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The first commercial video game with blood and guts?

TanruNomad

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I recently reviewed The Bilestoad for the Apple II (Datamost, 1982) which is a gladiator-style death match game with lots of pixelated blood and severed arms and decapitated heads and it got me thinking, what is the first video game in history to feature this sort of violence with pixelated blood?

Here's the game: http://youtu.be/P7j20nY8OQU

From what I read, only 5,000 copies were ever sold because it was so controversial.
 
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The earliest I actively know about was Halloween for atari 2600 but that seems to be 1983.. not that I've really gone hunting for that category before :)
 
Blame Mortal Kombat. Er, maybe even Mortal Kombat II or Night Trap. MK II was one of the first bloody games to appear on SNES after the heavy sanitization of previous games on their formats.

I mean, with the birth of a global rating system, games stopped being games and suddenly became elaborate murder simulators! :(
 
Blame Mortal Kombat. Er, maybe even Mortal Kombat II or Night Trap. MK II was one of the first bloody games to appear on SNES after the heavy sanitization of previous games on their formats.

Nintendo insisted that the blood be replaced with white "sweat", and also demanded that all Nazi imagery be removed from the SNES release of Wolfenstein 3D.
 
I thought that was the general consensus or official view of Nintendo. Their NES target audience was kids/family I thought. Sort of the difference in the consoles/companies today too. Nintendo Wii still seems like it mostly targets younger kid friendly games (although yes I have a few that I haven't even had the time to enjoy with the kids awake or home so there ARE a few (No more Heroes, Red Steel). Compared to xbox and ps3 where most games that I've seen have adult content and are unsuitable for potentially 17 and under.

Not that Atari really had deep enough graphics to represent much violence at any disturbing level that I recall. It probably did become more apparent as graphics improved that there was a moral decision on how graphic does it need to be and what's appropriate for what age. I'm surprised there isn't a book out there but I do see a few sites that seem to have done some blog level investigation on the matter of Videogame violence history.
 
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