Nintendo censors an adventure gaming classic!

I found a pretty funny article while searching the depths of Kotaku that has to do with early Nintendo games and their censorship of one of the most classic adventure games EVER, Maniac Mansion. According to Douglas Crockford, the guy who managed the conversion from the PC edition of Maniac Mansion over to the Nintendo basically said that there was a TON of stuff that LucasArts had to do before Nintendo even though about putting the game out for the hipper, younger audience they would get, as opposed to all the old fuddy duddies who would play it on the old school PCs of the day.

Here is a list of just some of the crazy and mundane changes they had to make:

• All the graphics had to change to work on the Nintendo. That’s a lot of changin’
• Bad words such as, “The meteor is going to be pissed” was changed to “The meteor is going to be mad”.
• A arcade game contained within Maniac Mansion called “Kill Thrill” had to have a name change. Because “Kill” was a bad word in Nintendo world. The new suggested name was “MUFF DIVER”.
• The name “MUFF DIVER” could not be used as a game name, because Nintendo didn’t approve of sexually explicit names. So MUFF DIVER had to be changed to something else. That something else? Muff Tuna. That makes way more sense!
• The words “For a good time EDNA 3444″ was also offensive to Nintendo, but it couldn’t be completely erased from the game, because you have to call Edna at some point. So, that was changed to “Call Edna 3444″.
• “Getting your brains sucked out” – also offensive. Man, Nintendo makes a job hard! This was changed to “Getting your brains removed”. Because that’s not as graphic. I guess.
• Because of the “brains sucked out”, a poster was removed from Green Tentacle’s room that said “Disco Sucks”. Can’t anything suck?!
• “He hasn’t eaten in 5 years.” made Dr. Ed sound like a cannibal in the world of Nintendo. Well, in the context that this was spoken from Weird Ed to Nurse Edna… it did kind of make Dr. Ed sound like a cannibal. So, they changed the “eaten” to “sleep” and everything was right with the world again.
• There was too much nudity for Nintendo’s tastes. Which nudity? This was in the form of posters that were hung on the walls in Cousin Ted’s room and in the gym. One of the posters that was offensive was a mummy that was in a playboy pose. This mummy was completely wrapped up and no skin was showing. Just to be safe, it was taken out.
• A statue also was taken out, because it was naked. Even though it was a classic re-creation of a Michelangelo statue. Nintendo has no taste in fine games.
• The words NES SCUMM was taken out of the game. As you may know, SCUMM is the name of the gaming engine that LucasArts used to create many an adventure game. Nintendo thought the words NES and SCUMM put together were offensive and may be looked upon badly.

So, all in all, you’d better stick with the PC version of Maniac Mansion, because the Nintendo version is just… boring. Though, Nintendo didn’t have a problem with putting hamsters in a microwave and letting them explode. I guess that’s cool. You can read about all the craziness in detail right here.