43rd on their "Top 100 Video Games." Controversy Lethal Enforcers gained controversy for its use of photorealistic imagery and was one of the video games part of the 1993 United States Senate hearings on video games, led by senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl. Lieberman, during C-SPAN’s coverage of the hearings, showed Nintendo and Sega the Konami Justifier that was bundled with the game and that it looked too much like a real revolver. At the time, it was pulled from toy stores, such as Toys "R" Us. Along with Night Trap and Mortal Kombat, which were also part of the hearings, the Genesis version was one of the first video games to be rated MA-17 by Sega's Videogame Rating Council. Legacy Lethal Enforcers popularized the use of digitized sprites and backgrounds in light gun shooters. Its release coincided with the release of another popular game using digitized sprites around the same time, Mortal Kombat (1992). Lethal Enforcers subsequently became the yardstick by which later light gun shooters were compared to up until the mid-1990s. Digitized sprites also became the most popular graphical representation for light gun shooters up until the mid-1990s, with the arrival of Sega AM2's Virtua Cop (1994) which replaced them with 3D polygon graphics. Popular culture A level in Konami's shooter Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius is modeled after Lethal Enforcers and has the player character avoiding moving crosshairs. Both the blue and pink Konami Justifiers appear at the bottom of the screen during the stage. The We Are Scientists album Brain Thrust Mastery contains a song entitled "Lethal Enforcer" in reference to the game. The album contains many video game related titles such as "Altered Beast", "Ghouls" (from "Ghouls 'n Ghosts") and "Gauntlet". Notes References 1992 video games Arcade video games Cancelled Sega Saturn games Fictional portrayals of the Chicago Police Department Konami franchises Konami games Light gun games Obscenity controversies in video games PlayStation (console) games Sega CD games Sega Genesis games Super Nintendo Entertainment System games Censored video games Video games about police officers Video games about terrorism Video games scored by Kenichiro Fukui Video games scored by Tappi Iwase Video games set in Chicago Video games with digitized sprites Konami arcade games Video games developed in Japan