The Wii Gets Ultra-Violent

Manhunt 2 to be released for the Wii? Nintendo has changed a lot.

Feb 11, 2007 Robert Janelle

A sequel to the graphically violent Manhunt was announced this week. Given Nintendo of America's history of family friend games, this comes as a shock.

"Nintendo will not approve games for the NES, Gameboy or Super NES systems which...depict random, gratuitous and/or excessive violence...depict graphic illustrations of death"

The above words were taken from old Nintendo of America Content Guidelines. Clearly the company has changed quite a bit, given the recent announcement that Manhunt 2 will be released for the Nintendo Wii.

In the original Manhunt, players controlled a convict named Cash who is being forced to perform for a snuff film director, executing goons the director has set-up for this purpose.

When Cash does perform an execution, the camera zooms in to film it, showing plenty of blood and even including rather graphic sound effects. These execution scenes range from suffocating someone with a plastic bag to splitting someone's head open with a baseball bat to decapitating people with a piece of wire.

The release of Manhunt 2 comes as a shock, given Nintendo's previous history of censorship.

The company was heavily ridiculed when Mortal Kombat was released for the SNES and characters would apparently sweat when punched, instead of bleed like in the arcade and Sega Genesis versions.

But the most famous example of Nintendo of America's content policies has to be the Lucas Games game Maniac Mansion.

In a 1993 essay for Wired, Douglas Crockford (who was in charge of porting the game to the NES) described the censorship he faced. Crockford learned that the worst word to use in a Nintendo game is "kill," which meant an a game called Thrill Kill located in the mansion's video arcade needed to be changed.

Nintendo censors didn't discover that players could microwave a hamster in the game until after it's release and demanded it be pulled.

However, in the mid-90s, Nintendo did relax a little. There was blood in the SNES version of Mortal Kombat 2, though it could be turned off. DOOM was ported to the SNES, blood and all.

But those are still are a far cry from Manhunt. Considering the amount of attention given to violent video games these days, it should be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Read more of Nintendo of America's content policy and censorship here.

The copyright of the article The Wii Gets Ultra-Violent in Video & Online Games is owned by Robert Janelle. Permission to republish The Wii Gets Ultra-Violent in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.