Bionic Commando and the Invisible Enemy

Bionic Commando released as an arcade game in Japan in 1987 and as a Famicom game in 1988. The enemy faction was the Nazz Army — a thin fictional overlay on the Nazi party, using swastika imagery in logo design and staging the game's climax around the resurrection of Adolf Hitler. The player character, Super Joe (a reference to Forgotten Worlds), fought through enemy bases to prevent the Nazis from reviving their leader. The game's final confrontation was with the resurrected Hitler, whose death by exploding head concluded the game. The narrative was an action-movie treatment of World War II Nazism, with the fictional names providing minimal fictional distance from the historical referent.

Nintendo of America's content guidelines prohibited Nazi imagery and the use of real historical figures as game villains. Capcom's North American localisation team, working on the NES version released in 1988, made systematic replacements: the Nazz Army became the "Badds," a generic evil organisation; swastikas were replaced with eagle imagery; the word "kill" in dialogue was replaced with "destroy"; Adolf Hitler was renamed "Master-D" and his general staff was renamed accordingly. The game's final confrontation — with Master-D, a man who looked exactly like Hitler and exploded in exactly the same way — retained the visual design of the Japanese original with the name changed.

The replacements produced a game whose censorship is partially transparent. Master-D's visual resemblance to Hitler, the eagle imagery's clear descent from Nazi eagle emblems, and the narrative structure of a World War II-era conflict with an evil ruler to be stopped — all of these elements survive the localisation. Players who completed the NES version and encountered Master-D were seeing Hitler regardless of the name change; the substitution was lexical rather than conceptual. The game's notoriety in localisation discussions reflects this partiality: the censorship is visible precisely because it was incomplete.