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Grand Theft Auto and the biggest moments in video game history

Grand Theft Auto 5 (GTA V) made headlines as the biggest video game release of all time, selling more than $1 billion worth of copies in three days. But GTA V didn't get to this landmark moment by itself. Find out more moments that changed the course of video game history in this list, from most recent to the beginning of (video game) time.

7. ESRB rating board

Tony Avelar/The Christian Science Monitor
Zach Lynch (r.) holds a video game controller as he plays his friend Brett Oppido in a game they play everyday after school. Parenting with limits can be hard to do, especially with teens.

In the early 1990s, video games advanced from 8-bit to 16-bit processors, which was a thrilling visual step forward for video game players, but a horrifying step toward realistic gore for some parents and those wary of the video game industry. The popularity of games like Mortal Kombat and Doom highlighted the violent nature of some video games to the point where Sen. Joe Lieberman held hearings on the effects of video games on society. A rating system was demanded.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board was created in 1994 with the goal of rating video games to offer a better idea of what each game may include. The ratings range from Early Childhood, Everyone, Everyone 10+, Teen, Mature, and Adults Only, and are printed on the front of each video game box. Each game is rated based on its most graphic content by anonymous raters who either have experience as educators or as parents. The ratings also can restrict sales: If the video game has either a ‘Mature’ or ‘Adults Only’ rating, retailers have the choice of whether they will sell the game to children under 17 or 18 years without parental consent.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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