PlayStation versus Xbox: the Mortal Kombat between the two reminds us of something, waiting for the fatality

When Nintendo he saw that it was losing market share in the face of the rise of the SAW by Tom Kalinske, he began to go out of his way to put a spoke in the wheel of the rival company. One of the best known trips was that of Mortal Kombat. We are in the early 90s, Street Fighter II had already revitalized the coin op industry and the title of Ed Boon and John Tobias was enjoying immense success in the arcade. Everyone talked about it and, above all, everyone wanted it in their homes.

It is no mystery that much of Mortal Kombat’s success was due to the extreme violence of Fatalitysince then cited so much that they have become proverbial throughout the industry.

At the time, Nintendo did not want to give up its image as a company that produced tech toys for families, with which it had achieved immense success in the NES era. For this he decided to censor the Mortal Kombat port on Super Nintendo. SEGA of him, who was building his fortune on having a more mature offering than the rival company, opted instead for a completely uncensored Megadrive version. Acclaim, the publisher of Mortal Kombat, had repeatedly warned Nintendo executives, with whom he had excellent business relationships, that the game would be complete on SEGA’s 16-bit console, but Mario’s house shrugged. and he decided to go his own way anyway.

The result was that Mortal Kombat sold three times as much on Megadrive than on Super Nintendo, for a total of about 6.5 million cartridges across all versions. The game also turned out to be a system seller, which gave a strong boost to sales of the SEGA console. As for the Super NES, however, not only did it get disappointing results from the port, but many owners of the console felt offended by the censorship, so much so that the American headquarters of Nintendo received many letters of protest, including those from some parents who asked not to censor their children’s games. And here comes the attempted trip.

In 1993 the extreme violence of Mortal Kombat became the subject of public debate in the United States, so much so that it came in front of the Congress of the United States of America on the initiative of ultra-conservative Senator Joseph Lieberman. Here the legend tells that to feed Lieberman it was Nintendo itself, irritated by the growth in sales of SEGA. In fact, it seems that a representative of Kirby’s company reached Washington DC to show recordings of violent video games, looking for someone interested in opening the case, so as to create political problems for SEGA and, perhaps, to obtain limits on the sale of certain games, which so successful they were enjoying. For the entire debate, Nintendo tried to take on the role of a company concerned for the well-being of families and young people and did everything to distinguish itself from SEGA, which in its intentions was to take on the role of the villain who profited from sex and violence. (the Night Trap adventure also ended in the debate). Fortunately, things did not go as Nintendo would have liked and the industry was not censored on a political level, but from that heated debate the American classification body for video games, the ESRB, was born and a greater general attention to management began to develop. of game content. There were other consequences too, but this is not the context to tell them.

What interests us here is the similarity of the historical console war between SEGA and Nintendo with some of the events that are happening today, albeit with the necessary differences of purpose. Let’s see if you can guess who we’re talking about: the top-of-the-line company in the console industry feels threatened by taking over one of its direct competitors and is doing everything to stop it, most notably putting a spanner in the works for a key takeover. which would make them lose the advantageous position acquired over the years on one of the most important franchises in the industry … oibò, who will ever be the two companies involved? What facts are we talking about? We have the names on the tip of the keyboard, but we can’t write them …

Parliamone is a daily opinion column that offers a starting point for discussion around the news of the day, a small editorial written by a member of the editorial team but which is not necessarily representative of the Multiplayer.it editorial line.