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Editorial: What's in a Rating?

Thursday, 26 January 2006

The ESRB rating Twilight Princess recieves has been a topic much-speculated on since the games' first showing at E3 2004. What many people don't realize is how much the rating ESRB gives could affect the game's reception.

Back in late November 2004, there was an interview with Bill Trinnen and Nate Bihldorff, some of the localization and translation people working on Twilight Princess. According to the interview, Twilight Princess is all but guarenteed a "T" (for "Teen") rating. Nate comments:

I don't think there's any question it'll get a T personally. We'll probably have to look at it and have a long discussion with the ESRB. But that is one of their bigger issues, that you can get away with, well, Wind Waker has beautiful graphics but it looks a lot like a cartoon, but the more realistic you get, the more you're going to get [in terms of ratings]. From what we've seen, I don't think there's any question that...

Then again, the interview was conducted prior to the creation of the "E10+" rating level (Everyone, ages 10 and up), so one must wonder if it's possible the ESRB will opt for that rating instead.

However, the reality of the situation is that marketing and advertising deals for any given game have to be ironed out months and months in advance of the actual release; What and where you can advertise very often is reliant on the rating the developers expect the game will get. That is to say, the creators of Doom III probably anticipated that their game would be rated "M" (for "Mature"), so they knew they would not be able to advertise in, say, Toys R' Us catalogues which probably wouldn't let such an adult-oriented game advertise in their publication. Since the developers need to make these sorts advertising decisions before their games get rated by the ESRB, one would expect the ESRB would try their best to keep the developers informed about new rating levels, such as E10+, ahead of time. It seems like the people in the interview would have to have been alerted about the upcoming E10+ rating even before it was announced to the public, making Nate's estimate of a "T" rating very likely.

Personally, I hope that this "T" rating doesn't keep tons of potential Zelda fans from getting Twilight Princess and discovering the Zelda series. You have to remember that a huge amount of the Zelda fans which Ocarina of Time produced weren't even in their teens when that game came out. Imagine if OoT had recieved the "T" rating--I think a considerable portion of those pre-teen gamers wouldn't have gotten the chance to discover Zelda.

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