The history of violent
video games is long and storied, going back far beyond the days of
Doom, Carmageddon, and a whole host of other games that would be
considered tame by today's standards. Before games like Mortal
Kombat shocked and delighted adolescents in dimly-lit arcade parlors
across the country, one could find a few scant examples of
ultra-violent arcade games scattered here and there. Excessive?
Sure.
Unnecessary? Probably, but that's what made them so great! One such
example of these forgotten classics of blood and gore is an old
shooting arcade game called Chiller.
Though it had a fairly
unassuming name and consisted of a tiny screen with a plastic rifle
mounted on a swivel, Chiller contained an almost sociopathic amount
of bloody violence. As soon as you pop in a quarter, you're taken to
the pre-game screen that tells you what special objects you'll have
to shoot in order to unmask the secret bonus level.
And so, after
committing that first row of horrific images to memory, it's on to
the torture chamber!
(no this was not drawn
in MS Paint)
Things are looking
pretty nasty. You've got bloody limbs all over the floor, bats and
ghosts flying around, and people in various forms of torture (hence
the name). However, this is all before you start shooting. Each
stage requires you to hit a certain number of targets to empty out
the "monster meter" before you can move on, and that means doing
stuff like this:
A dozen or so acts of
mindless violence like that, and you're on your way to the "Rack
Room":
In this stage, you
still flay the torture victims with your bullets and shoot down
vermin for points, but the real treat comes with lowering that
unfortunate fellow hanging from the ceiling above the river of
blood:
Mm mmm, good. That's
one happy alligator... or is it a crocodile? I always forget which
ones inhabit rivers of blood. Stuff
like that will earn you a trip to the diabolical "hallway":
Alright, it's not
quite as grisly as the first two levels, but you still wind up
shooting at severed heads and limbs as they appear. Early on, you
even have to operate a trap door:
Haw haw. At this
point, I should point out that the game also includes a number of
digitized screams, both male and female, that play at various times
throughout the levels, such as when you're shooting chunks of flesh
off some guy tied to a rack. If screams are your thing, click here to listen to a
sampling.
All good things must eventually come to an end, however, and so
you'll eventually wind up in the graveyard:
Here, you'll be
shooting at groping hands popping out of the ground, a monk with a
wheelbarrow full of body parts, and most notably, a girl buried up
to her waist in the center of the screen. See if you can spot the
surprising part of this target:
That's right, Chiller
wasn't afraid to throw in a little low-res nudity to draw in the
consumer. After that, it's hard to be impressed by shooting more
severed heads and the like.
And that's not all: if you've managed to find all the special
objects in each stage, you'll A) get to play a shot machine for
extra points at the end of each stage, and B) advance to the bonus
round, where you'll skeet shoot flying heads, hearts, skulls, etc.
And once all that's
out of the way, you get to play it all again! Wee!! Ok, I admit that
the game was kind of shallow, and seemed to get progressively less
bloody in each level. Still, captivating potential players with
unprecedented levels of gore is quite a marketing ploy. It even got
an unlicensed NES port of the game, and boy does that look good:
Of course, you'd be
lucky to find either incarnation of the game these days. Luckily,
that's why we have emulators: so you can enjoy all the cheap, tawdry
games of yore in the privacy of your own home. Enjoy!
