Midway's hyper-violent fighting game Mortal Kombat featured fatalities so shockingly gruesome in 1992 that outraged United States senators held congressional hearings about the moral decay of American youth.

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Midway's hyper-violent fighting game Mortal Kombat featured fatalities so shockingly gruesome in 1992 that outraged United States senators held congressional hearings about the moral decay of American youth. The political panic surrounding Sub-Zero casually ripping out the spinal cords of his opponents directly forced the video game industry to invent the Entertainment Software Rating Board, or ESRB, just to get the government off their backs. It is deeply amusing that the entire modern system of classifying digital entertainment by age appropriateness exists solely because suburban parents lost their collective minds over a few pixelated drops of digitized red blood. Every time an edgy teenager complains about having to show a photo ID to purchase the latest gritty military shooter, they can personally thank an ancient ninja spine-rip for utterly destroying their gaming convenience