How Gaming Has Changed Since 9/11

5. An End To 90s "Envelope Pushing"

There was a whole movement in the 90s gaming scene to essentially "see what we can get away with".

Mirroring other mediums doing the same - the likes of punk rock in music, film's "video nasty" period or the whole fascination with "apocalyptic event" movies - gaming in the 90s gave us Mortal Kombat, Carmageddon, DOOM, Unreal Tournament and more.

They remain some of my all-time favourites, but there was always that question of where any of this stuff ended. Would the public ever get too grossed out or otherwise sick, of media depicting gruesome events?

Whilst we can point to general maturity of the artform and many developers and consumers growing up, there's no denying that post-9/11, it was in increasingly poorer taste to make games about macabre subject matter.

This "rebel period" all but went away, and even GTA moved onto more refined pastures with the far more considered, GTA 4.