Is censorship in video games necessary?

Censorship has always been an issue that has affected many industries, the most relevant being that of cinema. However, in the area of videogames it left with the passage of time an enormous mark that many players of yesteryear have experienced over the last three decades.

This topic from a certain moment has had great debates all over the world, forming communities which some support censorship and others not, although each one will have its own reasons the truth is that for the developers of videogames sometimes it can be very uncomfortable not to be able to see their creation as they imagined it.

Many will think that the issue of censorship is something that happens in video games recently, but this is something that in the past was much worse. Before there was quality control in video games in the 1980s, they developed games with sexual content that were somewhat mediocre, specifically for Atari 2600.

At no time did they care about the target audience, but being very poor quality video games did not reach the hands of many people, however, the graphics would evolve making the figures displayed on screen become more detailed.

Companies such as Nintendo at the time of placing their first console on the market were very careful with this, because it was aimed at a child audience, which is why in the late 80's began to notice many censorships in the world of video games.

Some can be a little absurd, a very clear example of this is the censorship applied to the video game Contra de Nes, in Europe changed the Sprites of both the main characters and the enemies for robots, in addition to changing the name to Probotector. The excuse for this change was that being humans shooting made it a very violent game.

Just as Mortal Kombat suffered from the censorship attack there were many more video games, but one spilled the glass of water, causing scandal between communities, was Mortal Kombat. Its explicit content in the Arcades alarmed critics, forcing Nintendo on its port for the Super Nintendo to remove any trace of blood and modifying almost every execution movement of the game.

But not only the games of the fighting genre are attacked by censorship, there are adventure games that have received many changes, one of them was Snatcher, a video game created by the talented Hideo Kojima. Although it seems incredible Snatcher received more than 5 censures, each time a port for a new console came out, certain scenes were changed that were considered inappropriate.

As you can see the censorship in video games from yesteryear has always existed, even in the first PlayStation, when Resident Evil came out changed the tonalities of the videos to black and white and cutting certain scenes because they were supposed to be too violent. Later they would release a version where all this would be changed to how it was originally by complaints from the players themselves.

The company that has always been hand in hand with censorship even today has been Nintendo, for some reason to place their video games in the West always change something, are very few titles that are intact, however, a company wanted to break with this censorship, was Rareware and its video game Conker's Bad Fur Day.

This video game was one of the most explicit that came out for the Nintendo 64, with a lot of gore, sexuality, alcoholism, drugs and many more things. Despite this they had to withdraw and censor some, but Rare was responsible for leaving almost everything they wanted to show, for this reason many consider Conker's Bad Fur Day as the closing of the golden era of Rareware.

Perhaps some consider censorship necessary because many video games are played by children, but I believe that there are content rating systems like ESRB making censorship a thing of the past, as it is up to parents or guardians to buy the right video game depending on age, but apparently it will never end.

For my part I prefer to play the video game without any censorship, so I can have a full experience of what the developer and graphic artist wanted to convey at that time.