Whatever Happened To… Thrill Kill
This four-player brawler had plenty of brutal beatings to offer, but ultimately fell victim to its own murderous ambitions
A quick test for his Polymega review led to Nick revisiting this cancelled project
Ahead of its planned release, Thrill Kill was described as “dark, nasty, freakish and just plain wrong”. But this assessment wasn’t offered by some tabloid hack or a rent-a-quote backbench MP – these were the words of the game’s producer, Harvard Bonin, speaking to Official Playstation Magazine. The magazine itself described it as “the most filthy and depraved fighting game ever created”. However, underneath an exterior that was engineered for maximum controversy, Paradox Development was trying to do some pretty ambitious things with the fighting genre.
Thrill Kill was designed to be the Playstation’s first four-player 3D fighter, though it was ultimately pipped to the post by Acclaim’s WWF War Zone. This took considerable work to achieve – apart from having twice as many characters on-screen as the likes of Tekken, the game required full-3d arenas and a number of game design adjustments. “The multiplayer thing really screws up a lot of two-player standard conventions,” noted Harvard. “How do you face characters, etc?” One major thing that the game did was to change the player’s relation to damage. “We felt that fighting games have always inherently promoted defensive postures,” Harvard explained. “We wanted to promote in-your-face aggression in Thrill Kill so we reversed it and decided to reward the player for successfully executing attacks.” This meant that three characters ganging up on one was not an effective strategy, as the benefits were divided between the attackers – instead, players needed to concentrate on landing attacks whenever possible to build up a ‘Kill Charge’ attack, which would eliminate its recipient.
Of course, ultraviolent fighting games were nothing new – Mortal Kombat and a wave of mid-nineties copycats had actually made decapitations and dismemberment seem rather tame. Indeed, characters like Tormentor and his ‘Draw And Quarter’ move would have been right at home there. More extreme were the cannibalistic tendencies exhibited by the limb-wielding redneck Cleetus, who ate victims’ faces and drank their blood. However, the biggest differentiating factor that Thrill Kill exhibited was the sexualisation of the action, as the game included some
considerable BDSM influence in both its costumes and its moves. Indeed, Belladonna’s ‘Crotch Crush’ and
Violet’s ‘Miner 69er’ were highlighted as favourite moves by Harvard.
Thrill Kill was so close to release that it had even been submitted for rating by America’s ESRB, which classified it Adults Only 18+ – a rating that was almost exclusively given to games featuring explicit sexual content. The team had clearly hoped for the Mature 17+ rating, and hitting the higher one was particularly undesirable as it meant many stores would refuse to carry the game. Despite the inevitable controversy, Virgin Interactive was willing to go ahead with publishing the game, and a release date was set for October 1998. However, the decision was soon out of Virgin’s hands, as Electronic Arts acquired the American operations of Virgin Interactive as part of its purchase of Westwood Studios in August 1998.
EA was far more conservative than Virgin had been, and the game was cancelled swiftly. Speaking to Zdnet in October 1998, EA’S director of corporate communications Pat Becker explained: “The decision was made as soon as we could make it after we acquired the company. From the time that the deal was closed to the time that decision was made was a couple of weeks.” The reason was simple – the company felt that “the tone and the tenor of the game are just too violent”, with Pat Becker framing it as an issue of corporate responsibility, stating, “We have to be responsible for the content that we make available to the marketplace. We felt that this was not the kind of title that we wanted to see in the market.” There was no hope of a reprieve either, as EA confirmed that it would not sell the game to another publisher. Never mind that it was essentially complete – Thrill Kill was dead.
However, Thrill Kill took after its fighters, refusing to let death keep it down. Though Paradox Development’s work on characters and settings was essentially lost, the studio was at least able to salvage the engine to create Wu-tang:
Taste The Pain. This 18-rated licensed brawler was released by Activision in late 1999 and retained the four-player action with some gameplay modifications, allowing the rappers to do battle with each other and a range of fictional fighters. It received good scores from the press, earning 86% in Play and 8/10 in Official Playstation Magazine, with the latter praising it for “atmospheric graphics, delicious combos and outrageously violent end sequences”. But what of Thrill Kill itself? Well, the game had been leaked and was freely circulating online within weeks of its cancellation, with a move list and FAQ already doing the rounds on newsgroups by the end of October 1998. It’s fair to say that EA’S plan to ensure that it never saw the light of day was a miserable failure, then – and if you want to judge whether the publisher’s moral queasiness was justified, you can find out for yourself without too much effort.
“We wanted to promote in‑your‑face aggression in Thrill Kill”
Harvard Bonin