This Game Made You Crazy | Nostalgia Nerd

foreign [Applause] video games is crazy right I mean even though there are definitely video games that should be banned but never have been but that's just because they were crap but I mean who could possibly mistake pixels like these for something diabolical and fiendish well it turns out a lot of people because did you know one of the most controversial video games of all time was actually an arcade machine from way back in 1976. censorship a divisive topic and one that serves to raise or lower the bar in societies all over the world for Generations we all have our own personal ideas on what should and shouldn't be censored although exactly what is tends to be down to for government or in the case of places like YouTube The Independent publishing body look at all these root things here I've had the sensor one of them's a cat with a rude word on it so you're missing out of course censorship as a concept whether you believe in it or not makes sense it's meant to protect those who might otherwise be negatively influenced or traumatized by it but times have changed since the first ever ban hammers were slammed on offensive content and what would get media banned in the west just a few decades ago would barely make those desk jockeys that slam explicit lyric stickers on Nirvana CDs look twice today video games have been the brunt of all manner of moral outrage throughout the years some reasonable like the outrage over games featuring sexual assault as a gameplay mechanic which by the way have horrifyingly existed for decades and some moral outrage is perhaps not so reasonable what is not so reasonable depends entirely on your own moral compass of course I would personally get absolutely outraged if I saw a perfectly good CRT being chucked in a Skip and then I've probably locked myself in to rescue it in fact I have done that multiple times the current bar of censorship that allows us to play games where you'd get to shoot Lads in the head with blood everywhere going mental had to start somewhere and for video games it started at the very bottom back when the best Graphics you could hope for were a handful of bright blips on a black screen the first arcade video game is usually considered to be Nolan Bushnell and Ted dabney's computer space released in 1972 as part of a commercial partnership with the cabinet manufacturer Creator Bushnell had worked in an amusement arcade and had a good idea of how electronic games like pinballs and the like worked he saw a space War a game passed around computer scientists since the 60s while visiting a Stanford University laboratory and he thought the game which was being run on the Laboratories big bastard Mainframe PDP 6 far away from the prying eyes of a public would be great in the arcades the story of space war is fascinating and best told in another video my point is that your average punters didn't start getting any video games to start getting offended by until as late as 1972. by the way Bushnell and Danby after computer space went on to found a not unheard of Corporation Called Atari without computer space video games as we know them wouldn't exist today which is a scary thought in any case the next arcade game to make it to Market was be Mighty pong by Atari in 1972 a game that was sort of kind of totally ripping off a game found on the Magnavox Odyssey the Breakthrough video game console released in the same year pong took the arcade gaming World by storm a bunch of copycats followed and although now industry 4Runner Atari did put a fair bit of effort into creating new game Concepts pong would be the Mainstay game type for a little while at least companies like taito and Midway started to get involved bringing to life what was essentially a set of rectangles and squares bouncing around the screen with sound effects and distinctive soundtracks all this happened comparatively quickly only two years after computer space was released the creator of a game I'm talking about today was founded in 1973 exody was founded in California with the express purpose of making some coin-guzzling arcade games 1973 was incidentally only short before the pinball ban in California was lifted you can see my other video about pinball if that interests you thankfully for would-be gamers in the early 70s the negative association with Amusement arcades that had led New York mayor fiorella LaGuardia to utterly lob slot machines into the sea in the first half of a century had long fizzled out and the way was paid for video games to make a big splash amongst those who enjoyed pinball Skee-Ball and air hockey exedy was named for an abbreviation of excellence in Dynamics absolutely classic marketing business move to have a name that sounds like it means something awesome while actually making no sense for XD that Excellence started up around 1974 when the company released TV pinball there are conflicting sources online but TV pinball appeared to have just been released at the same time as they released table pinball which was just TV pinballs set in a table cabinet rather than an upright one and table footballer TV pinball was a game where the player removes tiles from the screen by bopping them with a pixel ball bounced off a sliding paddle essentially the now classic game Breakout look at this wood grain aesthetic quintessential 70s meanwhile and still in 1974 taito released the first ever driving arcade game speed race speed race was quite a sight of the arcades being fitted out with a steering wheel and an accelerator pedal a new and exciting addition alongside those pinball and ski ball setups also released in the USA under the name Razer players would need to swerve and spin the attached wheel to avoid other cars racing on the vertical scrolling screen the game was a great hit for taito and one wonders if XD had taken notice of that steering wheel setup because in 1975 they released destruction Derby an arcade cabinet kitted out with not only one but two steering wheels way to run up on Tito there exody yes destruction Derby had one up on speed race by virtue of it being a two-player game but it was also a considerably more violent game rather than needing to avoid the other cars like in speed race the entire point of Destruction Derby is smashing into the other vehicles on screen like a road raging lunatic the aim is to be the last surviving car on the screen the cabinet also came with a gear shift lever for switching between forward and reverse and an acceleration pedal this thing was the real deal the game was licensed for distribution to Chicago Coin who decided to change the Game's name to be massively more imaginative demolition derby and changed up a cabinet art a little although Chicago Coin had a big distribution Network they didn't do as good a job at getting the game out there as anticipated and on top of that were a bit too casual when it came to actually paying exedy on time which is not ideal XD needed to come up with a new game quickly to keep the business's momentum going and the easiest way to do that would be to rehash and re-release a game already on their modest catalog so exited sets are making some changes to destruction Derby that would give it the spice and excitement Gamers were looking for and what better way to add spice to a game than chucking in a Sprinkle of death interestingly Death Race wasn't the only game that came out of XD fiddling with the formula of a destruction Derby release I'll talk about that later and it's yet another not so kid-friendly game but for now let's take a look at where one of the most controversial games ever released came from now at the time violence in video games was about as new as the games themselves and by the time XD were working on the souped-up version of Destruction Derby there was already a game depicting death in the arcades gunfight developed by taito and also called Western gun in Europe it was released in 1975 as the name suggests it features two little Cowboys trying to shoot each other to utter death just murdering the absolute bobbins out of each other as you can see the graphical limitations don't exactly allow for Mortal Kombat levels of Gore the two crudely drawn Cowboys duel on either side of a cactus-filled No Man's Land while a wagon occasionally and casually wanders into the line of fire when a Cowboy is hit he apparently stays alive long enough to shout you got me which is not the kind of calm language you'd expect from someone who'd just been shot but I think it's fair to assume he goes on to die given that's the usual event after getting a bullet lodged in an aorta but exody developer Howell Ivy was about to give the violence of gunfight a run for its money he set the changing destruction Derby's computer played cars into little stick figures now the player car would be driving into a field of running probably panicking little humanoid creatures and he changed up for graphics so that instead of exploding like cars in destruction Derby did those humanoids would turn into little adorable graveyard crosses when hit that's a very definite way of saying that whatever has just been run over by the player is dead you can't get much more dead than being under a gravestone it's good to see such a speedy funeral service for these little critters very efficient I'm sure it was probably Co-op and thus Death Race was born a race between you and a friend to mow down as many unsuspecting Fantastical Lads as possible like a mentalist now the game with so little changes had become so something different entirely a game where instead of busting up other cars you're absolutely murdering people to death with your big bastard of a car but the arcade flyer described those little stick figures as monsters or Gremlins neither Fantastical creature has the same rights as humans not to be mowed over so sure everything is fine there how about it lads instead of handing distribution over to another company this time XD dealt with this themselves the game sold maybe a couple of hundred boards in early 1976 not bad not great in the meantime the company focused on their next release but a storm was brewing by the way the game was not meant to be related to a film released the year prior in 1975 death raised 2000 featuring Sylvester Stallone it certainly does seem to be more of a coincidence that the film is about a bunch of drivers competing for points by running over pedestrians but xd's general manager at the time Death Race was released Phil Brooks adamantly said in an interview that none of us not a single person in this company was aware of that movie when we made this game he also went on to add I think the movie Death Race 2000 stinks which is fair now as you can see despite the topic having the potential to be a bit Grim the graphical restrictions mean this game isn't exactly a bloodbath it's actually kind of adorable the little running figures look like a children's drawing the top-down view of the car looks like a test tube covered in sucker pads little humanoid monsters turned straight into gravestones after their hit like the world's fastest funeral service and what you end up seeing by the time the game's over is what looks like a 12 year old goff's textbook scribbles it's an adorable scene of utter death and Carnage and isn't it a fantastic reminder of how far we have come in just a few decades when it comes to graphical capabilities of video games good God that was a close shave wasn't it talking of close shaves this video is brought to you by manscapes.com the global brand for Men's Grooming and hygiene products they've sent me a load of stuff from there all in one performance package 4.0 he has loads in there my God anti-chafing ball deodorant pretty essential refreshing ball toner some performance boxer briefs I always need performance boxer briefs so this is the lawnmower 4.0 I'm going to shave me some body hair folks oh yeah oh it's got a little guide light as well so you can see what you're doing in the dark you probably shouldn't shave in the dark but in case you do this is cordless with 90 minutes of charge and check this nose and ear trimmer the weed whacker Plus for a limited time get all this plus two free gifts head to manscape.com today and get 20 off plus free international shipping when you use the promo code Nostalgia at checkout right I'm gonna go and use me some anti-chafing ball deodorants oh yeah but as Is Not Unusual someone was offended by this and not just someone actually quite a lot of people saw this and fell over themselves to grasp at pearls before I start ripping the absolute piss into the whole situation I'll just add that this approach is all about the context of the time while a game like this leaves a heck of a lot to the imagination it's not like there were many other video games to choose from in the early 70s and one including a very early depiction of video game violence was a very new thing new things are scary I am still going to take the piss a bit though complainers said that the stick figures look too much like humans which I mean I'm I mean they certainly could be I suppose they could be humans just as much as they could be monsters and Gremlins speaking to play me to trade magazine one exedy executive reportedly said that players should let their imaginations run wild director of a company Paul Jacobs told the Associated Press that if people get a kick out of running down pedestrians you have to let them do it what do we have to let them do that though Paul Jacobs I see what you're saying but do we have to this is the sort of challenge that pricks per person's mind a little bit the name Death Race may shock a few people but we find the game humorous probably not the best thing to say to a bunch of people quite angry at one of the earliest depictions of wheel-based murder in a video game according to the economist Bob Green who had his article published in a good few papers the arcade game was in such high demand that the cabinets couldn't be made quick enough an amusement arcade owner told the paper that random us would wander off into the street to ask if they had the game kids and adults hilariously Amusement arcade owner Jerry axt also says I don't have any explanation for why this is happening oh come on mate you know why people want to play a game with a bit of Gore in it we're all bloodthirsty bastards at heart Green's article popped up with very sensationalist headlines but went right to the point Death Race lets player kill people conversely even though as I mentioned before XD insisted this game had nothing to do with Easter own flick Death Race 2000 retrospectively probably didn't help but that's a fair assumption to make and that film is about mowing down people in a car but there's also the sense of agency that a video game gives you that a film can't that could also be a problem for those worried about impressionable youths reported in the Evansville press one unnamed electronic game industry executive makes a good point when explaining why he won't want his kids playing it it's kind of like TV violence there is killing but no repercussions from it you put in a quarter and tried to kill people with a car but you're not expected to feel any remorse about it the key difference here between the humans on Death Race and the ones you get a headshot on in Call of Duty is that these humans are defenseless and not trying to kill you in the modern day we do have a bare pit of Decades of gaming giving us that divide between real life and the life within video games we all have intrusive thoughts and feelings which we would never act on in the real world the sweetest person in your office probably smell ashes aliens to bits with a big hammer on their Xbox at home as reported by the Associated Press in 1976 Jacob said I don't think people really get off on thinking they ran down a pedestrian I think they just like to see how good a marksman they are apparently exedy started getting letters from concerned citizens after reading the Press coverage and reckon this cabinet had no business being in business Jacobs replied our response is that there are other electronic games with a violent theme including one in which there are clearly two human figures depicted and the object is for one to kill the other the game he's talking about could be gunfight which I mentioned earlier and yes he does make a reasonable point there in a time we have a bar for video game violence wasn't quite set who was anyone else to tell XD that their version of violence wasn't as acceptable as another company's version of violence he ruins it a bit when he goes on to add if a player imagines himself running over people and is able to release his frustrations well God bless him there's the problem in a time of weak Graphics was Death Race encouraging someone to use their imagination in the worst way that would allow a player to imagine they are mowing down walkers on their morning commute even if a game art and flyers save air monsters or Gremlins these figures look as much like humans as they would Gremlins or monsters and let's be honest kids and teenagers are vicious little bastards if anyone's going to make a simple collection of pixels as bloody as possible in their head it's them despite or probably because of the Uproar Death Race was a fantastic earner for exedy and the company couldn't get the cabinets made fast enough soon enough newspapers started to report that the national Safety Council in America had taken notice of the video game in one of their family safety journals they absolutely ripped into the game calling it sick sick sick a member of the council also claiming to be a behavioral psychologist Gerald to dryson says in the article nearly 9 000 pedestrians were killed last year and that's no joke it's not amusing he goes on to make the again a reasonable point that violence on TV is entirely passive and that death rate allows the player to have an active role in creating violence but then he goes on to say while he's sure most people playing the game won't jump in a car and start mowing people down he's unsure about one in a thousand one in a million and I shudder to think what will come next if this is encouraged replace what he's harping on about with a gun very much legal still in America then including assault rifles and maybe he'd have a point but he's not he's talking about a video game with terrible graphics and absolutely zero blood or Gore even through the modern lens this guy seems like he's clutching those pearls so hard they've melted into his skin and are now flowing around in his bloodstream when you get the higher score in Death Race you get called an expert driver by the end screen about that dryson says that violates my sense of taste and decency oh come on mate I'm trying to be impartial but just look at those graphics for newspaper coverage this game got was absolutely insane massively sensationalist headlines were printed in an utter boatload of papers photos were published of young impressionable children being clearly indoctrinated by this filth you can bet this kid instantly went home and jumped in his dad's car and started going absolutely mental just going to complete and utter Murder Town however even when interviewed for these sensationalist arcade owners didn't seem to have taken the bait one arcade owner interviewed for the Daily Press in Virginia May 1977 didn't seem to differentiate the Death Race game much from other games where you get to murder some other Lads a bit I don't agree with those who say such things lead to violence or implant evil Notions in those who play he said it's a game and nothing else he also offered up the idea of a game like this allowing punters to take out their frustrations he alleged that his female clientele would come in during a shopping trip and use Death Race to pretend to be running over their husbands then leave happy which is not as heartwarming as he clearly thought it was those women needed therapy not an arcade game Death Race in place of marriage counseling aside the national Safety Council saw absolutely no good in it and even by the standards of the time its wild the accusations of a council were making even writing in their family safety publication the game actually teaches a motorist how to kill a pedestrian well that's bollocks not to mention the fact should really most motorists already know how to kill a pedestrian with a car it's not rocket science despite all this kicking off and contrary to popular belief Death Race was never actually formally banned on a federal or state level or even in any local governments that being said there were reports of the cabinets being removed from some arcades by the owners bowing to the pressure of public opinion thanks to complaints here's one example recorded of one of the machines being removed in this article a psychologist weighs in saying it's the kind of game violent prisoners would enjoy smaller sensationalist Death Race did not get a formal release in the UK but that didn't stop it being imported over for some of the bigger arcades one such arcade was the rather rough playland in Piccadilly Circus a place known for rigging slots and where male prostitutes were known to pick up their clients the Sunday Mirror in the UK which my mom used to get did report on an uproar around an arcade cabinet of Death Race available at a London arcade in July 1976. the article mistakenly writes that the game was named after Death Race 2000 and explicitly says the characters being mowed down are pedestrians and I'll be honest in a very British fashion the writer of the article and the people she interviews for it apparently couldn't give less of a bobbin about the content the writer describes it as a Macabre way of having fun the guy who imported the machines to the arcade from America admits when he heard about it he was dubious but he says when you see it it's nothing the figures are Matchstick people there's no blood I suppose even for a newspaper like the Sunday Mirror it might have been a bit hypocritical to complain about the game's content on the same page as an utter whamming of standardly over sexualized female breasts speaking of overly sexualized female breasts let's take a quick look at the other game XD repurpose destruction Derby 4. one of the first games ever if not the first game that allowed the player to take the role of a female character the game appears to have been released in 1977. it is a rehash of Death Race or destruction Derby in which the steering wheels have been replaced with two joysticks the player can choose between being a male or female character which replaces the car doing the killing in Death Race his or her goal is to catch as many members of the opposite sex who will turn into Hearts yes only The cisgendered Straits were catered For here but remember this was 1977 and as you know gay people totally didn't exist back then unfortunately the only examples of this very rare cabinet that exists do not work one can assume that the Sprite for the female characters was more female presenting than the male ones although the characters in games like Tito's gunfight for example could honestly be any gender or sex the Flyers tend to explicitly show the characters as male presenting score remains an interesting snippet of gaming history as it does openly depict female presenting playable characters on the cabinet art cabinet art which by the way shows some poor guy awkwardly swerving the kiss of this last drunk on milkshake and this absolute Nutter of a girl laying a trap for a man to stumble into the days before Tinder were a tough time exedy kept the driving theme going after Death Race with the next game Ali rally a top-down racing game where players must drive around a simply shaped track there's conflicting sources online regarding exactly when Ali rally was released but it would appear to have been released after death race at the tail end of 1976. the company didn't seem badly affected by the negative press of their previous title at all and just kept rolling on it wasn't until years later that XD would be in the press for the wrong reasons once again or maybe the right reasons in 1986 exody added another game to their modest roster of light gun games would be frankly brutal Chiller Chiller is a game in which the player is invited to utterly torture the crap out of a bunch of people who are literally just sitting around having a not very nice time the first level is set in a torture chamber parts of the people being tortured can be shot off complete with screams of pain and blood bursts parts of the devices they are trapped in can be shot to decapitate or crush the skull of some poor bastard later on the game does move into more traditional territory of having you shoot horrifying monsters which is fair or ghosts which makes no sense but there's only four levels and the first two consist of torturing helpless humans even by modern standards that might raise a few eyebrows and of course being about 10 years since Death Race the graphics were far more advanced when it came to depicting depravity when interviewed then exodies vice president of software Vic ptolema he makes mention of his company's previous controversy with Death Race and explicitly says that the point of that game was to run over pedestrians not monsters not gremlin this is a direct contradiction to Exodus statements about them being monsters personally I do think Death Race was meant to depict monster murder but this Ptolemy guy clearly saw how well the controversy did for exedy and is trying to milk a decade old murder turd speaking of new game Chiller Ptolemy says I think it's disgusting but I think it'll make Ecstasy a lot of money spoken like a true marketing bastard fair play to him but did Chiller make XD a lot of money well that's where it gets interesting we already know that pixels that could kind of look like mass murder in 1976 made utter Bank in a world where the bar for video game violence was newly set ten years on gaming technology had massively Advanced and there were plenty of games on the market depicting all manner of violence with that being said Chile didn't do too well because the whole torturing innocent people were still pushing things a bit too hard and many arcade owners didn't want to touch it with a barge pole and it did unlike Death Race reportedly gets banned according to Ptolemy that is who told reporters the game was banned in Britain I couldn't find any kind of ban being reported in Britain which of course doesn't mean xd's marketing guy Ptolemy was lying I'm just saying that he was very open about how exedy wanted the game to cause controversy and also he does come across some of these articles as someone who would talk absolute bollocks to get some things sold and honestly fair play to him I kind of like him in an interview with Kotaku journalist Luke winky Ptolemy admits that when it came to Chiller XD bosses had given the developers orders to make something completely over the top horrific Chiller was made specifically to gross people out to make them uncomfortable and scared with the aim of getting a bit of a buzz going around the company once again and of course an attract screen in the arcade that shows a bunch of people tied up and ready to be shot at was certainly going to cause a buzz those clutch pearls would be practically vibrating their asses off by now interestingly after only a modest success of the arcade that would even take the game Chile was ported to the NES and released in 1990. obviously without Nintendo's seal of approval it is odd to see such a brutal game on a Nintendo console Chiller might have squeezed a bit more life out of exody but sadly after a vibrant career in arcade games in a brief but moderately successful foray into home Computing with the exody sorcerer exedy officially closed its doors in the mid-1990s all told the company just couldn't survive in the ailing arcade game industry alone and didn't pose enough of a challenge against some of the gaming Giants that had long emerged within the season the death rate remains a fascinating part of video game history a reminder not only of How Far We've Come technologically but a snapshot of a society that those of us today can barely understand when it comes to what's worth being offended by little gremlins being mowed down by a car yeah I think we'll survive somehow I'll leave getting offended for the next time someone tells me I have too many CRT monitors Get Wrecked so that was Death Race kind of reminds me of driving in central London if I'm brutally honest anyway until next time I've been Nostalgia nerd toodaloo foreign [Laughter] thank you [Laughter]

Channel: Nostalgia Nerd

Views: 87,722

Keywords: death race, deathrace, banned video games

Id: WnEL8dFc0cQ

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Sun May 21 2023