I remember playing Maniac Mansion, a particularly strange game for the original Nintendo. Amazingly, I also recall watching a spin-off television series loosely based on the video game, created by Eugene Levy, aka Jim’s dad of American Pie or that guy on SCTV.

Yahoo! javascript guru Douglas Crockford worked on the game’s NES conversion in the early 1990s. He penned an essay on the process called “The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System” that gained some cult status on early bulletin board systems. Among his frustrations were Nintendo’s strict — and often bizarre — guidelines and how they applied to the game.

The Big N’s 10 Commandments said publishers could not create games for the NES that:

1. Include sexually suggestive or explicit content including rape and/or nudity
2. Contain language or depiction which specifically denigrates members of either sex
3. Depict random, gratuitous, and/or excessive violence
4. Depict graphic illustration of death
5. Depict domestic violence and/or abuse
6. Depict excessive force in a sports game beyond what is inherent in actual contact sports
7. Reflect ethnic, religious, nationalistic, or sexual stereotypes of language; this includes symbols that are related to any type of racial, religious, nationalistic, or ethnic group, such as crosses, pentagrams, God, Gods (Roman mythological gods are acceptable), Satan, hell, Buddha
8. Use profanity or obscenity in any form or incorporate language or gestures that could be offensive by prevailing public standards and tastes
9. Incorporate or encourage the use of illegal drugs, smoking materials, and/or alcohol (Nintendo does not allow a beer or cigarette ad to be placed on an arena, stadium or playing field wall, or fence in a sports game)
10. Include subliminal political messages or overt political statements

Additionally, developers would go through a licensing process where they couldn’t release the same game for competing systems for two years and would be limited in the amount of games they could release in a year. This is the price you paid for making games for what was essentially a monopoly in the late 1980s and early 90s. Nintendo wanted to control quality and avoid another video game crash.

Crockford mused that these restrictions “would seem to ban any game in which your character met people, killed them, took their money, and then bought more weapons. But in fact most Nintendo games are still faithful to that theme, so we were unclear as to how to interpret Nintendo’s policy. In the Super Mario Bros games, which are considered clean and wholesome, kids routinely kill creatures, and the only motivation is that they are there.”

So, Nintendo was protecting my adolescent mind without me knowing it. Remember the bloodless, grey sweat-filled Mortal Kombat on the Super Nintendo? Or the strange Nazi-less Bionic Commando? Or even that “pubs” were renamed cafes from the Japanese to US translation of Final Fantasy II/IV? These are only a few of several examples.

The Big N, however, recanted some of its puritian ways in the late 1990s as PlayStation and Xbox entered the scene. Competition ended up being the best motivator for “free speech” and the removal of the restrictions. (The game rating system created around that time provided Nintendo with some cover, which didn’t hurt either.)