Games have been raising hackles since their inception. Howell Ivy kick-started gaming and controversy’s relationship when he designed Death Race in 1976, a simple black and white game that was, well, about running people over for points. That was enough to get America riled up, prompting 60 Minutes to run the first of many, many televised news stories about the psychological effects of gaming. But public outrage is unpredictable. Politicians and parent groups have been shocked by d-list titles like Manhunt and Night Trap while more popular, widely played games with far more inflammatory content have passed by unnoted. Today, 61 Frames Per Second presents The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial. A number of these are games that we are surprised did not cause uproar in a number of communities. The rest are games that we ourselves find seriously questionable in content. How do you feel about these videogames? Indifferent? Appalled? Leave a comment and let us know. — John Constantine
NARC
I don't know about you, but I have at least a couple of friends who have occasionally sold drugs. They're pretty lucky they grew up in the relatively permissive '90s, and not in the merciless, Reaganite '80s presented in NARC. Sure, NARC gives you bonus points for arresting dealers instead of killing them, but that's because it's almost impossible to do. Far easier is just perforating them on the spot. As my fellow blogger Cole notes, "I guess dismembering hundreds is okay if they're pushin'." In fact, there was some parental outrage over NARC's unprecedented level of gore, but its moral assumptions went pretty much unchallenged. — Peter Smith
Pokémon
Have you ever noticed that there are no regular, powerless domesticated animals in any of the Pokémon games, cartoons, comics et cetera? Let's say your pre-teen brother/sister/cousin goes out for a walk one day and comes across a pigeon in the street. They then capture this pigeon in a small cage and train it to fight the dogs, lizards and ponies that the other neighborhood kids have captured and trained to fight, as well as stray cats and sewer rats that can then be captured and trained for similar purposes. Yeah, that scenario is a little awesome, but it's also pretty horrifying, right? When Michael Vick is involved in a dogfighting circuit, the media explodes with rage, but when your kids do it in a Nintendo game it gets rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. — Derrick Sanskrit
Final Fantasy Tactics
As much as Final Fantasy Tactics’ tale of political intrigue in the feudal fantasy-scape of Ivalice is concerned with a power struggle between church and state, it’s hard to get past the game’s barely veiled indictment of Christian lore. Tactics' villains are essentially the Catholic Church. Their central figure is Saint Ajora, a 'child of God' with twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him and sent him to his death. 'Cept it turns out Ajora wasn't really the son of God, but a power-hungry war-mongering mortal who was sneakily made divine through church skulduggery and historical revisionism. Good thing RPGs require so much reading, otherwise there might have been some good ol’ fashioned game burnings back in 1998. — JC
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