This is American hysteria's aftershock, where I share with you a story that didn't make it into the main episode.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and today we're talking about violent video games.

The game, the game Golden Eye came out for Nintendo 64 when I was nine,

and I would sit in a room in the dark late at night, actually terrified of what felt so

incredibly real. The blockhead graphics are laughable now, but back then I could almost feel

myself shudder with wounds the way James Bond did, well, the way I did, since it was one of the

first popular first-person shooters.

I sniped people from far away.

I threw grenades into tiny control rooms full of people.

I planted mines that would explode my enemy with just a button on my watch,

which was often a friend sitting right next to me on multiplayer.

And later, in Grand Theft Auto 3, I would slam through pedestrians in my

car and then smash into cops until I had what was called five stars, and then I'd just pop off that

cheat code which dropped me yet another grenade launcher or a flamethrower and have a terrifying shootout

until I'd finally fall to my knees and the screen would go black. For a long time,

violent video games had been scapegoated by Republicans and Democrats alike, blamed for a variety

of violence, including mass shootings. When violent video games first came on the scene in the 1970s,

they looked as simple as you could possibly imagine, with Pong exploding in popularity in the early

part of the decade. The first real video game controversy came in 1976 when an extremely simplistic

arcade game called Death Race shook the foundations of American culture. Described as sick and morbid

by the National Safety Council, they also stated,

quote, one of its most insidious and probably unrecognized characteristics is its shift from

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