The first video game to ever exist, known as ‘Pong' which was released in 1972 is a far cry from the standards of video games now which make the most of the technological advancements in the last thirty years. The game was a table tennis sports game which featured plain and simplistic graphics. Three years after the release of ‘Pong’, the first violent video game was released. Known as ‘Death Race’, this game featured the same simplistic 8-bit graphics, and the player would find themselves playing as a car, with the objective of the game being to run over as many human-resembling pixels on the screen as possible while a timer counted down. The game had a terrible reception at launch, causing outrage from the public due to its violent content which had not been seen in any video games at the time. The developers eventually took the game off the market after the backlash of its release became so severe, with newspapers and other organisations attacking the game for promoting violence in a playable virtual form.

Seventeen years later in 1993, the game ‘Mortal Kombat’ was released and had one of the largest video game launches ever, with advertisements all over the TV, and the date of the release being called ‘Mortal Monday’. The game was the first to feature lifelike and realistic violence, being called the “most violent video game ever” at the time, as players could horrifically “finish” opponents with ripping the heart out of the fallen enemy, or tearing their head off, and hold it up as a trophy being just a few examples. Even though ‘Mortal Kombat’ was intended for mature audiences, there was no law which prohibited minors from playing or accessing the game which led to denunciations of the game by politicians and many news outlets. On December 1st 1993, American Senator Joe Lieberman gathered the Washington press corps and showed them recorded tapes of the most gory elements of the game, announcing his intentions to introduce a game age-ratings body to prevent what he believed to be the corrupting influence of video games on young minds. A week after the press conference, the senator chaired a subcommittee on violent video games, insisting that the industry needed to introduce a system of self-regulation if it wanted to avoid state regulation. Within five months of that, the games industry established the ‘Entertainment Software Rating Board’, a self-regulating entity which now determines the age ratings for video games. One of its first acts was to give ‘Mortal Kombat’ a “mature” rating making it illegal for people under the age of 18 to purchase it.