7 TERRIBLE Video Games That Made The Industry Better

4. Custer's Revenge - Forcing Rating Systems & Treating Games As Art

This applies to a bunch of titles that royally freaked America's top lawyers and government officials out at the time, but let's focus on the one that wasn't remotely good to play.

Because the formation of the ESRB was a fascinating thing.

With video games before its creation being categorised as "toys", and the American Software Publishing Association saying the government "didn't want to spend any time" regulating adult video games, it meant the likes of Mortal Kombat, DOOM, Wolfenstein, Night Trap etc. were "being made for kids".

Obviously one look at these things and you knew that wasn't the case, but clearly video games were in need of a regulation system.

Where all the aforementioned games were actually pretty good with solid mechanics and enjoyable pay-offs (yes, even Night Trap), 1982's Custer's Revenge had long been held up as a truly awful game that should never be given the same categorisation as, well, anything else.

Centring on the attempted rape of a Native American prisoner (yes, really), the ESRB's formation finally came in 1994, but it was after over a decade of certain companies just seeing what they could get away with.

There'd be envelope-pushers after 1994, but with codified age-gates and that inbuilt sense of consideration behind what the hell you were making, it elevated and matured the medium like nothing else.