On December 9, 1993, and March 4, 1994, members of the combined United States Senate Committees on Governmental Affairs and the Judiciary held congressional hearings with several spokespersons for companies in the video game industry including Nintendo and Sega, involving violence in video games and the perceived impacts on children. The hearing was a result of concerns raised by members of the public on the 1993 releases of Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and later Doom which was released after the first hearing. Besides general concerns related to violence in video games, the situation had been inflamed by a moral panic over gun violence, as well as the state of the industry and an intense rivalry between Sega and Nintendo.

The hearings, led by Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl, put the video game companies to task for the realistic depiction of violence in video games, and threatened that Congress would take action to regulate the industry if they did not take steps themselves. As a result, the American video game industry created the Interactive Digital Software Association (now known as the Entertainment Software Association) in July 1994 to serve as an advocacy group for the industry, and subsequently formed the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to provide content ratings on video games sold at retail in North America.

Background Since as early as the 1970s, video games have been criticized for having violent content that psychologically influence players. In 1982, the Surgeon General C. Everett Koop asserted that video games may be affecting the health and well-being of young people and were potentially addictive. However, until the 1990s, the perceived target market for video games was generally for children, and manufacturers of video games typically did not include high levels of graphic violence in their games. Most computer game software would be sold through toy stores like Toys 'R' Us or general retail outlets like Sears and Wal-Mart, rather than computer stores.

State of the industry By 1993, the video game industry had recovered from the 1983 crash, and was estimated to be worth . Video game consoles had reached the 16-bit era with the ability to support higher resolution graphics. Alongside this, video games had started to draw older players, creating a market for games with more mature content, both on home consoles and in arcades.

During this period, two key players were Nintendo and Sega. Nintendo had been instrumental in helping to recover the North American market after the crash with the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES); in 1990, Nintendo sales accounted for 90% of the US market. Its successor system, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), was released in 1991. However, to avoid repeating one of the issues that caused the crash, Nintendo took care to limit and review what third-party games could be made for its platforms to avoid a glut of poor games. Sega, which had already released its Sega Genesis in the US in 1989, found their sales to be lagging behind Nintendo. In an aggressive campaign aimed at the United States market, Sega heavily pushed the game Sonic the Hedgehog, with its titular character aimed to become Sega's mascot and rival that of Nintendo's Mario. Sega was also less selective about which games it allowed on the platform, allowing many more third-party games onto the system to increase its library in contrast to Nintendo's. Further, Sega used marketing language purposely aimed at Nintendo, such as "Sega does what Nintendon't". By 1992, Sega had obtained 65% of the US gaming market, overtaking Nintendo's dominant position. Subsequently, a strong rivalry between Nintendo and Sega was formed, referred as the "Console Wars", which continued through the next decade and into the sixth generation of video game consoles, after which Sega dropped out of the hardware market and became principally a game developer and publisher, and at times working collaboratively with Nintendo.

Existing content ratings system Prior to 1994, the video game industry did not have a unified content rating system. Entering 1993, the Children's Advertising Review Unit (CARU) of the Better Business Bureau had heard rumblings from politicians that the content of video games was under scrutiny, and sent word to its board members, Sega and Nintendo. Sega agreed that they should have a ratings system, and had developed its Videogame Rating Council in June 1993 in association with independent educators, psychologists, child development experts and sociologists. The Videogames Rating Council had three principal ratings for games released on the Genesis platform: GA for General Audiences, MA-13 for games intended for those thirteen years and older, and MA-17 for those 17 years and older. Sega debuted their system in June 1993 just prior to the release of Mortal Kombat for the Genesis, knowing the ratings system would help mitigate concerns over the violent content in the game. Nintendo did not have a ratings system, but as it had control over the cartridge manufacturing process, it would only publish games they felt appropriate for a family console. Nintendo also refused to use Sega's ratings solution due to their continued corporate rivalry.

A further difficulty for the industry was that there was no established trade group for the video game industry. While many of the game publishers belonged to the Software Publishers Association, this group represented more practical software interests, such as word processors and spreadsheets, and the Association did not hold the entertainment software membership in high regard.

Mortal Kombat

Fighting games had become a lucrative property after the release of Capcom's arcade Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in 1991, which established many conventions of the genre. While Sega lured many of Nintendo's third-party developers to break their exclusivity agreements to publish games only for the Nintendo consoles, Capcom remained loyal to Nintendo, licensing only a few titles to Sega to publish, and only the SNES received the home console port of Street Fighter II in 1992, which was said to help keep the SNES sales ahead of the Genesis in the United States for that year.

Numerous other fighting games followed to try to capture on Street Fighter II success, but most notably was Midway's Mortal Kombat, first released as an arcade game in 1992. Mortal Kombat was highly controversial at its release. Unlike Street Fighter II, which used traditional handmade sprites that resembled cartoon or comic book illustrations, Mortal Kombat used digital scans of live actors, with graphic depictions of blood and gore (notably the infamous Fatality finishing moves) that were largely absent from other fighting games at the time. Despite the game's advertising indicating the game was meant for mature audiences, the perception that video games were still aimed at children caused parents and other concerned groups to criticize the violence within the game. However, at this point, Mortal Kombat was only an arcade game, making it relatively easy to segregate it from other arcade games if necessary. Greg Fischbach, the co-founder and CEO of Acclaim Entertainment, the company that had secured the license for home console versions of the game, said that while the negative press attention helped to boost the game's popularity, "[w]e didn't want that press or publicity", and recognized that the industry might need to take steps to quell similar problems in the future.

Because of its success in the arcade, Acclaim Entertainment started to bring Mortal Kombat to various home consoles. Both Sega and Nintendo sought the game for their consoles, the Genesis and the SNES, respectively. Both companies recognized the issue with the level of gore in the game, but took very different approaches. Sega, staying with their attempt to capture as much of the market, went with trying to keep as much of the visual gore from the arcade game in place. While the Genesis version of Mortal Kombat as shipped eliminated the blood and fatalities, they could be activated via the use of a well-published cheat code. As the game, as shipped, did not include the blood and gore, Sega labelled it with their MA-13 VRC label. On the other hand, Nintendo wanted to keep games on their system appropriate for families and children, and required Acclaim to change the red blood to grey sweat, edit the fatalities, and change other parts of the game's artwork to remove elements like severed heads on spikes. Sega's version of Mortal Kombat outsold Nintendo's by a factor of five. This furthered the existing rivalry between the two companies.

Night Trap

Night Trap is a 1992 game developed by Digital Pictures and released on the Sega CD, a CD-ROM attachment for the Sega Genesis. Night Trap is presented as an interactive movie, using full-motion video to show scenes and allowing players to choose their next option, creating divergence in the story. The game's narration centered on the disappearance of teenage girls (starring Dana Plato) at a winery estate, tied in with the appearance of vampire-like beings that feed on young females.

Night Trap drew criticism worldwide, which helped to publicize it. Similar issues were brought up in the United Kingdom, with former Sega of Europe development director Mike Brogan noting that "Night Trap got Sega an awful lot of publicity... Questions were even raised in the UK Parliament about its suitability. This came at a time when Sega was capitalizing on its image as an edgy company with attitude, and this only served to reinforce that image." However, in retrospective, much of this criticism was deemed misguided. Steven L. Kent writes that "Reading the transcripts of the 1993 hearings, it is hard to believe that anybody had ever actually played Night Trap. Few people bothered to acknowledge that the goal of Night Trap was not to kill women but to save them from vampires. Players did not even kill the vampires—they simply trapped them in Rube Goldberg–like booby traps. Nearly everyone who referred to Night Trap mentioned a scene in which a girl in a rather modest teddy is caught by the vampires and killed. The scene was meant to show players that they had lost and allowed too many vampires into the house." Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com noted that "its game objectives were mischaracterized either through ignorance or deliberate obfuscation, transforming it from bland and barely titillating FMV adventure to child-corrupting sexual boogeyman." In Sex in Video Games, Brenda Brathwaite describes the game as "rather campy" and its sexual content as "minimal and largely limited to the dress of the women", also pointing out how many critics claimed the game was about killing the female characters, rather than helping protect them.

Lethal Enforcers

Lethal Enforcers was a 1992 arcade game released in 1992 by Konami which used light guns; the player takes the role of a police officer to lethally take down criminals while avoiding killing civilians and fellow police officers or being shot by criminals. The game was rendered using photo-realistic imagery which drew some concern. It was ported to home consoles the next year (on Sega systems in late 1993, and on the SNES by early 1994). These games shipped with the Konami Justifier, a plastic light gun modeled after a revolver.

Moral panic around gun violence In the months prior to the hearings, there had been a small moral panic in America on gun-related crimes, which fueled the concerns related to violent video games. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, gun-related homicides had reached record highs in 1993 since the 1970s. Both Congress and the Justice Department were looking to reduce the amount of violence on television.

Congressional concern