10 Controversial Video Games That Are Insanely Tame Today

1992 must have been a year fraught with more moral panic than the red-baited era of McCarthyism: both Night Trap and Mortal Kombat saw release that year, and it must have made many a Sunday school teacher shake their fists in anger.

Mortal Kombat might have been the most publicly vilified video game to ever exist. It offered some of the most visceral gameplay available at the time, and the digitized actors utilized by the game made the whole thing seem incredibly 'realistic'. Today, Mortal Kombat X seems infinitely more real, even without the use of actors, and it puts the crude renderings used in the series' debut arcade outing to shame.

However, at the time, parents and government officials lost their minds, and we can only assume the serious demeanor Reagan might have affected were he in office during this digital epidemic. It's a wonder that awful, corrupting interactive media like Splatterhouse, Doom, and Mortal Kombat didn't turn the nation's youth into a bunch of psychopaths. Wait, on second thought, it really isn't.