It wasn’t an indelible classic like Super Mario Bros, but this fun, jaunty platformer had lots going for it, especially given that it came out in 1986 – back when the NES was in its relative infancy in the US. Elsewhere, it was probably to avoid difficult rights issues.
Sometimes, this may have been because western audiences simply wouldn’t have recognized the anime or manga on which a game was based. Oddly, a late cutscene involving a gory exploding head was left in, possibly because Nintendo thought most players would never even reach it.īeyond avoiding sensitive topics like Nazism and religion (Nintendo also liked to edit out crucifixes and other such symbols from old games), there was something else that sometimes vanished on a game’s trip overseas: its licensing. Nintendo, sensitive about such imagery in the west, had all this shorn from the American and European versions, where the game went under its now recognized name, and all instances of Hitler moustaches and Swastikas were carefully edited out. In Japan, the game roughly translated to Hitler’s Resurrection: Top Secret, and contained a number of controversial references to the Third Reich. One of the most famous examples is, perhaps, Bionic Commando on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Sometimes, these changes can be as subtle as altering lines of dialogue so they make sense in a given country – an everyday phrase in Japan would likely mean nothing to UK gamers if translated literally, for example – to fairly drastic changes to a game’s graphics. Thanks to the internet and the growth of gaming as a general cultural phenomenon, audiences are now more familiar with the concept of localization: the process of altering a video game for a specific marketplace.
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