Banned to the Bone

For as long as I can remember, as a horror fan, censorship has been wagging its mom finger at us whenever our favorite genre played a little too hard and showed us the gruesome goodness we really wanted to see. Okay! I get it! We really shouldn’t want to see people torn apart horrifically or enjoy playing a character brutally bludgeoning someone to death… but we do… We are horror fans.

Understandably, there are points where a line has to be drawn as the crazies of the world like to spoil it for the rest of us by getting ideas and taking things beyond just entertainment. This causes games to push the boundaries of… classification! Here, games are rated for their appropriate audiences or denied to be released at all when classification is refused. But when did pixels and polygons become too hot for TV? I wanted to take a look into the world of horror games that pushed the limit to get banned to the bone!

The early days of horror gaming weren’t causing anyone to crap their pants with indistinct blocky figures poking one another to release a red pixel. Understandably then game developers were looking at new ways to bring a better horror experience to their players. In the 90’s came FMV or Full Motion Video in video games. FMV games were often point and click style adventures with prerendered backgrounds and sometimes live action video put in place for cutscenes. Games such as Night Trap and even the classic Resident Evil of 1996 used the technology to invoke a realistic feel if you can look past the campy acting. However, there was one game in particular that caught my eye when looking into the era of FMV games… Phasmagoria.

Phasmagoria by Sierra On Line in 1995 is a point-and-click style horror game that included scenes of gore, sex, and violence in FMV form that drew a lot of eyes. Despite being marketed as an adult game and coming with a password system to censor the content, it was not saved from the censorship guillotine. With the games industry mostly being for kids at the time, there was a concern that any gore-curious computer-literate 10 year old could bypass the security measures. Even if the password system was not defeated, the pixelated/censored scenes left the imagination to conjure something worse than actually depicted.

Some retailers declined to carry it, religious organizations and politicians condemned it, and it was refused classification altogether in Australia… Boo. It got the big chop down under!

As computer technology advanced so did the quality of graphics. Games no longer needed FMV to show the good stuff and now we could act out the depravity for ourselves! And that is why Manhunt 2 from Rockstar got slammed for "Gross, unrelenting, and gratuitous violence".

In Manhunt you played as a death row prisoner who is forced to kill in a series of snuff movies. The game allowed the player to execute characters and be rewarded for brutal killings. Already pushing the limits of classification for its violent imagery, things took an even darker turn when Manhunt was blamed for influencing a murder in the UK. Here a teenager, who obsessively played the game, bludgeoned his friend to death with a hammer. Thus, after the announcement of Manhunt 2, critics opened fire at the idea of a release of a sequel. Despite the executions being censored and the kill score system being removed before the game was released… Manhunt 2 was banned in multiple countries (United Kingdom and Ireland) and many US retailers such as Target, Walmart, and GameStop refused to sell it.

Thrill Kill by Paradox Development was an unreleased and eventually canceled horror fighting game from 1998. Passed around my school yard like a dirty porn mag, I was able to get my hands on a playable copy. The sadistic fighting game had 10 fighters sent to hell and must fight to the death for a chance of reincarnation. It featured all kinds of crude and demonic fighters such as the mad surgeon, who would slash at players with his scalpel, and the tormentor (reminiscent of pinhead from Hellraiser), who would impale you with his chains! As you fought you would fill up a meter that would allow you to do a “Thrill Kill” finisher. And for pure mayhem, it supported up to four fighters at a time.

Sure, this game was gory! But it was probably the suggestive sexual themes that got the game controversy and then eventually canceled. Murder and mutilation okay! Boobies? Absolutely not! It was pretty much Mortal Kombat with bondage. Lady characters often had moves that involved breaking necks with their crotches while making orgasmic moans… try explaining those sounds coming from your room to your parents!

Playing Thrill Kill, I feel that it was weak sauce compared to today’s standards as is the case with many banned games these days. It wasn’t as taboo as its reputation has it to be… And to be honest it was kind of jank as the controls were bad and it just wasn’t that good of a game but did live on as Wu Tang: Taste the Pain/Shoalin Style minus the gory assets. Thrill Kill goes down in history as being one of those games that was just too hot for TV, which also made it more desirable to own.

One thing we can say about people is they will always want what they are not supposed to have. And banned games have always had that certain appeal, because you just know they gave the gory goods that feed our soul. Yeah… I’m weird like that and will always be fascinated by those games that were banned to the bone!

*This feature has been lightly edited for clarity and was originally published in Issue #1 of Fearzine Magazine which was distributed in June 2024.