when the game was released and the rule was put in place bombings weren't as much of a widely talked about issue
Lol I would have to highly disagree with this. Either way, I don't really care about the whole code thing. It just make's gun a tiny bit harder to level but, again, whatever.
Someone in a different thread commented about how the game was rated PG. First off, the ESRB rates games and PG is a movie rating, not a game rating. POTCO was rated E10+. At the time, the E10+ rating was actually pretty new and it was created specifically for games kind of like POTCO actually, which had more violence than permitted in an E rating (everyone), though were kind of weak in qualifying for a T rating (13+).
The ESRB does a judgment on every game and explains the rating they gave. I can no longer find the judgement on POTCO, though just looking at some contentious ratings between E10+ and T recently, the thing that seemed to sway towards a T was (1) blood, (2) ***ual themes that were more than just suggestive themes (there are specific definitions on what is a suggestive theme or otherwise), (3) simulated gambling. Now keep in mind that these ratings are determined fairly subjectively so there is not a cookie cutter method for assigning these ratings. So just because there is some blood in a game doesn't mean it has to automatically be T or higher, for example.
The third point there, simulated gambling, is my theory on why "the code" was implemented. It seems pretty straightforward that simulated gambling puts a game in T+ most of the time, and POTCO clearly has simulated gambling. Since E10+ was a new rating at the time, I am sure Disney lobbied the ESRB hard to somehow get a E10+ rating because they were running ads for the game and Dead Man's Chest on kid's TV networks (which actually came up in 2007 in a congressional report on marketing violent entertainment to children). I assume Disney and the ESRB committee came to some kind of understanding that allowed the E10+ rating to be justifiable in light of some T-rated aspects in the game. I bet they toned down some suggestive dialogue and perhaps implementing the no shooting live humans part of "the code" as a way to also dull down the violence of the game.
This is purely speculative, but when POTCO was being released I have to say all of this made perfect sense. Even though TLOPO is its own thing, I feel like fundamentally changing an aspect of the game that made it more kid-friendly in the eyes of regulatory agencies in the past would undermine the essence of the game. Even though most players now are the adults that used to be kids back then, and we get annoyed at "the code" and the chat censor, etc, I don't think TLOPO should actively strive to alienate a child audience.
