10 Most Controversial Video Games Of All Time
Stalking scantily-clad young women in a house? That's 90s video games.
Adult-themed games date back to the early days of home computing, but by the 1990s, graphics and sound were sophisticated enough to take this to a new level.
It was during the 16-bit era, when the SNES and Mega Drive ruled the roost, that the authorities decided the depiction of graphic violence and sex on consoles was cause for concern, leading to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board - a body charged with assigning movie-like certificates to games.
An industry watchdog was long overdue, but it did little to stem controversy in the medium. In fact, some of the more notorious games came out in the wake of its formation, from ultra-gory shooters that were blamed for corrupting impressionable teens, to crime sims that rewarded players for being downright gratuitous.
Like any entertainment medium, video games have rattled its fair share of cages over the years, and some of the more contentious titles have found themselves banned in numerous countries, or they're hacked to bits through censorship.
While it's important to remember that there are countless beneficial titles out there - scientifically proven to boost things like hand-to-eye coordination, memory and problem-solving - it's usually the games that caused uproar and sparked moral panics that stick in our minds.
10. Grand Theft Auto (Series)
No gaming franchise has courted controversy quite as consistently as Grand Theft Auto. It even has an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for doing just that.
From the 1997 original to 2013's GTA V, Rockstar's crime simulations have allowed players to commit every immoral act under the sun, and usually rewarded them for it.
This includes carjacking, gun crime, torture, drug dealing and even a bonus sex mini-game called Hot Coffee, which had US politicians spitting out theirs in disgust.
Although such content has seen some countries outlaw certain entries in the series, only one nation has banned Grand Theft Auto outright and that's Thailand, which blamed it for the murder of a Bangkok cab driver in 2008.
The eternal firestorm of controversy has done nothing to harm GTA sales, however, with the latest instalment making more than a billion dollars in three days and continuing to rack up impressive sales to date.