Once upon a time, when Nintendo was the king of the video games
industry, the house that Mario built was notorious for its censorship guidelines. In retrospect, many scorn Nintendo's
policies as holding the industry back, and for being generally ridiculous. While, yes, many of the policies were
carried out to ridiculous extremes, this is somewhat understandable for a company that is under the most scrutiny in an
up-and-coming industry; this was an era before the ESRB, so Nintendo had to cover its own hide (even if they stuck with
it for too long). To quote Hamlet, "though this be madness, yet there is method in 't."
I am not sure how long this has been available, but for anyone who is curious, filibustercartoons.com has a full list
of Nintendo's once-dominant censorship guidelines, along
with some historical examples of the rules in action. It is definitely worth a look-see.
[Thanks, Dan]
