Classic game: Manhunt
“You’re killing to entertain, so play to the camera.”
Back in 2003, it was impossible to appraise Manhunt on its merits. Depending on who you asked, it was either a plastic bag thrust over the head of society so that Rockstar could choke the decency out of it or a focal point for the defence of free speech in a maturing medium. Who could tell whether it was fun or not?
Released at the peak of the Housers’ notoriety, and held responsible, by some commentators, for actual murders and causing US lawmakers to question the videogame industry’s ability to regulate itself, Manhunt was more cultural lightning rod than game.
Now the conservative establishment has moved on, we can play with the plastic bag removed from our eyes. The throat-ripping takedowns no longer shock as they once did, for a reason that would chill anti-Rockstar campaigner Jack Thompson: they’ve become commonplace in games. Today, the greatest surprise Manhunt has in store is that it’s actually a very traditional stealth game. Your primary activity is moving between patches of shadow in the grey and grainy Carcer City, while Vice City’s minimap is remixed to show the way noise ripples outward to attract enemies. Rockstar even simulates the greater travel distance of crunchier sounds like walking on glass and gravel – deeply nerdy territory for a studio which at the time was working alongside PlayStation to attract a cooler, mainstream audience to games.
SHADOW PLAY
Like the best of its genre, Manhunt is a game about gathering information.
Enemies don’t show on your radar unless you’ve seen or heard them recently, which creates tension: you’ll want to thwack a wall every so often to make any nearby hunters shout, revealing their position. But in doing so, you’ll give away your own.
This is Splinter Cell for sadists, basically, but without the gadgets – an omission that makes Manhunt more demanding than its peers. Beyond the bottles, bricks, and severed heads you can lob as distraction, you’re reliant solely on your talent for creeping close enough to a stranger to breathe down their neck without them noticing.
A takedown can be instant, but the longer you hold r before bringing down the hammer (or machete, or baseball bat), the more gruesome the kill, and the greater the acclaim from your captor and snuff director, voiced with strange gravity by Brian Cox. Of course, waiting also puts you at greater risk of discovery. It’s a classic risk-reward dilemma, and an evolution of early GTA’s nasty scoring system, which gave you bonus points for running over a cop with his own car.
In a way, Cox’s director is rooted in GTA too. Sam Houser’s pet GTA III feature was the cinematic cam, which let him watch from a detached perspective as he cruised around Liberty City. Manhunt goes further, with its handicam-style cutscenes and cutaway cameras that film your kills. Rockstar layers these shots with distorted VHS effects, giving them a voyeuristic quality, as if you’re watching something you shouldn’t be.
You can argue that Manhunt’s director is Sam Houser, the way his most vehement critics imagine him to be: dangerously controlling and socially irresponsible. The game reportedly unnerved some within Rockstar: one former employee claimed it almost caused a “mutiny” at the company’s New York HQ. GTA had its wanted level, the moral elastic band that pinged players back to lawfulness, but Manhunt offered no such comfort.
Manhunt is certainly unpleasant company – easier to appreciate than to love – but the lines it crosses today don’t concern its depiction of violence. Its Mexican hunters are a reminder that Rockstar North’s attempts at satire sometimes strayed into plain old racism. ‘Bring proof of the dresswearing hunter’s death’, meanwhile, just doesn’t read acceptably as a mission objective in 2021.
Yet Manhunt still has a role to play. You can find its sound simulation in GTA V’s radar, which pings your footsteps as part of its stealth system. It’s fitting that Manhunt’s place in Rockstar’s games is beneath your feet, a forgotten undercurrent that’s nonetheless part of the foundation of PlayStation’s biggest series.
“This is Splinter Cell for sadists, but without the gadgets – an omission that makes Manhunt more demanding than its peers.”