Splatterhouse

Splatterhouse pits Jason Vorhees-sorry, Rick Taylor against hordes of the nastiest creatures you ever swung a board at.

Here in 2004, excessively violent video games are nothing new. In the last dozen years we've been through senate hearings on digital decapitations and protests against sadistic, trigger-happy mob games, so frankly, gamers have gotten a little desensitized to game gore. But back in 1990, in the waning days of the NES' reign and the kid-friendly era of Mario and Pac-Man, a game like Splatterhouse was pretty darn eye-catching. This was a game that wasn't afraid to spill a little blood; in fact, it wallowed in buckets of the stuff. As kids, we were of course fascinated with the gruesome spectacle of the game's grisly levels. It's safe to say that Splatterhouse was one of the very first games to use its shock value as a major selling point, and that really makes it stick out in our minds.

Honestly, the gameplay is only half of what made Splatterhouse great. You took control of a hapless college student named Rick who was sucked into a demented mansion along with his girlfriend, Jennifer. After Jennifer was kidnapped and Rick was forced to wear a bizarre hockey mask (called the "terror mask"), you were tasked with--surprise--rescuing your girlfriend and surviving to see the dawn. The game itself was simple: You walked ever to the right while punching, kicking, stabbing, bludgeoning, and shooting every vile hellspawn that crossed your path. There was a fair amount of variety in the weapons, but really the gameplay in Splatterhouse could have been called a bit repetitive. Could have, we say, because the endless parade of slimy, foul, god-awful creations that the game threw at you kept things morbidly entertaining. You always wanted to press on to see what the next unholy boss would look like, whether it would be eating its own entrails or flinging pieces of rotten flesh at you or spawning maggot-eaten giant slugs to consume you. Definitely a game to show your parents, this one.

Here we see a piece entitled Attack of the killer flesh-eating, big-mouthed worm things from hell.

If a new Splatterhouse were to be made today, there's no doubt it would take full advantage of the third dimension, 2D games having gone the way of the dodo. If the game appeared on capable hardware like the Xbox or even the immensely powerful PC, perhaps using--dare we say it--the Doom 3 engine, the developers could put some serious detail work into crafting the darkest, dankest, most disgusting environments and enemies ever seen in a video game. The biggest strength of a new Splatterhouse game wouldn't be its beat-up-zombies gameplay (though that's fun in itself); it would be the creepy, disturbing atmosphere that talented art direction could create with today's potent game hardware.

And perhaps all this is more than wishful thinking, as the rumor mill has in fact been churning for a little while now about the possibility of Namco reviving the Splatterhouse name for one more gory go, maybe even this year. So stay tuned, boys and ghouls. (Sorry, we couldn't resist.)