Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 77: The History of Video Game Censorship

Episode Date: October 25, 2016

Like every type of media still in its early years, gaming is viewed (by some) as a world-destroying force bent on stealing our time and warping our innocent minds. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Henry Gilbert and Mikel Reparaz as the crew traces how our anxieties over this new form of entertainment have caused society to push back and demand sometimes-hilarious changes. It's bowdleriffic! Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week on Retronauts, we're coming to take your video games away. Hello, everybody. I'm your host, Bob Mackey for this episode of Retronauts, And today's subject is the history of censorship in gaming. Let's see who else is here before I talk more about why I chose this topic. Who's across from me as usual? Hi, it's me, your pal, Uncle Jeremy. Ooh, okay. Is that like Uncle Miltie?

I don't know. That's just what a lot of kids call me. That are related to me, I should say. If you compare yourself to Milton Burl, you better watch out because there's one thing you need to worry about. But we'll talk about that later. No, no. Who else is here? Rival podcast host slash Sonic Weapon, Michael Rappar.

Are you coming here to take me down from the inside? I am. Oh, wow. Okay. I should be worried. Just like Shang Sung in Mortal Kombat, too. Is that how it works? Yes. I need to read my history of Mortal Kombat again. You do.

And who else is here today? Intern for Senator Joseph Lieberman, Henry Gilbert. Wow. Were you the one that pointed out Nighttrap as a snuff film? I put it on his desk. Yes. All those girls are really murdered everybody. Sir, you need to look at this.

Ain't a play to really die. Conspiracy, anybody? So, starting on the dark note, I mean, this is going to be a slightly dark episode because we're going to talk about certain events that might have shaped the landscape of media in general, but I did want to do an episode about censorship and gaming because it's always been a thing. And in terms of my use of the word censorship, please don't complain. It is a very broad term. It's just addressing the changes made to a game, self-imposed or not, to make it more palatable for a particular cultural climate.

So that is my definition of censorship for this episode. And I mean, we could do an entire series of episodes about how many things were changed because up until fairly recently, I think like almost every game saw some changes in terms of content coming over to America if it was a Japanese release in the first place. So I did want to do a brief overview of just how video games were not alone in being censored. The history of media is when new media comes out, the general reaction is for people to say, like, it's going to kill us all. We must push back against this. We must fight against this new media because we like the things that we like, and this is frightening. So I did want to talk about a few things because, like, even books.

were a scary prospect for people who were not used to the idea of written fiction. And the general idea was like, why would you read a book full of lies? Why wouldn't you just read the Bible, which is true? I mean, this is exactly what people thought at the time. Last of the Mohicans is killing America. Yes, exactly. It's warping our children's brains. And so that's the reason most of the first popular novels were epistolary novels.

They were written in a letter format as if to say, like, this could have conceivably happened. You're reading like correspondence between people. And there would always be a preface like, this is. meant to guide you morally down your path in life is fiction. So, I mean, there was people worried about, oh, these people reading books, they're going to have their minds warp. They're going to think about sex and violence all the time, and they're reading like Jane Eyre and Pamela and things like that.

Yes, I do have a master's degree in literature, people, and this is the only place I can use it. But I'm glad Henry is here because in terms of comics, it's really funny to think about where comics started. I mean, comic books originally started as bound collections of newspaper strips. And the history of comics in America kind of started where everyone else started. They weren't just superheroes. There were crime comics.

I believe the first actual published graphic novel was a crime story actually illustrated by a black artist. So there were crime comics, horror comments, romance comics, things like that. But again, moral outrage. These comic books are warping children's minds and all of a sudden the comic code comes into existence. This is a very short history, by the way. Thanks, Frederick Wortham. Yes, exactly. Seduction of the Innocent was a, was a.

The short film, I believe, that was made about this. Okay. I've only seen the short film that ends with, like, a child gouging another child's eye out with a stick or something like that. That was a- Wasn't that Takashi Mika? I'm sure he made the remake. There was, like, a famous comic, I forget the title, but it included, like, a woman's eye being menaced with a hypodermic needle, which doesn't... I'm certain it was an EC book. But so the thing you're talking about, seduction of the Innocent was a book by a very prominent at the time.

psychologist, a children psychologist who said how he was attesting the comic books were ruining the minds of children most specifically horror in crime books popularized by E.C., but he wasn't a fan of the homosexual overtones of comics like Batman or Wonder Woman either.

And the video you're referring to was basically like the reifer madness of that time made in response to it, which ends with an implying like, yeah, this kid's going to kill another kid because he saw somebody get stabbed in a crime comic. And that led to the creation, there were a ton of, you know, hearings, Senate hearings, and all that,

and it eventually led to self-governance and the creation of the Comic Code Authority, which basically made everything E.C. Comics published illegal, made superhero comics much softer and introduced things like in Batman comics, they introduced an old aunt to hang out with Batman and got rid of Alfred because they're like, the time it was like. Three generations of homosexuals, how dare they? I suppose it was seen as like... You can only have two.

I suppose at the time it was seen as like a gay stereotype that a rich man living with his young ward and then his also gay butler. So instead they get rid of it... Sitting around in dressing gowns. Yeah. And they get rid of the butler and then they introduce Batgirl and Catwoman more as a sexual thing for Batman. But anyway, so that was the response to it then. And eventually it calmed down.

It almost killed comic books as a major medium until it came back. in the wacky, crazy 60s. Yeah, and I mean, Mad Magazine exists because of the comic code because they're like, we still want to do our weird, gross, subversive stuff, or we're not going to call it a comic. It's now a magazine, which is not... Black and white, so it softens the blow. But it's important that we mention the comic code because always what happens was, in the face of possible government censorship, there is a self-appointed, self-enforce board of censorship

that industries usually create in order to avoid, you know, being banned outright by entire governments and things like that. Well, I think that at least from an American perspective, I think both with comics and video games and then with music too that you see this thing of, they walk up to the edge of the government getting a hand in art, specifically in creating like the art board or whatever and having governed mandated censorship. And then they just kind of whisper to the corporations, just censor yourselves. We don't want to open this kind of worms. And so they end up doing that anyway. But that it was the case of Comic Code, which was in effect. until, I mean, it was basically ignored and weakened and softened into the 70s and 80s.

And then lots of big stuff started being published without the Comic Code authority on it. And by 2000, even Marvel and D.C. just dumped it. Yeah, I eventually went away. I did notice that. I never really read a lot of superhero comics, but I eventually noticed the Comic Code did go away. But I think it's still on, like, Archie Comics. Like, Sonic is still A.O.K. folks. Yeah, it might be. I have not. I had heard it was pretty much dead.

So another, oh, Jeremy. I was just going to say, yeah, there was a lot of pushback against the Comics Code in the 70s because, you know, creators wanted to address serious topics in both Spider-Man and Green Arrow, I think. Both had stories involving, you know, drug use. And it was, you know, commentaries against, like, cautionary tales against. It was what the moral guardians would want. And I think that was really what sort of revealed the inanity of the Comics Code Authority. Because they wanted to show, they wanted to make really what was kind of a, in Green Arrow specifically, they made, was a very cornball PSA about how heroin is bad. But the very existence of the comic codes rules were you can't even say heroin to say it's bad. You'd be saying we're smack. They just have to say drugs like he's on drugs. That applied to a lot of other things like for Marvel Comics. They didn't have zombies.

They had Zovembis. They didn't have the mafia. they had the Magia. God, so were zombies too close to the occult for Marvel? Yes. Yeah, okay. So we're going to get to, I mean, again, it's all what the culture wants to enforce, the popular culture at large. I didn't realize the Magia was actually a response to the Comics Code Authority.

Yes. Or maybe they just like, thinly veiled, yeah. Like the Kuiazza. So a few more instances of censorship in terms of mediums, or media rather. Movies in America were pretty, you know, there was no governance over what kind of content. If you look at things like Fritz Long's, what's the word I'm looking for, the movie? Metropolis. There you go, thank you.

Metropolis. There's like nudity in it and stuff like that, like really salacious gowns and you can see breasts and things like that. This happened before the Hays coat came into effect. And essentially it made it so these movies had to abide by all of these rules, again, that were enforcing the cultural values of the time, which in this case were pretty racist. And one of the rules was like, no miscegenation, no black or white relations should be mixing, no race mixing at all. We don't want this in our white, white movies. So, again, these cultures, these culture values were not shared by everybody, but they were the kind of dominant values at the time. And it's funny how certain directors love to find ways to sneak things past this.

Like Albert Hitchcock, for instance, you couldn't show a toilet in a movie, for example, with the Hayes Code, or a toilet flushing, I believe. So he made it so, I believe, Norman Bates tears up the letter of the girl he kills rights and flushes it down the toilet after he kills her. So that was an important part of the movie and he fought them on that. He won. So he broke new ground and showing flushing toilets and movies. So thank you offered Hitchcock for doing that. But I mean, noir movies, all kinds of great subvers of directors, love to break these rules or find ways to break them cleverly. Isn't that also why, like, in movies and TV shows at the time, you always had husbands and wives sleeping in separate beds?

Exactly, yes. I mean, and even in movies, too, you would see that. And, I mean, it was always like something you would giggle at, like, later in life because unless your parents were really on the rocks, I don't think they slept in separate beds. You'd have to really be on the rocks to just invest in separate beds. Like, we're going out buying separate beds, honey. Is it time to push the beds together again? What's that Ned Flanders?

Or, uh, I think that might predate Ned Flamers. Okay. Yeah. So, again, with movies, we have the MPAA coming into being as a self-governing board. But again, um, they have value. use that not a lot of other people share for a long time. It was really hard to get content involving, you know,

gay relationships in the movies without them immediately marking it an X rating or something like that. So, again, they are reflecting popular values, and in this sense, these are Christian values for some people. Yeah, the documentary, this film is not yet rated, really dug into a lot of the hypocrisy in there. Often,

on the sex side of things, they would, they made a differentiation between the explicitness of a sex act between a heterosexual couple would be allowed, but that same level of explicitness between a gay couple would not be allowed. Yeah, that's a great documentary, by the way. Yeah, and in terms of comics, you should really read the Tencent Plague.

It's a fantastic, super long overview of how censorship changed comics in America. So I have one more example of self-governance in terms of content. In this case, I don't believe any content was exactly changed. It was more of a warning, and that was the infamous explicit lyrics sticker, which I believe was spearheaded by Tipper Gore. Who seems like the ultimate buzzkill, and I'm not surprised why Al left her eventually, because if you go back, hey, if you go back to these old videos of her, like, freaking out about music, she just seems like unhinged. And for things that are frankly, I think innocuous in the long run, I mean, this is the pre-internet age. Any child could go online onto YouTube and look up any NWA song on their own if they wanted to.

But at this point, you needed there were gatekeepers, then that was the music stores and things like that. So there was an explicit lyrics sticker, in this case, put on things. I don't think there were any lyrics change. I know that whoever wrote Two Live Crew, they had like a First Amendment sort of battle, and I think they won that in terms of lyrics, explicit lyrics for, they did the song Mesa Horny and all that thing. I mean, it wasn't good. That's probably the most tame song. Yes.

What you do see now are alternate versions of albums sold at like Walmart or something. Yeah, you're right. Walmart will not stock the explicit. lyric albums, but also who buys albums at a store? Like, you know, you'd be a surprise. Yeah, but I was in a target yesterday, and I had the thought of walking by like CDs and thought like, oh, how retro, like CDs, like a thing you buy. But people do still buy them.

I don't want to sound like an elitist who's moved past CDs. But I do recall, like, you know, in my stupid teen years, I bought the first Eminem CD. And there was the cleaned up version of it that they, sold at stores, which it was just him basically re-recording new lyrics to half of his... Wow. Half of the songs. It's like the airplane edit. The first you listen to in an airplane.

There's one song, it is one of his least popular songs on that album, but it's where the story is that he gives a girl too many mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms, and she goes into a coma. Oh, that old yarn.

But then in the, but so in the clean-up version, she's allergic to regular mushrooms that he puts on a pizza. And that is what happens. It's like the radio Disney version. How about you change the lyrics, too? I want to hug and kiss you.

That's not everyone would enjoy that. That's beautiful. So, again, this episode is meant to be, those are some examples. I mean, I just wanted to point out that video games are not alone in being fought against in terms of, oh, this isn't right. Our children are going to kill each other. This is going to warp our values. I think people are calming down much more than they used to. But I want to explore various cases of this over the years and how I want to show people who might be a little upset about.

common cases of censorship these days that it used to be a lot worse. We're actually in like a very good era in terms of people not sanitizing things as much as they used to. And I do want to point out this episode is mainly going to deal with the American side of things because I was going to attempt to jump into other censorship in like Europe and Germany and Australia. But that's a whole another can of worms that I think you can do an episode for every country. And Australia in particular seems like the most reactionary in terms of video game contents. You guys have heard stories and read stories about like this game is banned and if you live in Australia you have to order

your games in New Zealand and things like that any other examples of that I mean I know it feels like their government really is kind of behind in terms of this accepting video games as entertainment I believe they lightened up on it but they for a certain time I believe it was under the same ratings

board that they did their movies and so when it got the 18 I believe it was rating for a movie or or a video game you didn't sell it there but it was a simple as just going to New Zealand and buying it. Not that that's like, yeah, just go to New Zealand. That seems pretty easy, right?

Must be right next door. Unless I'm wrong, like, there was a push to have games rated the same way as movies because their games ratings just didn't have an 18 plus. So you couldn't market anything there that would be rated an 18 plus. I see. And that happened with, like, Fallout 3 was

unavailable in Australia for a long time. GTA 3 had to be toned down. I actually have an Australian copy of GTA 3 that like I ordered special for a feature at games radar that like you can't pick up prostitutes there's not much blood uh yeah are they are they afraid of recidivism there like well everyone here came from a criminal stock oh wow we don't want to influence anyone on duly all of our Australian subscribers just unsubscribe yeah if you're an Australian and let us know what the censorship is like there I don't know if it's as draconian as it used to be but

I'm feeling it's still a little backwards in terms of I've been I've seen stories about Australian bands as recently as a few years ago, so I can't remember what it was for, but it's not been that long, so that may still be in effect. And then there's stuff you read about, you know, Germany cuts a lot of stuff you would expect. And also, like, though it's not censored in Japan, I believe there's zero rating is pretty much the same as an AO rating is here with the SRB. And I think, as I recall, it's not, I mean, sex is definitely a thing there too that will get causes zero rating, but

like decapitation, just any, like, dismemberment is a big no-no in the, we're going to get into why, and the true story behind that is terrible. Yes, yes. I do want to address that because I just, you know, really found out about it recently, and I think more people need to know about it.

So, yes, I want to ask you guys, can you recall the first time we actually picked up on a game that there was censorship in? Like, when was the first time you noticed? Like, this could be censored. And in terms of my my own experience, I remember playing Earthbound, and I believe the first

boss you fight, usually when you fight a boss, you go up to them, you talk to them, they like diss you a bunch before the fight starts. And his last thing was like, don't go to heaven. And I was like, are they, are they winking at me? Like, they wanted to say, go to hell. And things like, things like Chrono Trigger, where you pour soda on Toma's

grave or whatever, like, it was obvious. Like, you, this was alcohol. Like, you were saying, go to hell. Jeremy, can you think of anything you picked up on as a kid or a teen or whatever? You're like, they, They changed this, didn't they? This had a cross in it at one point or something like that. I mean, Castlevania, obviously, that's a huge one with the Christian iconography.

I'm trying to remember when I discovered Castlevania had censorship to, like, statuary being more fully clad in the American version or Medusa losing her femininity altogether in Castlevania 3. But I didn't know that at the time. I did think it was kind of weird that, hey, why is this Medusa a dude? Madudsa. Madudsa. What? Hey, they need love to.

But, yeah, the Toma Levine pouring soda over, having you pour soda over his grave, like that, that stood out. This Mr. Pib holds my memories. I remember actually being surprised that Galgo 13 was not censored on any of the ice. Yes, yes. It really slipped through. That was kind of a, that was like a kind of a school yard, like, Teehee. because someone told me like, oh, yeah, you go and you smoke cigarettes to gain health.

It's the best game ever. I was really curious, and I rented it, and then I got to a sex scene. It was like, what? Am I remembering correctly in that you're actually good at GoGo 13, the NES game? I have finished Golgo 13. Oh, dear, Lord, Jeremy. That makes him the best Goldville 13 player around. God, you're going to be recruited by an actual sniper society.

I finished it when I was a kid when it was still relatively new, and I picked it up a few years ago, and it's like, I don't think I made it past level one. I think it's one of those. They reversed the jump-in-attack button. Yeah. Those bastards. And that's the ads for it, or if I can just take a little aside into speaking trivia. The ads for it was like, so much action, you'll wear out the B button.

It's like, the B button is jumping your stupid game. Even the ad people thought it was wrong. They wanted to change. Michael, how about you, anything that stuck out to you as someone growing up being like, you change this? There's probably a bunch of things that I'll remember after the fact. So I'll just say the, I guess I was old enough by the time Final Fantasy 3 slash 6 came out that like the cafes everywhere were just kind of like, really, they're going to go to a cafe and drink milk?

Yes. They're not going to go to a bar or, yeah, and like just realizing like, yeah, that happens in a lot of Nintendo games, doesn't it? Yeah. It's just like, yeah, a lot of people spend time in cafes. It was like that in Earthbound as well. I think the localizer was just like so winky because you go into a bar and there were like drunk middle age people and they're like, I've had too much caffeine today.

It's like, yeah, okay, I know. I've had too much caffeine. I don't look like you. I'm usually vibrating and very anxious. I'm sorry, Henry. Anything from you? Yeah, you know, it's tough. I think I definitely remember in River City Ransom when I saw butts.

I was like, I never see butts in other games. It was more of realizing perhaps other games cut them out when this one somehow kept it in when you go to the sauna or the gym in that game. But I also think, and Final Fantasy 3 slash 6 as well, but that was because I was making friends I didn't have the internet this was only like 96 so not many people I knew

didn't have the internet but I had made a new friend who I was 14 but his and he was too but his older brother he was online and so he was like this we thought he was the coolest guy who knew everything because he could just read online

hey do you know Shiva is like shows her boobs in the real Final Fantasy 3 which is called 6 and we're like what how many Final Fantasy This is, how did you know these things? You're magic. So I think that might have been one of the first times I really realized it.

Yeah, I think there's something to the notion that you started to realize that games were censored when you came across games that weren't. Bionic Commando is that way for me because you fight Hitler and he calls you a damn fool. We're all like, and then we blew up Hitler, Master D. Master D. Then we blew up Hitler and his head exploded gorely. Just chunks of it. Other games don't do this. And actually, I think that may be where we realize.

like, you know, they censor games and somehow this one didn't get censored. So I wanted to, I linked you guys to an article, and it's cool if you didn't get a chance to check it out. But this article has been on the internet for, I swear to God, 20 years, and it's still up in its original format on, like, tripod or whatever. It's called the expurgation of Maniac Mansion. And as a kid, just, like, as soon as I got on the internet, I'm like, I want to read about Maniac Mansion, who's written about it, are there more Maniac Mansions I need to know about? and this is one of the first things that came up, is essentially someone, I believe his name is Douglas Crockford, and he was working on the port for the NES.

And it's basically an account of how contradictory and strange and just frustrating the censorship was that was being enforced by Nintendo. And there are some changes to Maniac Mansion that don't necessarily ruin the game, but make it a little different than the PC version. Of course, they take away some of the classical art that features female nudity. They take down Dead Cousin Ted's Playboy Mummy Centerful,

with no nudity. It's just a cute joke. And in the PC version, I guess this is a fair cut. I mean, Nurse Edna, does want to have sex with the college students that come into her room probably without their consent because she says, you're lucky I didn't tie you to my bed when she captures you. So in the NES version,

she just comes off as like a stern scold. Like, you're lucky I didn't call your parents, which, yes, I can understand why that's not Nintendo game. There was one line, because I read that article too, and that was cut when you call up Nurse Edna and don't say anything. and she's like, is this an obscene phone call? Because there's no heavy breathing.

Yes, exactly. She was a real per- Here, let me show you. And she's a pervin day of the tentacle, too, so that's her character. But one other change that was weird was, I mean, I will link to this article, please read it. It's a really good insider account of what it was like to work on a game that was, you know, that needed censorship. And one of them was the scum system was what Maniac Mansion ran on. And it stands for a script, sorry, script creation utility for Maniac Mansion.

And in the credits it says NES scum system by and the people who made the scum system for the NES and the people would be like, sorry, Nintendo would be like, why does this say NES scum system? What's this mean? They explain this. And like, we don't know if we want the word NES being next to scum. So I don't even think they mention scum. It's like you're calling a scum. Yes, exactly. So I could be wrong about this, but either just says scum system or it's not in there at all. But NES is not in your scum system in that credit sequence. So yeah, I mean, they were very, very touchy. But again, They had to be paying attention to all the content in the game, and a lot of it did slip through. So, like the Hays Code, the NES Censorship Code had a number of, like, you know, rules to follow. And I'll go over these really quick, and maybe we can think of a few things that didn't follow them. So, no, Nintendo would not approve of any games that includes sexually suggestive or explicit content, including rape and or nudity. I don't think there was a lot of nudity that I can recall in NES games. In the Japanese version of Galgo 13, the hotel sequel, yeah, sequences have nipple. The American versions do not, but they did not cut out the very obvious silhouettes coming together.

That's how babies are made. And then the health bar refilling, which then led to a schoolyard rumor that that's what was happening in Zelda 2 when you go into the woman's house to refill your health. That's right. Oh, man, Zelda, yeah, I forgot about that. And the previously mentioned River City Ransom butts. Yeah, I think the lady was giving Link special hugs. That's what my mom told me. So another one is they do not approve of games that contain language or depictions,

which specifically denigrates members of either sex. And what was this in the first line in Google 13, just a woman or whatever? No, that's Ninja Guiden. Oh, Ninja Guiden, yes. Yeah, just a girl. Get out of here. Rio Hayabusa, you're on red alert for this one. So they cannot depict random, gratuitous, and or excessive violence.

We already mentioned Hitler's head exploding. Depit graphic illustration of death. Depick domestic violence and or abuse. And one of these I can think of is in Mother 2 slash Earthbound. After the prologue when you bring Poki and Picky back to their parents' house, their dad chases them upstairs. And in the American version, you just hear the sound of a door slamming. And the Japanese version, you heard the sound of them getting spanked.

So that was one thing they changed for the American version that I can think of. So that actually makes more sense than a door slamming. Yes, exactly. Like, why else would he be chasing them upstairs? So games that reflect ethnic, religious, nationalistic, or sexual stereotypes. or language. This includes symbols that are related to any type of racial, religious, nationalistic, or ethnic groups, such as crosses, pentagrams, gods, or gods.

But apparently Roman mythological gods are okay. And they had no problems throwing Hindus under the bus either because it was like, your gods are just silly, fun creatures we can summon in battle. Like, yeah. Religion isn't real. Yeah. This is something that makes Bina Commando interesting because they did take out a lot of swastikas. That's right, yeah.

And, like, you know, a lot of German Nazi symbolism. But, you know, then they kept Hitler exploding at the end. So. I like to think the sensors just didn't make it that far. Me too. Well, you know, it's OK, it's Capcom. I don't know how it was done back then, but when people submit games to ESRB for ratings, the ESRB does not, like, play these games in their entirety. They're given, like, a videotape where the publisher says, like,

here are the objectionable material in the game. Here's the objectionable material. they'll hear the parts that will cause a problem. So let's list it for you what the issues are and give you like kind of a synopsis of it. This has so much comic mischief in it. It's going to blow your minds. And it's expected that you're not, that they're not being lied to.

Yeah. And if they are. There's an assumption of faith. Yeah. And if you let, if you disrupt that faith, there will be consequences for that. Like the SRB is not going to trust you as much. I wanted to point out, it was strange that like, you know, everybody knows about Castlevania.

The crucifixes got turned into boomerangs. They were censored outright from the game. Crosses were taken out of ducktails. And yet, what is on the front of Link's original shield? Oh, yeah, you're right. He's a big old Christian. And so Major's mask when he gets to the Islamic Crescent Moon on his shield. But they did take that off.

We'll get to that later, though. But there's no Christ in the world of Hyrule, so it's not a Christian symbol so much. There's official Link to the Past art of him literally praying. in church to a crucifix on his knees, like official Nintendo art. So Link is a Christian in case you're wondering. In Dragon Quest 2, I believe it was, when you started having party members

who would be walking around in caskets behind you if they were dead. Like, those had tridents on them that I feel certain were crosses in the Japanese version. They might have been turned into ghosts at some point just to avoid the cross thing altogether, like a little floaty ghosts. It could be a Hindu thing again

because the Hindus have like a sacred. Trident. But you also go to literal churches to resurrect your team and talk to a nun. Yeah, they play very churchy music, too, with organs and everything. Yeah, now they have their own symbol. It's like an eagle sort of thing. Yeah, it's like the erdic or erdrick or Lodo or whatever you want to say. Yeah, I prefer roto.

So we also have, they will not approve games that use profanity or obscenity in any form or incorporate language or gestures that could be offensive by prevailing public standards and taste. So take that as you will. Not a lot of cursing. I mean, we do have, I think the harshest curse I saw on a Nintendo game was damn. And that was probably by on Commando. I'm sure it popped up at least more than that, maybe one other time. But they were pretty good about language, mainly because things weren't translated properly. So I think a lot of curses didn't make the cuts. I like to think that somewhere in the secret tunnels in Final Fantasy Four, there's like a dwarf that nobody's discovered that just says damn ass hell. Yeah. So games, they will not prove of games that incorporate or encourage the use of illegal drugs, smoking materials, and or alcohol. Nintendo does not allow a beer or cigarette ad to be placed on an arena, stadium or playing field, wall, or fence in a sports game. So it's funny that I feel like the Japanese culture, I don't mean to broadly stereotype, but I feel like they're much more comfortable with drinking in terms of it being a normal human behavior. and in terms of their games

there's a lot of drinking and things like Dragon Quest and a lot of games where it wouldn't normally show up like in Wario Land too one of Wario's powers is essentially him being drunk but instead of being drunk

in the American version he's now crazy Wario and I think it's like Final Fantasy Adventure is Crunk Wario yeah is it Final Fantasy adventure that there's the banana smuggling side quest I confuse them all the time but in the Japanese version

it's literally heroin Like in that cutesy little game There's a heroin smuggling side quest So yeah They were really careful to sanitize this stuff I can't think of anything that really made the cut I mean This is why Virtual Fighter could have never been

On an Nintendo console You would have had to have had Soda Master shouldn't be Soda Master Oh man his teeth are so bad You know that is I never even thought of how strange it was To not see like beer ads in stadiums And playing in a sports game

You still kind of you don't see that in even like Madden or whatever. I feel like it'll still get you like references to alcohol or smoking is going to get you of an M rating these days. And games cannot include subliminal political messages or overt political statements. So they can't be subliminal, liminal, or superliminal. And it's weird that they have a game called North versus South

where conceivably the South could win the Civil War. So I wonder how they thought about that. They said all the slaves free in celebration. I'm like, all right, guys, we won. They also had like a... an American Revolution strategy game. Like, it was by Kowai, it was on the same lines as Nobunaga's ambition.

Liberty or death? That could be, yeah. Where England could have won. Yeah, and I mean, I guess there was the Sox, the Cat Rocks, the Hill game in which some of the enemies were like Richard Nixon and other Republicans, and I guess there was some anxiety.

And maybe that's why the game never got released. I'm not sure if it was worthy of release. It didn't look very good. RIP socks, by the way, you're a true hero. I bet it's also very bad. Yes, it seems like it was. It seems like it would have been a 90s artifact that belonged just securely in the movies. Yeah, I mean, Sox Mania didn't last very long, I think.

It was strictly 1992. So as we talked about, of course, someone had to be looking at these games. We're not sure what their process was. It could just have been an internal thing like, hey, hey, Tom and PR, play this for half an hour and tell us when anything freaks you out. But we talked about some stuff that slipped by. I think the Mac Venture games were surprisingly mature than ES ports of these games. It's like deja vu, you're like drugging people, you're tying people up.

There's like people locked up in trunks. You can shoot people. You can even shoot yourself. One of the things that scared the hell out of me as a kid was Shadowgate because I was just playing around. It's like, I wonder what happened if I used a sword on myself. And there's like a graphic depiction of you cutting yourself apart and blood spilling out and you're dead now. So maybe the fact that it was just text meant that they can get away with it. But these games are remarkably mature and they got away with a lot of stuff, especially deja vu,

which was like a super seedy noir send-up that still had the grittiness of a noir movie. Well, deja vu, there's something that was, I think, printed in Nintendo Power that always sticks with me. They did like a strategy thing. And he's like talking to a woman and they had the text like,

sweet as a lemon. I ended the conversation with a swift right hook. It's like, you punched a woman? Yes, I guess you can punch women in this game. That's right, yeah. I wonder, too, if they were just going through different channels for American published things than Japanese, things that came through Japan instead.

Like, were they going past different guards of stuff who maybe were either just more lax or more, or there were smaller teams, who knows? Yeah, it was such an unorganized process back then. I think a little background, though, to Nintendo's very strict rules, it has to at least be partially in response to them just trying to not be Atari with the NES in general. and the Atari was fan, not that Atari, like, themselves wanted to publish Custer's Revenge or disgusting junk like that, but it got, like, big news at the time that you could play that or beat him and eat them on their system. I guess the Swedish erotica games. So many.

I think Nintendo was just trying to have a more tight grip on it to make it clear to parents, too, like, no, this is for your children, this is safe for your children, not like that scuzzy Atari. Sorry. What if my son wants bubble bath babes for Christmas? What do I tell him? I'll buy him Warriors Woods instead. It builds strong bones. So what else is happening here?

Nintendo started to look bad by the early 90s as gamers, quote-unquote, grew up. Not really. They just wanted trash in terms of violence and sex. But they wanted these things, and Nintendo was beginning to look like backwards and not great in terms of their competition to Sega Genesis, who was like, yes, put your gross stuff on our system. Even though Sega did censor some stuff themselves, they weren't completely out of this. censorship game. But again, I think Mortal Kombat, of all things, really turned the tide because Nintendo, their version of Mortal Kombat looked good, but you had the white blood, the censored fatalities. I mean, you were really going to play that game for the fatalities. And almost

the gameplay, yes, I mean, some of them were intact, but there were the ones that did not involve dismemberment or like hearts being pulled out or heads were being ripped off or whatever. I mean, as a kid growing up at that time, that is when you were becoming savvy enough at age 10 to 12 or whatever, to know that Nintendo, to pick up on Sega's marketing message as well, that Nintendo is giving you less than what other people can give you in terms of violence or sex or edginess in general edginess. And so, I mean, that was totally Sega's marketing point of like, we're more grown up than Nintendo, we're going to sell you these things.

And you get hit with that so much that then when you see such an obvious example of looking at Mortal Kombat on the Super NES versus Mortal Kombat on the Genesis. this, it does feel silly, and you're just like, hey, wait a minute, I have, the, the blinds are off. Because the excessive blood in mortal combat was not silly at all. Certainly not. It was grown up for grown up kids like me, and I'm a big boy now. Everybody knows.

I want some big blood. If you get hit with an uppercut, an entire can of tomato paste is going to fly out of your mouth. Exactly. And I want all that tomato paste. It is sort of like how the UK had the video nasties, and some of them were disgusting and reprehensible, but I would not want to ban them from public viewing. Like, Last House on the Left,

obviously lots of horrifying rape in that movie. But they did have things like Evil Dead and Evil Dead, too. And these movies are just like Warner Brothers cartoons with fake, like, Kool-Aid being thrown around. They're the silliest, goofiest things. And the fact that they actually concern people just makes me laugh in retrospect.

Like, you looked at the silly thing and you thought it was, like, dangerous? Well, Clockwork Orange was actually banned in the UK for years and years. And, like, to the point where there was a theater in Paris that was specifically set up to show Clockwork Orange to English people who were coming over. So it just had like one print that was worn completely out from being shown over and over again. I love Clockwork Orange, but in the defense of that censorship, it was

also, that was self-censoring by Kubrick. Like Kubrick supported it. There was, there was, I believe there was some sort of copycat attacks in England at the time that were inspired by the film. Englishmen just aren't mature enough to handle this movie. So he was fine. I don't think it played in England in a theater until after his passing.

But yeah, I think with Sega, they were, they also were just getting more to the scatological stuff that Nintendo wasn't so into like the Bougar Man and all that, yuck.

Bougar Man. Was there a Kickstarter for that recently? I think there was. I think it failed as much as the Dizzy, the Egg re-comeback failed. Bookerman could not make to the 2015.

First century, unfortunately, but... This time has passed. Yes, this episode is really meant to be a companion piece to one that Henry was on. It's the, I think it was the history of video game violence. It might be episode five of this reboot of Retronauts, but I don't want to cover a lot of the same ground. I do want to briefly touch upon the violence and the way the government responded to it, which frankly wasted everyone's time, but I think it's said an important precedent

that these things were not going to destroy society, and it was a couple senators. One notable one is Joseph Lieberman, just kind of freaking out over games that do seem fairly tame in retrospect. I mean, Nighttrap was one of them, and I don't know if they actually looked at the content, because, again, this is something that could be broadcast on TV even then. I mean, I don't even know if there was actual

blood shown. It was, like, usually just girls being dragged away into trap doors and stuff. I mean, this thing was, like, made for a VHS console in the late 80s. It was as cheesy as you can get, but I guess they thought it represented a real threat because of the real people involved. I think it's also

to do with the, uh, the perceived audience for video games. That's true, too, yeah. This is something for little children, and you're giving them a horror where sorority girls are being dragged off by vampires. This couldn't possibly be sold to anyone over the age of 12, so you're trying to poison children with this. And I would bet myself that Lieberman was, like, handed a memo, and they just said, like,

yeah, this does sound horrible in this memo. I think they go into the details about it in that book, Consul Wars. Yes, they do. And we did cover this in the last episode from three years. ago, but again, Nintendo was playing it super safe. They were like, our games are only for children, sir, and we cater to children. Bow and Sega

under the bus saying, like, they know what they're selling. Children's playing sweaty combat. I believe that was probably Howard Lincoln that did that. Is that true, Jeremy? He was the dude, yeah, he was the Supreme Bus Thrower at the time. So, again, the ESRB was created in 1994 as a way to self-regulate

content, but as with the MPAA, it reflects certain values that not all American share, and again, these people People aren't just terrified of sex. And it could be, again, that thing we talked about with the MPAA and that homosexual or non-heterosexual relationships are viewed as like risque content just by existing. At least that's how I view it because it seems so rare that you see gay relationships or non-heterosexual relationships in games as not just like the one gay character you can date.

Well, I mean like that as a queer person myself. I would at least like to see, like, oh, they put one in here for this one scene. Like, I remember playing the, skipping way out, but I remember playing the Fahrenheit slash Indigo Prophecy. And in that, there's, like, a character has just the stereotypical gay best friend. But for me, it was like, wow, an actual gay character in a real game, who's just the dumb gay best friend who will talk to her and never be seen again.

But I was so excited for that. But I feel like now, at least, thanks to indie games and, more diverse voices making games, you're seeing a lot more representation that even if more publishers, many publishers still aren't really putting that in their games. Yeah, I mean, Bully had the famously, the Over the Rainbow achievement,

which I got, and it's like, again, in that game, you can kiss all the boys you want to, you can kiss all the girls you want to. It's all fair. Rockstar has been more of the cutting edge of that than others, that's for sure. And speaking of Rockstar, my last point before you hit our break, is even with the SRB,

We still had what I refer to as utter bullshit like hot coffee, which is completely just a shame that adults reacted to it. They're repeating what they did 10 years ago, and I'm not making a political statement, but I really feel like Hillary Clinton made herself look so out of touch. And I think today's voters are thinking back upon hot coffee when she's like, you better Pokemon, go to the polls and vote for me, kids. And it's just like, you were afraid of a clothed polygons smashing into each other 10 years ago. that could only be accessed by a hacking device. So I believe this caused a huge problem for Walkstar. They had to pull games off the shelves, I believe, and re-sticker them or something. There was a lot of misinformation, and I see that all the time still, a lot of willful misinformation

where, like, the news story became about, like, oh, you put in, you type in the code hot coffee into the game, and that's how you get this. Like, no, that's not what, you have to buy a special device, and it only works with certain versions. I can tell you, I can tell you a retail-level anecdote about that. I believe it was 0405 when it happened. Oh, yeah. So I was working at Blockbuster Video when that happened.

And I was having to explain to my coworkers what that even meant because we were renting GTA San Andreas a lot. And they're like, wait, isn't this a sex game? And I was trying to explain. Like, no, it's a cheat and you need a secondary thing. It only works on PS2. There's a saucy puppet show hidden inside. And then came the day when it got officially re-rated

by the ESRB as A-O and we actually, like, I was part of taking it off the shelves until we got the re-rated versions from Rockstar. And so, again, I was trying to have to explain to them, but it was kind of just falling on deaf ears the nuance of the situation

and not that just this was a sex game. And also it's still like, so, but if finally you could take out the cheat to see terrible, like, simulated sex, you can still do every single other horrible thing in GTA, though I also had been in the situation of Blockbuster of like not being like the scold or whatever

or not being like approved but when parents would rent Grand Theft Auto to them I would a couple times I was like you know these ratings are right you did like I'm just pointing at the everything like you see you see what it says this game has

like are you cool of that if you at least bought this Star Wars game he could still kill things but not you know prostitutes but don't think it really works Yeah I mean I think this really inspired Rockstar to continue pushing the limit. And for as much as I think they're very tone-deaf with their satire and very toothless

in some senses, I feel like they're good at throwing something out there and making it part of video game history. Like, you are going to see a penis in this game and shut up. There's now a penis in a video game. Maybe there could be more penises. Like, they are really good at doing that. Naming a game, The Ballad of Gay Tony. Like, there's a gay character who's a central figure of this DLC.

Like, they want to push the envelope in terms of, you know, including content that would be, like, frowned upon by. the ESRB, I think. Well, in Red Dead Redemption, which they were making at the time of hot coffee, they really were not fans of the government because the government was getting all up in their business about seemingly selling porn to children. And so that's why the actual enemy of Red Dead in Red Dead Redemption is the government being assholes to you the entire time.

It's an allegory. I remember, like, at the time, like, I was talking to people who were like, oh, Grand Theft Auto, isn't that the game where you can just go around raping people. Jesus, no. Are you getting this? The news really stirred people up into a frenzy about this game without really understanding what it was about.

And in daytime talk shows, like, Montel, I recall, when GTA 3 was new, Montel Williams just did this whole thing on it that was like playing in the break room at the place I was working. And I was telling them, like, it's not really, what Montel Williams is talking about is that that what really happened. There's that famous, I believe it's a Fox News still where it's the Mass Effect One they found out you can have sex in the game and it's like sex box

Mass Effect lets your children have sex with aliens and everyone laughed at it because I think at this point we're like no just go to hell we're okay with this it's fine shut up and there was no there was no outrage then there was like a conservative like blogger who took that and ran with it and suddenly it became like oh you can

reach out and rape anyone digitally online God why does this keep coming back to that I think they're trying to like project their fantasies onto the audience but yeah so But we're going to take our break now. I want to say one thing. I believe Bernie Sanders will be pro hot coffee.

And with that, we will take our break. And we are back, and I hope you enjoyed that little commercial break. And we're going to talk about just some common Japanese-to-english censorship and changes, because I feel like these are the most common ones. Obviously, American culture, especially in the 80s and 90s. is much different than Japanese culture and what each country would accept was very different. And we talked about a few things already, like, you know, obviously addressing drinking, addressing, you know, Christianity and things like that.

But I feel like in general, even today, there is a general aging up of female characters. I feel like we are, we want our girls that are attractive to be not illegal, but maybe barely legal. So the different, I mean, that is just a, it is to a degree a cultural thing, just like the age of consent is different in two different countries. It is what it is, and this is not to make a moral judgment on what number is a better

number, but now I'm sounding like somebody who... West Virginia does it right. Well, I think mainstream Japanese don't really find that as appropriate either. Yes, yes. I mean, sure, but... See, these are things... I don't want to make exceptions about

Japan, just to say, well, I've been to Tokyo four times, so I definitely know Japan. I've watched lots of anime folks, so I'm the authority I've never been to Japan. All I know is that in American versions of anime, you have a lot of college girls who wear high school uniforms. That's true. I mean, I think they stopped doing that because of there's some precedent set even for that. But that was a common thing.

There'd be like a dub line snuck in like, I just got back from college, wink. Yeah, it's especially, they're all 19. It's especially confusing because in Japan, junior high school is what we would call high school. And so, like, you get these teenagers saying, we're just junior high school students. And it's like, you look really well developed for junior high school students. Yes, exactly. And not just because they're drawn by horny animators. So Japan does treat Christianity with the same irreverence.

They treat most organized religions. Just as they borrow like Shiva and other gods from other religions, they're like, hey, this cross looks cool. I'm going to make an entire anime series about it and why I'm depressed. See, I didn't, I had been pretty guarded from the Japan's love of Christian iconography until I think it felt like the same year I played the game Zeno Gears and saw the air. anime, Evangelion, and both of which just, like, bash you over the head with crosses the entire time. And I think, actually, they

I think back, it was probably mostly pointed out to me when I was reading the Toasty Frog thumbnail theaters for for Evangelion. Created by one Jeremy Parrish, who is not owning up to it, but people did enjoy those a lot, Jeremy. Are they, are those online?

Somewhere, probably. Those are Jeremy's like, kind of distillations of Evangelian. Those are like 20 years old. Jesus. Yep, yep, yep. So, yes, and in that case of Xenogers, I think they were going for obvious Christian illusions. In the case of Evangelian, I think it was like, this stuff looks cool.

And I think that the creator almost just has said as much. Like, I like this stuff. This stuff looks cool. There are cool, like, Latin words I can use. So let's go for it. But I mean, he was really into the Dead Sea Scroll. That too, yeah. I'm talking about Ano Hodechi and what he's into.

Except our Dead Sea Scrolls do not predict giant robots. attacking Earth, so it was kind of a letdown in that case. If you read the sort of extra canon stuff about Evangelion, like the role of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the eggs and things like that, it's bizarre. Yeah, it reaches beyond Christianity, though, right? I mean, I feel like it... The Dead Sea Scrolls are supposedly like a set of instructions for, like, populating the planet with the... It's... Yes, but, yes.

Yeah, it's like an instruction manual, basically. Life's Little Instruction Manual. So let's talk about Xenogiers, an important movement, I think, in terms of making us less anxious about things referencing Christianity in terms of iconography and names. I read an article about this that's based on an 8-4 play podcast in which they reviewed Richard Honeywood, who was one of the main translators on the project. And apparently other translators on the project quit the project because they thought Christian fundamentalists would try to retaliate, would try to blow them up, would try to kill them. because this sort of Christian-themed content looking at it through an irreverent lens was kind of new for video games. And that was one of the reasons why they're like, this might not come over here. I don't see them.

They're not that far removed from the film released of The Last Tentation of Christ, which did get very vocal detractors against it. And there were like threats of violence. Don't believe there was any violence actually. That is true. Yeah. And that was only a decade earlier, correct? 1988 was the last temptation, yeah. Well, I remember, the thing about Xenogiers is it doesn't really go after Christianity.

There's some imagery, but it's more about the concept of God, and it's not really specific to, like, the Judeo-Christian God. What was the deal with the church in, was there some sort of molestation thing going on there? Yeah, I mean, there was like a pedophile priest thing going on. Yeah. But even that wasn't, I don't know, like, having grown up, you know, religious, I did not. sit there and take umbrage to what zenogears was saying i i had a lot of other complaints about the game but it wasn't like my religion no it was like oh this is so corny i remember there was there was an article in discussion on ign way back in the day where they were talking

about how zenegers it's it's not just like you know plenty of japanese games have like a crucified god at the end that you have to fight as boss but this one actually raises questions about, like, religion and whether we need it at all. And somebody in the comments was like, oh, so Americans can't handle philosophy? Is that what they're saying? That's very true. Yeah, it's like a discussion of belief systems and things like that through the lens of an anime RPG.

And I have this quote from Richard from that podcast, and this is what he said on the podcast. He says, they referring to the other translators, took every biblical reference they could and tried to twist it. One of the translators was worried about this and was like, I don't. wanted to have fundamentalist Christians or other religious groups being upset and blowing up her office. And I guess in the States at the time, it was a concern. So I had two translators walk off the project and I was stuck there by myself. And he tells another story in that I believe he talked the Japanese creators, maybe the director. He talked them out of naming

the final boss, Yahweh. It was originally Yahweh, which is, I believe, the Judaic name for God, right? And apparently, I never got to the end of Xenegers because I go to hell second disc, but apparently the final boss is named Deus, which just means God. Still God. Yeah. But it's a less offensive version of that term. Yeah, like Yahweh would have been on the nose. But even so, it would be

like Allah or something. It was kind of difficult to be like, oh, they're dissing Christianity when like at some point there's soylent green happening. Yes, yes. Like the entire idea of the God was that he was an engine

that powered a spaceship and crashed on a planet and created humanity to become food for him to leave the planet, like, that's not really reflecting what I remember seeing in Genesis. One thing I really love is that, like, three years later in 2001, I was playing Dragon Quest 7, and when you get towards the end of the game, you fight God, like, and he is literally the bearded Santa Claus God, and I think he just fights you because he's bored. He's like, let's fight, it'll be fun. He's just like, hey, can you beat me in combat?

And if you win, he's like, oh, good job, way to go. That's a very Dragon Ball Z. Yes. Isn't God a final boss in the Simpsons game also? Yes, yeah. You fight him in Dance, Dance, Revolution. That is what you do. But I think, you know, this brings me back, too, in the mid-90s, the stuff we were not getting or barely getting, which was also a full of Judeo-Christian imagery with the Shimagami games.

Like, we barely, we got some on the Game Boy called Revelations, but I think those took place in medieval-ish times. they were fantasy settings that you could have the remove of it. And then they even put out those, like their Pokemon rip-offs that were... I think they were called DemiKids or something like that. Yeah, Demi-Kids. So it really was what, you know, Christian parents who thought Pokemon was about capturing demons, that actually was what Demi-Kits was about.

Yeah, actually, I did not get into the amazingly fascinating and somewhat hilarious fundamentalist reaction to Pokemon because some people sincerely believe Pokemon was a sign of end times. Like, they're making packs with Japanese demons and they're going to take us over. So, yeah, I recommend you look up YouTube videos of preachers talking about Pokemon

because when they bring up, like, Pikachu as an evil figure, you'll laugh, like, Clafari. There's a picture of Clefari, and the guy's, like, pointing at it with a pointer, like, this will bring us down, everybody. So, yes. So, yeah, I think, I would bet Atlas just self-censored in the way that they just didn't localize many things

that, like, we got the Jack brothers in the Revelation games, but we didn't get the Air. original, like the original Shin-Migami didn't come out in America until it was an iOS app a few years ago. I have to think of what America, how they respond to Persona 3, if that came out 10 years earlier, where it's like... People at the time thought they wouldn't get published.

Yeah, even then, even that. I did too. It's like, they're going to hold guns to their own heads. Smartly, I think that's a very iconic, ridiculous way to summon a demon is to shoot yourself in the head every time. I think smartly, it was a smart choice to change it into magic glasses for Persona 4. It was like, I've got my magic glasses, dink. And instead of like,

and your tarot cards. Yes, exactly. My tarot card and my magic classes. Yeah, like tarot cards, pentagrams, making packs with demon. Like, this was like catnip for people looking for, you know, these issues in games. Luckily, it came out late enough where I think, and from a publisher like Atlas, you know, if this was a rock star game, like Demon Summoner, New York or whatever, they would call it. I'm sure it would have gotten a lot more attention.

Yeah, it's not like Xenogers was the first time we saw Japanese RPG's approach ideas of Western religion. Yeah, absolutely not. You know, Breath of Fire 2 had a really huge storyline around like a church and, you know, even Chrono Trigger had the cathedral where the nuns turned into La Mia

and, yeah, like there was all kinds of stuff like that. You fight God or the master, the creator at the end of Final Fantasy legend. It was pretty common. And actually, Zinnigures was predated by Final Fantasy tactics, which has a much more

bracing and direct take on, like it's a hot take on Christianity. It's very hot. It's like, oh, St. Ahorah, who is actually Jesus, was actually a demon who turned into a hot chick. That was so hard to pull out of that badly translated game, though, I think. I mean, I didn't get it. Maybe that was their protection, though. Like, this is so badly translated. Nobody will get it.

Yeah. So, I mean, they were not only afraid, not by they, I mean, the industry, I mean, they were afraid of stepping on Christian toes, but also people of other religions like Muslims. One of the more infamous removals of content was the Fire Temple in Nocary of Time, sampled a Muslim call to prayer. And in fact, you can actually hear the word Allah being chanted in the background of the Fire Temple. And that was changed to a MIDI version of that chant, I guess. I don't have a comparison between the two. Maybe I'll throw one in right now. I'm going to be able to be able to be.

And also Lynx Shield, Link's shield, the Mirror Shield had the Islamic Crescent Moon on it as well. and Gannon's red blood that happens when you do the final stab at the last boss fight, that is also removed in the second iteration of Ocarina. I believe it becomes green blood. It becomes green blood. Which is totally cool. Yeah. He's Vulcan. There's something similar that happened

Green blood is son of a bitch. Well, yeah, a little green, little big planet or one or two shipped with is, I believe, some Islamic chanting or verses in it. Or a song that had some of them. A song, yeah. And so then

they just patched it out on release day. So if you never went online with your copy, it technically was still in there, but it was gone the second you went online, which you'd need to do anyway, really, to do anything with that crappy game. Hey.

You know, we're talking about Square Annex that also reminds me of or Square Soft. When Final Fantasy 7 came out and like shit and damn was being set in it, like, that's when it hit me. You could, these characters could say these words?

It was clear. Wasn't all of it like garbled? Like, it was really inconsistent. I agree. I think it was a very... Maybe it was like an MPA-A kind of thing. Like, you can have so many instances of this word.

The rest have to be covered. I think it was such a disorganized project with so many people working on it. Some people thought we can swear and some people thought we can. So you have Barrett saying like ampersand like question mark exclamation point. And you have, uh, sometimes he says, like Sid says, uh, damn ass hell, whatever. So yeah. Or maybe said swears are just more authentic, who knows? So I did want to talk about American games being censored for Japan.

I mean, it does work the other way around sometimes. And one of the more infamous instances is, and there's a good reason why, you cannot detonate the bomb and megaton in the Japanese version of Fallout 3. Why? I don't understand this historical context. People still being alive after, I guess, the only nuclear attack on civilians in world history. Yeah, both of them. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty obvious way.

Yeah. So that character, the character who recruits you to do it, I believe he's, like, just dummied out of the game, and you have to play the game with Megaton Attack. I never blow up Megaton, but I'm a goody-to-shoes in those games. I mean, it's kind of, it can be kind of rare, I think, where they will even keep out in, you know, when we were growing up, I feel like stock footage of nuclear testing was, like, used in every movie all the time. You'd see it. I think they're... And Nintendo Play Aloud commercials. Yeah, I think they're a lot more, they're a bit more sensitive to using that footage. in Japan than we are over here. And there seemed to be a turning point in terms of Japanese content, from my perspective, used to always be more violent. Like, that's where you went to get your more violent games, your more violent content.

Oh, yeah, especially. What's that? 80s, on a piece. Oh, yes. Oh, man. Extraordinary gruesome, superfluous scenes, of course. Watching the Geiver opening recently. It's like, oh, my God.

He, like, tears a monster's face in half with his fingers. Yeah. I mean, that's what that, I mean, when you wanted effed up content, you would go to Japan if you're a young team, you know, looking for rude things to watch. Yeah, as a kid, well, as a teen, I remember thinking crying Freeman was like the most obscene thing I'd ever seen. And I bet if I were, I haven't revisited since then, I bet I would just kind of like giggle at it now or just think like, oh, this was as far as I thought it went. So I always wondered why there was a turning point in Japanese media where all of a sudden things seemed a lot more sanitized. And in doing research for this episode, I found out why there was an interesting. infamous child murder case in Japan, and by child murder, I mean, a child was a murderer.

And I don't want to get into some of the more gruesome details, but it should be pointed out, this child killed and dismembered, a special education student, and left their head in front of the school gates. And they proceeded to do a very zodiac killer-like kind of scenario in which they would send letters to the police, to newspapers. They murdered another child before they were caught, and I think they attacked a few other children. Is that the one where they carved X's over the eyes?

I don't remember that detail, but this... That cartoon character? Yes, it could have been that. I'm not sure if it went that far, but this guy was on hinge. I believe he's back in society now, but they don't disclose his name or anything like that. But this was the turning point. It was sort of like a Columbine-style scenario, way less damage to, you know, in terms of deaths, but it still was very shocking.

And I think from this point on, Japan was super, super, super-sensitive about depicting decapitations or dismemberment in games. I'm thinking of like, it really struck me as odd in Resident Evil 4. Leon can undergo any amount of gruesome deaths that are specifically tailored to certain enemies to certain traps. A chainsawkeye can just lop his head off and it'll say game over as your body just falls to the ground without a head. None of that stuff is in the Japanese version. And I believe it was this incident that really made that turning point happen where Japanese media in general became much less violent. And my girlfriend was like, is that where Moe came from to replace it?

I'm like, oh my God, you might be right. There have been a few events that have left a pretty profound psychological scar in the Japanese collective conscious. There was the... Elm Shenrikio? Seren gas attacks by Omshin Rinkio. That's why you can't find garbage cans anywhere. Yeah. Well, it's like I didn't hear that one.

The stabbing Zanakabra? That's right, yeah. Six or seven years ago. Sorry, Jeremy. That's okay. Yeah, no, that, yeah. Like, it's such a generally, like, peaceful, non-violent culture. Like, you don't hear a lot about crimes over there.

So the ones that become high profile seem to have a really huge impact on... Yeah, and you can kind of... Now I think back on, like, Japanese media I've seen from the late 90s. Like, I can... I feel like I can imagine that the shadow, like, that case cast on it. And same, same with the nerve gas attacks as well. And, like, you... I think you look at something like Battle Royale, and you think, like, I don't know, like, if...

Yeah, Battle Royale, I think, was a direct, like, response to this, or was directly... I'm not sure when the... novel was written. It could have been the novel preceded this, but I think that movie would not have happened if not, like, looking at, like, what if children can be violent creatures too? What if children can be amoral? Things like that. And same of, like, the terrifying children of like Ringu or... Yeah, yeah, that's true. The grudge. What was it? The grudge. Yeah, about Ju-on? Thank you. I was trying to be a wee-a-boo and say the Japanese name for it. As a culture, we really work out our anxieties through media, and you can see how that's happening

here, but I think it was really just the dismemberment involved in this case that made it a very, very touchy thing even to this day. And we'll get away from children being murdered. Thank you. If you want to learn more about children being murdered, search for the Kobe child murders on Wikipedia. You'll read a lot of horrifying details. I'll keep you up at night. So another

thing that gets changed, and there are so many instances of this, is just the fact to just the effort to remove general sense of Japaneseness from things. I feel like this was more common when there was more xenophobia towards the Japanese in America. Stuff like Ace Attorney. I believe if this was

translated today, if this was only brought over here today, I want to believe they would still keep it in Japan, but I feel like there was still that lingering, like, would Americans want to play a game about Japanese people? I don't know. So I feel like in those cases, it's not reacting to racism or whatever. It's just like a general discomfort with the idea

of like, you know, why would they want to not play people like who were like them? It's so strange to me in the case of Ace Attorney when like changing food to a hamburger or whatever, like that that seems like an odd choice of localizing something when one of your characters or multiple characters

like basically Shinto Priest's... That is so specifically Japanese with so many plot points that are specifically Japanese, having them eat hamburgers won't change that. You can't change those characters. Yeah, it's one thing to have Alex Kidd eat hamburgers instead of rice balls, but something else for, you know, Maya Faye to have hamburgers.

Exactly, yeah. The creator even said, like, I made the first first game ambiguous in terms of where it was set just so there would be a chance of a localization. But when it didn't get localized, he was like, screw it. So in the second game, the first case is a murder at a Shinto shrine. So the inside joke in the series is how much they tie themselves into knots in order to make things conceivably Americans. It's like, no, no, no, this took place in a different timeline where Japanese were not sent to internment camps. And they, you know, integrated more with California society.

So this is a California that's like part most or like half Japanese. I don't know. There's some strange lore to it. That's more twisted than the Zelda timeline. It's the Kelvin timeline. Yes, exactly. Is it like Kakuto Chojin, the fighting game? It's like set in an alternate reality where China discovered the new world first. Oh, is that what they do?

Okay, yeah, yeah. It might have been, it's not as extreme as like, oh, Japan won the war or something. It's just like we did not react as harshly towards Japanese nationals or Japanese Americans as we did during World War II. But in general, there's a lot of, like, changing of Japanese foods and stuff. Yeah. And though I think this has led to like this kind of something in localization I'm not a fan of. Even in my beloved persona games, which is just like this opposite end of the spectrum of just like, well, let's, you know, they would call them Sempai if they're an upperclassman. And so of course this is, you know, just the honorifics and stuff are Akun, Sempai, Kohai, like all that stuff.

It just feels, it feels too extreme to me. I'll tell you what, I don't mind those until they're being spoken by English, American voice actors, and then it sounds wrong. Like, if there's a Japanese voice actor saying it and I'm reading it on the screen, it feels very natural, of course, it feels like it's a natural part of language, which it is. But if it's an American being like, Jeremy Kuhn, help me, or whatever, I don't buy it. Yeah. I kind of use that philosophy in my professional life when I'm trying to set up interviews with, like, Japanese developers. Like, I might use honorifics in email, but I will not say those. out loud.

Yes, I say Mr. I say Mr. whatever. Yeah, yeah. Well, because I've, in a professional setting,

I've taken it with, like, with Nintendo, when they book you things with Miyamoto, he's Mr. Miyamoto. It's Mr.

Wadder, RIP. But they don't, they don't call him them son in, in the things. Yeah. And yeah,

I would think from a localization standpoint, I get it if in the line, like one character calls another character, like, blah, Chan as a way of

saying, like, of belittling them or making fun of them, just call them like cutesy poo or whatever. Like, make up a new thing. Don't just put Chan on it. Or like, change the character's tone at least. I don't know how all that works, because I used to watch a lot of Ronma one half dub

and they would come up with some really weird like, Ronma darling and sort of Ronmasama. Like, it felt really awkward and tacked on. It's a really complicated choice to make.

Yeah, it's difficult, and that's why I don't envy localizers, for a lot of reasons. Well, especially in, like, dubs, you got to, like, so many you know's have to be said just to fill the mouth movement. It's like, yeah, come on, Ronma, you know, I want this, you know? So, in terms of other Japanese games, I wanted to think of a few major examples of, like, removing the Japaneseness. And some are, I believe, are sensible, like, elite beat agents. As much as I love Owenan in those games, the concept is so specific and so far. foreign that it would never fly like this is the Japanese cheer team game like get that away from me. They gave it a whole hog localization. All new characters. Yeah. They rebuilt the game and that

works. Yes. But that's a very, yeah, that's a hefty investor. That wasn't a localization, but it was like let's take this idea and make it American. But that was, I think they had a good intention that it worked well. And things like we mentioned in an episode recorded a few days ago or yesterday, Sayuki World II became Wampum. Maybe not so sensitive towards our Native American friends, but It worked out pretty badly. Yes, but there's... Especially, like, why was our little Native American friend running through Chinese bamboo forest killing Chinese ghosts?

Alternate timeline, Jeremy. Curious. Alternate timeline. Are there any other... Where Native American settled. Tao Fang? Tauffeng Fist of the Lotus that I was thinking of, not Kakato Chojin. I say it only because I know someone out there is going to call the song.

Excuse me, Michael. Yes. You know, one example I can think of... Actually, sorry, Kakato Chowjin was one of the games that was changed and censored because of its Islamic elements. They like recalled that entire game. It could have been that same call to prayer sample or whatever, I think so. I think one of the character endings

had that. Sorry, Henry. Oh, no, that's cool. No, one thing I always think of with changes, localization, censorship is just the history of the puff-puff jokes in... Oh, thank you. Yes. Those have been around, I believe, since the first game.

And in translating in English, they always deal with it in a different way. I believe in the first in Dragon War, they just called it like the super soapy wash or they're like take a bath it's a super soapy bath but it was this thing that they kind of took puff puff was a borrowed thing from akir toriama or at least akir toriyama put it in his dragon ball books i did see it in dragon ball yeah i think balma promises that to master roche yeah and it is it is to i believe it is motorboating or just something a breast breast touching a head yeah breasts are placed on the face and head area i don't

I don't know. I don't know if this is real. I mean, I assume it's real. We did finally see it in Dragon Quest. What was the PS2 one? Yeah. So they talked, they put it in multiple, multiple games as a joke. And I wonder if it's like how when we were growing up, there were the stories of like the donkey punch. It was just a sex act that amused immature people. It had a funny name and a funny, I remember in one of the games and it was maybe an NES game where it's like the girl, you go to a town of night, the girls like come and. I'll give you a massage, and the lights go out, and the lights come back on, and it's her dad or whatever. So it's implied that his man boobs were all over your face and head or something like that. I think that's Dragon Quest 4 or 5 that has that in there. Maybe that was a D.S version I was thinking of, yeah.

There was also in one of the Dragon Quest games you get an item by having a wife, dropping off a man's wife to him in jail, and she gives him the puff-puff massage in jail. Through the bars? No, they're in the same cell. So it's like Midnight Express or something. like that. Oh, Billy. And, yeah, the big reveal of actually getting to see Puff-Puff in obviousness.

Seeing it clearly was in Dragon Quest 8 on the PS2 where you get a Puff-Puff massage and a woman with a very extreme French accent says, I give the best puff-puff massages ever. And she is a voluptuous woman. But then she's like, close your eyes. And so it's just darkness. and then when the lights finally come back on, she's been rubbing slimes against your head the entire time. I think even the creators realized, like,

we have to play with this idea because it might not be appropriate anymore for the time these games are being made. I actually did get them on comment on this one side. On the record, Yuji Hori? Yeah, as I've bragged about on this podcast before, I'm very proud of guys. I'm still jealous.

I interviewed Yuji Hori the one time, along with the two guys. Actually, you guys, I think you interviewed both of the other guys I interviewed about Dragon Quest Builders issued, Jeremy. Yeah, I interviewed them twice, actually. I am so jealous.

I'm so jealous. But so at that, I asked him like, you know, what about, I've noticed that, you know, I'd asked him about how pun-filled and joking the localizations had gotten and they're like, yeah, we had been working on that because we wanted,

they're funny in Japan, but the older localizations weren't funny, and so we wanted them to have more like slime puns in there and stuff. And so I said, yeah, I notice the puff-puff jokes get changed sometimes. They all had a laugh at that as well as the translator. And they said, yeah, sometimes we have to change the puff-f-f-f jokes just for a rating thing, that they're told, like, this will get a higher rating if we're more explicit with this puff-puff jokes.

So change it to something else so we can get this E or E-10. Rate a T for explicit puff-puffs, only in America. So Michael was super nice, and Michael wrote a lot of these notes himself. He actually sent me a bunch of suggestions. We have to move on to our most fun part of this episode soon, but I do want to hit a few of these. And I think Michael really wanted to talk about Super Noah's Arc 3D and how that came into being.

And that, of course, is the biblical-themed Wolfenstein 3-D engine game for the Super Nintendo. Michael, take it away. Well, if I remember right, I could be wrong about some of the details here. But when Wolfenstein 3D came to Super Nintendo, they had to cut a lot of stuff. Like, the Hitler was changed to the stop. Meister, Nazi Germany was changed to the master state. Like basically all the World War II stuff got stripped out and it was just a generic, you know, dictator you were fighting that was vaguely Germanic.

And they had to take out all the blood, of course. There were new weapons like flamethrowers and bazookas, but, you know, the... Dogs were changed to rats, I believe, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He couldn't kill dogs. And I believe that this pissed off the developers to the point that they actually... licensed the engine that they had used for the Super Nintendo version to Wisdom Tree to create Super

Noah's Arc 3D, which was an unlicensed religious game for Super Nintendo. Which you can get on Steam now. Yes. I streamed it on US Gamer. Check it that out online, please. It's very hard, actually. The crazy thing about Wisdom Tree that I wanted to talk

about was that they used to be a company called Color Dreams that produced very edgy games, like one called Menace Beach, for Oh, my God. They did the port of Chiller, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, they did, which is like the most gruesome thing ever still. I play that in an arcade, and I think it still haunts my dreams.

I bought it from an ad in GamePro that advertise arcade quality graphics. No. And then realizing, like, oh, arcade quality is circa 1982. Got it. Yes, yes. That was an Exitie game. I think that was like kind of like a, in the vein of death race. They were making these edgy, like, you know, controversial games.

Just to be shocking. But Chile was just like your select gun. shooter. You're shooting up tied up torture victims, though. At one point, yes, one of the stages is that. I don't know why I'm doing this. This seems like a bad thing. But Color Dreams did all these edgy games.

And the one I like to point to is Menace Beach, which you're a skater trying to rescue his girlfriend. And in each level, you see, like, this girlfriend tied up on a rack pleading for your help. And, like, she's wearing progressively less clothing in every shot. Yeah, it's very rolling thunderish. Yeah. This becomes, they have some sort of, we got our soul saved moment. Come to Jesus moment. Yeah, come to Jesus moment.

Thank you. And became wisdom tree. And men of speech becomes Sunday fun day about a kid who's just trying to get to Sunday school. And the cutaways to the girlfriend become cutaways to a Sunday school teacher who has a different biblical thing to share with you each time. Does she get more naked every time? No. Okay. Well, I'm out.

She gets more clothed. It's a more devout. He starts putting on a parka and, like, puts a park on over that parker. There's one more angle to the story, Michael. I'm not sure what order the events happened in, but I believe Color Dreams really wanted to make a Hellraiser FPS. And the management would not let them. And I believe all of the assets were gotten rid of, and that's when they had to turn to a more biblical take. But maybe ID software or whatever, they thought that was the perfect revenge, you know, just to have this.

Yeah. So I'm not sure what events that happened in, but I believe people have been trying to find that Hellraiser game, whatever's left of it. but I think like the Flanders who ever run the company were just washed their hands of it completely so yeah some other examples are we have thrill killer

sorry thrill kill it's the I think it's a logical conclusion to our obsession with violent themed fighting games I remember one called like time killers where it was just like arms and legs being lopped off every second I was just like rolling my I was 12

but I was like come on get out of here That wasn't censored though Yeah it was just in arcades you can play it But thrill kill became a Wootang game if I'm not mistaken It became a lot of things. The engine was used for like five different games. Some of them not fighting games.

But I guess what happened was... When I say Wu-Tang, I mean the rap group, not the Kung Fu. Yes. So EA acquired Virgin, the game's original developer, and they were like, we don't want our names on this. And this game was all about violent, gruesome fatalities. Fortunately, or I guess unfortunately, depending on your point of view, the developers released this game through a hacking group. So in college, everyone I knew had this game in the early 2000s. I don't know if that was true for you guys.

I was the only one in college who had it. And that was the only time I've ever paid a pirate anything, and I still feel a little bad about it. That was one copy, sorry, one floppy you could have copied or should have, yes. But that thing, the game is also just trash. Like, it's very... It's okay. Like, I thought it was really fun at the time because, hey, it's a four-player fighting game.

How many of those exist in 1998, whatever? Sure. Yep. So we have some other stuff, and I have to kind of go through these fast because we're running out of time. or Lammy, of course, the hell stage was changed to an island, and they change a lyric in the first song that referenced. You can play on an island. You go far.

It messes with the meter of the song, too. It totally does. It's awful. And actually, the demo version of that level that is on a PSM disc or whatever, or PlayStation Magazine disc, has hell in it. So you can play that version if you get that demo disc, and the Japanese version, of course. But it's funny because in the Japanese version, Lamie dies

and goes to hell, and she meets her, the evil version of herself, and has to play against her. In this version, I believe, she just gets into a plane crash on that island, but the level is still the same. The level is still like a very hell-scape-ish hellscape. And the evil version of Lammy, Rami, is created by like running Lammy through a fax machine. Yes, that's right. Yeah. Oh, man, I love it. Check out our episode on I'm Jeremy Lammy and Parapa. If you want to hear me be so positive, you say Bob Mackey, please shut up. We also have Duke Nukem 64, the most hilarious idea in the universe. I'm glad

Michael brought it up because it's like, they had to work so hard to make this palatable for the Nintendo audience. And everything about Newcom. Duke Nukem was the, you know, the edgy, cool PG-13 hero we all needed at the time. But Nintendo didn't want anything to do with that. So the strip clubs were removed, steroids were removed. The babes, you could no longer kill them. Instead, you save them, I believe, instead of killing them, I think. Sure.

Was there anything else you wanted to run over and check out on this one? The strip club level that was turned into a pseudo-McDonnellds. That's right, yeah. And I seem to think it was the same level, but just everything was re-skinned. So what was previously a strip club floor was now a loading dock outside of a fast place. Yes, everything offensive was changed into Duke Burger. That's right. The porn bookstore was changed into like a Duke Burger, like just the restaurant.

And then like there was like the Duke Burger warehouse or whatever. I'm guessing he doesn't use someone's neck as a toilet in the N64 person as well. I never played that far. I don't know what those cutscenes, what they did with those graphic cutscenes. So another one that really. astounded me 10 years ago or so was when Conquer's bad fur day was remade, they made

it more censored than the N64 version. So like the cursing was bleeped out, including the Great and Mighty Pooh, who says shit and crap and whatever a lot. Yeah. It was really weird. There were a couple times where when Nintendo I think wanted to prove how not censorious they were

anymore, they would go to such an extreme and Conquer was one of those type things like, we're going to go more am rated than anybody does. Nobody will say that we're a bunch of babies and so that that's what Cochran up being which is just like a very British style

scatologicalness too of not just like it's obsession with poo seems like in a very British stuff. Lots of rhyming words. Yeah. It's a swirly weirley scurly poo. I think a lot of things got by the sensors because they're like I don't know what these people are saying. It's like these like northern

UK accents. What's a twat? I don't know. A twat. I mean you absolutely need subtitles in that game. to understand, Bernie. The train spotting of video games. It's fun to listen to the director. He did a let's play of this game, and you have to, you have to pay full attention to this guy

if you're from America because he is very hard to understand. You realize where all those accents came from. I mean, those northerers, man, yeah. Northern England, they are hard to understand. But it's like Lister and Red Dwarf. Yeah, yeah. Very sing-songy accent. I believe they said they wanted to make a sequel,

but they were told, like, well, you can't make a sequel until we can prove this will sell. so let's make, let's just do a remake, and then Microsoft just got involved and started making like changes to it. And that's crazy to me to think that they would think shit is like, they can't keep saying shit all the time. Yeah. That is strange, especially the Xbox was considered like, you know, the adult grown-up,

big boxy console and N64 was like the kiddie console, even though we all played it. We all love golden eye, things like that. So I did want to move on to the most fun segment, our 9-11 segment, everybody. Let's give it up for 9-11. It changed everything, of course, including video games, and we as a country were understandably pretty raw about 9-11, and publishers were very anxious to include imagery that would remind us of 9-11. Now, in our modern age, every Michael Bay movie is essentially a 9-11 recreation that intentionally preys upon our feelings. But, at this time, we could not have buildings falling over. I believe the original Gundam was running on Cartoon Network, and they took it off the air because, of course, it opens with a colony falling on a planet, I think, a space colony.

Well, also, the ratings were very bad. I mean, I think it was a convenient excuse. A few of these were convenient excuses to cancel a cave. Well, a more obvious example was, like, adult swim began, like, the week before 9-11. Yes, yes. And Cowboy Bebop was on that. And an episode that is actually when they're more comedic episodes of Cowboy Bebop involves a mad bomber who blows up empty buildings. And he wears a teddy bear suit, right?

The teddy bomber. And the end of the episode ends with a big thing. fight on basically a twin towers that is going to get blown up. Like, so they never, that was episode 21. I believe it. It was pretty far to the run, yeah. They never aired, they didn't air for a very long time. You know, Peter Jackson didn't censor the two towers, and that was very offensive.

There were articles at the time, like people were asking, are you going to change it? Are you going to change it? Too soon? No, you idiots. It's not the twin towers. So, I mean, I think that we are so near to tragedy, especially talking now, we've just been through so many shootings, so many global incidents of violence. I think we are just

in nearer to tragedy and we don't see these reactions these days. I mean, we had a mass shooting before E3 and I didn't really see a big response outside of the proper moments of silence. So unfortunately, we are just like, okay, yes, bad things are going to happen. But I don't want to cover a few things that were

changed because of 9-11. One of them, the most notable ones, was Meadow Sala 2, Sons of Liberty. Apparently, Arsenal Gear was meant to destroy the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan's Financial District. So, I mean, it did. You just don't get to see it. You just see, you fight on top of it and then climb down and like...

It makes for a very sterile ending. Yes, it's very strained. It's very, very strange. There's like a fade out and then you're fighting on top of it. Though, you got to admit, it's pretty impressive that they got that. Like, it was out at the end of September the game, wasn't it? Like, they made... It was in October.

Oh, yeah. It was October. It was mid-October, all right. So, and another thing that happened was there was going to be live action footage of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. Hackers did uncover the Statue. Statue of Liberty live action footage that's still on the disc with like some narration, but I don't think they found the World Trade Center footage. And also something that's really interesting.

I read a Kotaka article about this from five years ago. Riden's name was the way it was depicted in Japanese changed. So originally it was depicted with Kana, which is the syllabic alphabet in Japanese. Usually for non-Japanese words. Exactly. And borrowed words. In the Japanese version of Metal Gear Solid, his name was depicted as kanji because Riden was spelled slightly similar to Laden

in Japanese. Not enough to really make this change justifiable, but that was Kojima's excuse. So even the way characters' names were depicted were changed to remove them or distance them from 9-11. So that's a very interesting change. Yeah, the RL thing.

So, yeah, I don't think it's that similar, but maybe the Kana are very similar to each other with those two words. So that's one way that it was changed outside of the change of the ending, the change of removing the footage. Yeah, it would just be like an extra character in Riden. Yeah, yeah.

So I don't know if the Japanese were as sensitive as we were, but I'm guessing they had that concern in some way. I mean, they were still selling GameCubes. Yeah. So Grand Theft Auto 3, contrary to popular belief, and this is on a lot of places, I think it's on Wikipedia, it was not delayed because of 9-11, because of content that could reflect upon 9-11. And Rockstar's offices were just very close to ground zero. And they couldn't do any work while cleanup was happening, while rescues were happening, while people were looking for people. So that's one reason the game was delayed. And there weren't actually a huge amount of changes, as most people believe.

Some visual assets were changed to the city looked less like New York, so you weren't actually shooting at New York cops, you know? Yeah, the cop cars were changed. Yes. Because, I mean, of course, New York police were heroes at the time, and they were viewed as in a very heroic light, and we did not want to shoot at them. There was the Stroke's debut album came out a month afterwards, too, and they cut a song that was only on the UK release called New York City Cops, because it was, it's a very innocuous song, but just that the chorus is New York City Cops,

they aren't too smart. Oh, no. That's not a good time for that song. October 2001, 2001. There was a whole plotline cut about Darkle, I think, who was going to have you blow up buildings. I did read an interview with the Grand The Auto guys. Apparently, that was never intended to be in the game to begin with.

It was removed before the game was published, not because of 9-11, but because they just did not finish that content. So that Dark Hell terrorist guy was just never meant to be in the game to begin with. And I believe all they changed outside of that was like some dialogue bystanders that maybe wouldn't sound so great in light of 9-11. So I'm not sure what that dialogue was, but yeah, it was changed. And a few more instances, the Dreamcast game Propeller Arena featuring dogfights in major cities was canceled outright. But I think this was probably more likely due to the Dreamcast's ultimate decline by this period of time. I think it was like, this is a convenient reason to cancel a game. I mean, the Dreamcast was pretty dead by September 2001.

Yes. And our last example is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 because it was like, oh, the terrorists used this to learn how to fly. Well, actually, they went to flight school and were never, like, found out at that point in their lives. But they removed, oh. The game WDL War Jets. Oh, okay. Pulled off shelves. Oh.

Because it depicted events similar to 9-11. You could crash planes into buildings. Yes, that's exactly what this is, this is too. I mean, they removed crash damage, in quotes, to your plane, which meant your plane could crash, but it would not explode. But people modded it back in because they wanted that. So I assume they modded in the World Trade Center as well. And you can probably watch a lot of tasteless videos on the internet that are recreations of 9-11, but please don't.

Oh, there's one more, actually. came to me that the second, the sequel to Neversoft's Spider-Man game, Spider-Man 2 Electro attacks, I believe it's called her, it's Electro-Bugaloo. The game was released right before 9-11, and it ends with a fight against Electro on top of the World Trade Center. And so then they immediately recall, Activision recalled it, re-did it that it's just a battle on top of a tall building and won a tall building. A nondescript tall building.

Yeah. So to wrap up, I want to know really quick from all of you because we're shortly running out of time. What is your take on censorship? In short, I'll tell you mine. I think that censorship is look at it in the larger scope of things. I see a lot of people being very upset about very small changes that are ultimately irrelevant and perhaps not as artistic as you think they are. And as long as it doesn't really disrupt the core game or the core gameplay or the theme of the game or the meaning of the game, if this means more people can play it, I'm generally. for aging a character up, covering up a boob, whatever. I mean, I can look at boobs whenever I want to. I have the internet folks. I don't need them in video games. It's fine. That's my stance on things. Henry, how do you feel that censorship? Wow. All right.

You have 30 seconds. Okay. I would say from the standpoint of localization censorship as well, particularly, the way I grew up is I'd have to, I'd read. They changed this thing in a manga or a video game I read or I had played, but I'd never

get to see it. Today, if you hear about, they change this thing in Video Game X. You can see it right there. Somebody has uploaded it to YouTube. It's out there. So, to call it even censored feels weird to me. It's just like, if you want to see the sexy costumes

that they cut from Fatal Frame on the Wii U, you can see all of it, all the time. It isn't being held from you. It's just not in the game, and in innocuous cases like that, I don't much care. And I, you know, I'm not a pro-censorship person either.

and artists should be able to do what they want to do. But I guess I have a more grown-up thought now of just like, these things are products being sold by companies. And companies censor things. And when I see people getting mad at what they think are like political groups that cause censorship, I want to say like, well, no, Walmart censored this thing. This giant company censored this thing. Be mad at this company that kept this thing from you because they didn't want,

they were afraid they'd sell fewer things. But that's my feeling. I think that it behooves people, creators, to really consider what they create and be responsible. And if they're going to push limitations and break boundaries, they need to make account and be willing to accept the ramifications of it. I think people who get bent out of shape about perceived changes, perceived localizations, what they think of as censorship by people who, are, you know, making their own internally motivated changes need to grow up and not abuse people who are involved in the process but do not actually make the decisions. That's horrible and idiotic and irresponsible. If you want to make changes, change the systems that cause the

pressure and the need to make these modifications. You don't like censorship? Well, you know, work at the cultural issues at large, you know, the, the conservatism or whatever that encourages and necessitates changes. Like you said, you know, Walmart makes the changes or requires the changes. So petition Walmart. Don't go after like someone who is a low paid localization editor on a video game who doesn't have any control over this one way or the other. That's not accomplishing anything. And in fact, you're hurting your own case and hurting yourself. and hurting other people. So grow the hell up.

I agree. Jeremy. They censored her vagina bones. Those vagina bones. I'm anti-vagina bones, by the way. I believe in a glorious future where we are free from the tyranny of vagina bones. Well, now that this is all in record, I'm sure we'll be quoted on many message reports for this. But thanks for the intelligent conversation, everybody.

I really appreciate it. All of the information about how you can help out the show is in the commercial break. Please listen to it. But as far as finding all of us, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. I write for usgamer. net is Something Awful.com. And you can also listen to my other podcast, Talking Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of The Simpsons.

It comes out every Wednesday, I believe, on Lasertime Podcast.com. If you like The Simpsons, you'll like our show. It's that easy, Henry. Where can we find you? Well, gee, I'm on Twitter as H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. You can also find me at Fandom, the editorial outlet of Wikia. I write about games on there, a senior games editor there. Fandom.wikia.com.

Also, I am a member of the Lasertime family. We call it a family now, not a network of podcasts, where we talk about pop culture things on regular podcasts. And I used to do one about comic books called Cape Crisis. You can listen to all those old ones. But I'm also regularly on Talking Simpsons, the weekly exploration of every episode of The Simpsons, one at a time, hosted by one, Bob Mackey.

That's me. Michael. I'm also part of the Lasertime family. You can listen to me, talk about video games, pointedly every week on Vigigame Apocalypse. Go look at Viggaemapocalypse.com. Yes, Vigigame is misspelled the way I'm pronouncing it, V-I-D-J-A. And Jeremy.

You can find me making dad jokes on Twitter. I'm not a dad. I just make their jokes. You can also find me... You're a dad at heart, Sherman. You're a dad at heart. You can find me, of course, on USGamer.net and posting about terrible puzzle games at Game Boy World.

Awesome. Thanks so much for listening, folks. We'll be back next week with a brand new mini episode. See you then. They say the Pokemon whole effort is to train children how to become the number one Pokemon master in the world. You follow it through the new age teaching, you find out that masters are those who take control of spirits in the dark realm and they tell those spirits what to do. The child at some point becomes capable of taking these powers and channeling them through their mind, through their arms, or through their power sources. Their power sources, of course, are many of the

symbols that they pick up from the Pokemon paraphernalia. So, so Pokemon is a game that teaches children how to enter into the world of witchcraft, how to cast spells, how to use psychics, how to use psychic phenomena, how to put work supernatural powers against their enemies, how to fantasy role play, Pokemon World is a world of the demonic.