-2-the-hearing/
- 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