That’s not what the “Nintendo Seal of Quality” meant. The Seal was just a logo on the box that showed the game passed Nintendo’s internal testing and would work in your NES. In other words, the game had an official 10NES chip inside. That’s all it meant and that’s all it’s ever meant, through the Super NES, N64, GameCube and Wii years.
As for self-censorship limiting the appeal of games, I think that’s a bit much. The real reason gaming was seen as for kids was because Nintendo positioned the NES as a toy. It was only after the system became a hit that you saw more adult games on the Super NES and beyond.
My contention is that the Seal implied that the game had gone through Nintendo’s censorship process and wouldn’t be about, for example, Custer trying to rape a tied-up Native American woman. (Custer’s Revenge for the Atari 2600 had that plot.) The Seal meant (denotation) that the chip was present and that the game would work when used in the NES. The Seal implied (connotation) that the game publishers had gone through Nintendo’s hoops, one of which was the censorship regime.
This is true to a point, certainly.
The reason the NES was positioned as a toy was to trick toy sellers into giving it shelf space. After the Crash, received wisdom was that the console craze was as dead as the hula-hoop and that nobody would ever want to buy a video game system again.
Nintendo did as much as it could to make the NES seem like something other than a console: It had a front-loading mechanism like a VCR and unlike most previous consoles, which were top-loading. It had a game pad instead of the joystick which had once been the controller of choice. It was even packaged with the R.O.B., a gimmicky little ‘robot’ peripheral, all in an attempt to distance it from the stench of death pervading all previous console brands.
The censorship certainly contributed to the perception of the gaming world as just for kids in this country. It wasn’t the whole reason (the adults playing games now grew up with consoles, for example) but I’m fairly certain it was a reason.
I wonder if the lack of seal on most of the Bible games I’ve seen was because Nintendo was hesitant to use Christian imagery in their games. They were all piggy-back cartridges.
This is precisely right. Nintendo didn’t want any religious images in their games. Zero-tolerance all the way in those days. Nintendo progressively lightened up when the American console industry got back on its feet and there was real competition to Nintendo’s offerings in this country, first from the Sega Genesis (competing with the SNES) and then from the Sony Playstation (beating the pants off the N64).
No kidding. They were so draconian that they wouldn’t even allow crosses on tombstones in third party games like Super Castlevania 4. Oddly, this didn’t apply to the original Zelda, as Link’s shield has a big honkin cross on it.
Which would explain the impossible, ugly, tedious glut of first/3rd person run and gun shooter games, and the relative lack of the sorts of games that used to give people like me a reason to own a console instead of just playing everything on the PC. =/