https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mb8az4/extreme-violence-in-mortal-kombat-11-still-feels-wrong-and-thats-a-good-thing

They called it Mortal Monday. It was September 13, 1993 and I had just turned 10. Mortal Kombat was moving from the arcade to the home console and every kid I knew wanted to get their hands on the brutal fighting game. I had poured over the pages of GamePro, learning how Kano would rip the beating heart from the chest of his opponents and that Sub-Zero could rip the spine from the body of his fallen opponent.

My parents weren’t going to let me play it. Violent video games were all over the news in the early 1990s and Mortal Kombat was the poster child of a moral panic—one that said violent video games were rotting the minds of children and turning them into violent psychopaths. As with rap music and comic books before it, politicians and pundits were blaming video games for the nation’s ills. There was even a Senate hearing lead by Democrat Joe Lieberman showing discussing and showing footage of the game's famous fatalities. The hearing—which played footage from the notoriously goofy Night Trap while Senators hefted the blue light gun from Lethal Enforcers—was ridiculous.