Coltan Scrivner

Slasher movies came out in the 80s, but they also coincided with the release of widespread use of VHS in homes.

So people were not just concerned about teens sneaking into a slasher movie.

They were like, now they can have it at home.

It's going to pollute the minds of children at home and there's nothing we can do to protect them.

When video games started coming onto consoles, there was a similar sort of moral panic of, oh my God, now not only do we have to keep them out of the arcades, we have to make sure that they're not getting these things and playing them at home.

Yeah.

So, yeah, when Mortal Kombat came out, it came out on these two platforms, the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo.

And Super Nintendo was way more popular, right?

I don't know what the statistic was.

I don't even remember if I cite it in the book, but it's just like significantly more popular in U.S.

households.

When it came out, Nintendo was like, we're kind of a family friendly company.

video game company, but we don't want to miss out on the money.

We don't want to miss out on, you know, the success we know this is going to have.

So how about we just turn the blood into sweat, this gray, goopy stuff.

We don't let Sub-Zero rip your spine out and show it to the audience.

Maybe we tone down some of the finishing moves.

And then Sega was like, nah, we'll just do the whole thing.

Yes.

What happened was when the game came out, the Sega Genesis version outsold Nintendo 5 to 1, despite being way underrepresented in U.S.