Dating clear back to the summer of 1996, both GamePro and Electronic Gaming Monthly reported on a case where a mother purchased Primal Rage on the Genesis for her son, but was upset because of one of Chaos’ fatalities where he pees acid on his downed opponent.
Fighting games were no strangers to drawing the ire of parents, with Mortal Kombat often being the most cited example, as it helped lead to the creation of the ESRB.
In another case, Ellie Rovella of Gilbert, Arizona launched a grassroots campaign against Primal Rage on the Sega Genesis after she bought the game for her then 11-year-old son back in the 1990s.
The kicker here though is the game was rated with a T for Teen 13+ rating by the ESRB, which is something she ignored when purchasing the game for her 11-year-old son.
Upon seeing Chaos’ golden shower fatality, Rovella returned the game and in her… rage convinced the store she purchased it from to remove it from its shelves.
It’s worth pointing out that Primal Rage allows you to play volleyball with the in-game humans mid-match, but this didn’t seem to get noticed by the kid’s mom.
Rovella didn’t stop at returning the game though, as she went on a grassroots campaign to get Primal Rage out of stores.
Target reportedly removed the game from 22 of its stores, while Best Buy went several steps further and pulled it from 251 stores in the United States.
Rovella started to run into issues with her case, because instead of contacting Time Warner Interactive directly, Primal Rage’s console publisher, she took the matter to the media. Time Warner Interactive usually resolved matters directly with consumers back then, by reimbursing them for their purchase or by some other means.
Tracy Egan, a former PR director for Williams Entertainment (previously Time Warner Interactive) said in 1996 that her company wasn’t too upset about the situation for a couple of reasons.
First, if Primal Rage was raising the ire of the stores’ customers, then Williams would rather those stores not sell the game than have to deal with any protests of boycotts, saying sales of one game would not make or break a store.
Secondly, by this point, Primal Rage was already passed its peak sales cycle, and Williams wouldn’t be greatly affected by its removal. Primal Rage on the Genesis was released in August of 1994, so this was close to two years after the game came out on consoles.
After all of the complaints, Primal Rage on the Genesis was once again resubmitted for an ESRB rating — and it got the same one it did previously: T for Teen 13+.
All of the other versions of Primal Rage, except the Genesis version were put back on store shelves, even though many of them featured this move. The Genesis version likely didn’t return to store shelves due to Rovella’s complaints.