Self censorship is censorship, I am making a video about the history of video game censorship. Nintendo’s self censorship prevented them from even bothering to port some games to America.
From the book
Replay: The History of Video Games :
"Keen to avoid controversy or another Custer’s Revenge, Nintendo produced an extensive list detailing what game publishers could not put in a NES games. The rules echoed both the Hays Code, which policed the films of Hollywood from 1934 to 1968, and the 1954 Comics Code. The Hays Code emerged in response to a spate of scandals in the 1920s that earned Hollywood the nickname ‘Sin City’. Enacted by Will Hays, the head of the movie business trade association and a campaign manager for US President Warren Harding, the code was actually written by the Catholic Father Daniel Lord. The Hays Code banned sex, drug use, nudity, swearing, positive portrayals of criminals and the ridicule of religion. Its rules encouraged Hollywood to spend three decades creating innocent fantasies or moralistic parables where the bad guys were always punished for their crimes.
The Comics Code was born out of a political row about adverts for porn, drug paraphernalia and weapons in comics that coincided with increasing public disquiet about gore, violence and sexual content of comic books. The Comics Code took its cues from The Hays Code. It banned cannibalism, zombies, torture, sex and werewolves. It required that “in every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal be punished for his misdeeds” and demanded that judges, government, police and other respected institutions were not treated in a negative way. Many of Nintendo’s restrictions could have been lifted directly from the Hays Code. Nintendo prohibited graphic depictions of death, the Hays Code barred studios from showing brutal killings in detail. Both barred sex, nudity, random or gratuitous violence, criticism of religion and illegal drug use. Nintendo also banned games from featuring tobacco and alcohol, and prohibited sexist and racist content. The NES remake of the ultra-violent, anti-drugs Narc played down the drug references and removed the blood from the original coin-op game. “The game was watered down to almost unrecognisable levels,” said the arcade version’s creator Eugene Jarvis. Jaleco was forced to remove nude Greek statues from its NES version of Lucasfilm Games’ Rocky Horror Show-inspired adventure game Maniac Mansion. Even Miyamoto couldn’t escape the censors. His 1984 Pac-Man clone Devil World was refused a US release because it featured demons, Bibles and crucifixes – a breach of the rules of the treatment of religious imagery.
But Nintendo’s code differed from the Hays Code and Comics Code in its motivations if not content.
Nintendo’s rules did not emerge in response to public or political pressure but more from an expectation of controversy at a later stage. It was also a unilateral censorship code rather than one agreed to the video game industry as a whole – as was the case with the movie and comic industries with the Hays Code and Comics Code."
The part I made bold is the difference with today. To quote another book,
Console Wars :
"By the early 1980s, the videogame bonanza had become so lucrative that everyone wanted in on the action. This included companies that had no business entering the market (like Purina, whose Chase the Chuck Wagon was designed to help promote their Chuck Wagon brand of dog food), companies that didn’t quite understand the market (like Dunhill Electronics, whose Tax Avoiders allowed players to jockey past a maze of evil accountants and onerous IRS agents), and lowbrow companies that set out to polarize the market (like Mystique, whose flair for pornographic titles was highlighted by their 1982 anticlassic Custer’s Revenge, which follows a naked cowboy on his quest to rape Native American women). With games like these becoming more and more common, the marketplace was overrun by a glut of smut, muck, and mediocrity."
In other words: this was part of the safe guard to prevent another US video game crash from happening again.