The International House of Mojo

Ex-LucasFim Gamer Douglas Crockford details the toning down of Maniac Mansion for the NES.

The mansion contains a number of arcade video games. One was called KILL THRILL. The name had to be changed. Doug Glen, our Director of Marketing, suggested that we change it to MUFF DIVER, which I thought was a pretty good idea. Unfortunately, I later became aware of the NES Game Standards Policy, which stated in part:

Nintendo will not approve NES cartridges...with sexually suggestive or explicit content

Yikes, MUFF DIVER had to be changed again. In order to minimize the impact on the artwork, I needed to substitute MUFF with another four letter word that was less suggestive that could make sense with DIVER. We settled on the word TUNA.

You'll be wanting to read the whole story here. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll probably not dive for tuna.

Update: Turns out this is a near 15 year old article that's been picked up on today by various sources for some reason. Still worth a read or a re-read though!

Source: Crockford.com