This giant space robot brawler is full of the kind of stylized, largely bloodless sci-fi violence that would normally earn a T rating. Maybe they didn’t like Wario’s fart-based attacks? In any case, the upcoming 3DS version has been bumped back down to an E-10+ rating, even though it has “mild suggestive themes.” Your guess is as good as ours. Those sequels apparently added “mild violence” and “crude humor” to the “cartoon violence” of the original, according to ESRB descriptors, which are obviously not appropriate until you’re 13. While the original N64 release got the E rating it probably deserved, follow ups Melee and Brawl were somehow bumped up to a T rating.

The game got a T rating despite what one Digital Press forum-goer describes as scenes of “a disemboweled dog, maggots eating a rotting corpse, a decapitated man with visible trachea and esophagus in the neck, and implications towards strippers and prostitution.” But Night Trap, which helped inspire the ESRB’s creation, showed slumber party girls in nighties, which is obviously much worse.

Just after the ESRB was officially formed, it faced one of its first tests in Hideo Kojima’s gritty Sega CD crime adventure.

Here’s a chronological collection of some of the most baffling ESRB ratings decisions we’ve come across over the years, ranging from too lenient to too harsh to just plain hilarious. Still, among the thousands of ESRB ratings issued over the years, there are quite a few that have us wondering what the group was thinking. Despite some concerns surrounding transparency and rating methodology, the industry-wide self-regulation of the ESRB has been a boon to those trying to hold off continual efforts at government restrictions on game content and sales. The ESRB should also be commended for educating the public about the meaning of its ratings-73 percent of parents say they check ratings before buying games, according to the ESRB-and of getting retailers to comply with voluntary age-based sales restrictions-87 percent of stores refused to sell M-rated games to minors in a 2011 FTC investigation. Since then, the organization has taken on the Herculean task of assigning a content-based age rating to practically every commercial video game released in the United States.įor the most part, the organization has done an admirable job of accurately evaluating the content of thousands of games based on brief video montages provided by publishers.

On September 16, 1994, the newly formed Entertainment Software Rating Board handed out its first ratings certificates, including its first M rating for the 32X version of Doom.

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