Blizzard has been under fire after suspending a pro-Hearthstone player after his pro-Hong Kong remarks during a Livestream. Blizzard has since responded and has lifted the banned on Ng Wai Chung, known as “Blitzchung,” in-game. These types of scandals are nothing new to the industry, for as long as video games have been around there is always some sort of scandal that helped shape the industry for better or worst. So here are five of the biggest video game scandals. Now for this list, I will be excluding scandals that revolve around broken/ unfinished games, or games that lied to the audience. Those games scandals are enough for another list, this list will cover games with real-life implications.
5. Mortal Kombat ESRB Rating
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQFZC6dzauM
Mortal Kombat was developed by Midway Games and it is directly linked to the ESRB rating system. For a quick summary, the ESRB summary is the rating system that video games are sorted into. In order: E for Everyone, T for Teen, M for Mature audience, and A for Adult. There are also subcategories such as E+, similar to the movie rating system, this system started because of the rise of parents protesting that video games are becoming too violent and that there needs to be a way to protect the children. The game at the forefront of the protest was Mortal Kombat. In order to protect its brand, Nintendo chose to censor the Super Nintendo port of the game. Sega, on the other hand, kept their port uncensored claiming that the rating itself should be good enough. The argument leads to congress demanding a proper rating system. This is one of the earliest and most important scandals since it resulted in the modern way in which we rate games today.
