The Game That BROKE The Gaming Industry

Unfortunately, the methods used to try and prevent this game from being received as a controversy would only worsen its cause. Night Trap's initial plot saw you keep watch on security footage of each room in a house in order to protect a billionaire's daughter from "Ninja Burglars", which mercifully did not last long.

Said burglars would then be changed to vampires, only for Hasbro - who were funding the game's development - to tell developers that this also needed to be altered. Hasbro worried the neck-biting vampires created the kind of violence that could be replicated by "impressionable gamers", which is a worrying concept on several levels.

In a final adjustment, Night Trap developers Digital Pictures would create a strange-looking enemy known as 'Augers', who wielded hook-like weapons which they would attach to the necks of the women they captured, using a needle in them to steal their blood.

Although created with ostensibly good intentions, in practice the Augers' interactions with the humans you were trying to protect looked undeniably unsettling, and would stoke the rage of the US government, leading to a hearing about introducing legislation to control violent video games.

However, anyone hoping they wouldn't just dog pile on more violent games definitely realised the situation was doomed when this discussion's introduction compared the danger of video games to the danger of "minors with guns".

Alongside Mortal Kombat, Night Trap was held up as a symbol of "inappropriate content" in gaming, as it essentially has the plot of one of those budget slasher films that tries to involve as many women in negliges being violently murdered as it possibly can. While Night Trap isn't a game you'd want a toddler playing, Senator Robert Lieberman took this one step further than merely suggesting it was inappropriate, implying that two tragic cases of murder were partially caused by violent video games like Night Trap.

People absolutely railed on the game.

Howard Lincoln, a Nintendo representative, stated that Night Trap "will never appear on a Nintendo system", going as far as to say that Night Trap "has no place in our society".

Quick FYI though, Night Trap eventually got a 25th Anniversary re-release in 2018, also available on Switch to this day, so this guy could not have been more wrong.