Thrill Kill is a cancelled 1998 fighting game for the Sony PlayStation, which even today is still widely available despite being officially unpublished. Thrill Kill was considered a technical feat for the PlayStation for allowing four players to fight simultaneously in the same room, although this technical feat was overshadowed by the brutality and controversy surrounding the game.
Set in an urban version of Hell, the characters were all damned souls fighting for another chance in the mortal world, watched over by Marukka the Goddess of Secrets, who has organized the infernal tournament and promised the winner reincarnation on Earth. Other content included revealing BDSM and fetishistic costumes, characters with amputated limbs and other handicaps and violent and sexual moves with names such as “Bitch Slap”, “Swallow This”, and “Head Muncher”.
Thrill Kill was developed in the late 1990s for the Sony PlayStation by Paradox Development, now Midway Studios – Los Angeles. There was much hype surrounding the game, billed as the new Mortal Kombat, and expectations were high in the gaming community. The original publisher was to be Virgin Interactive, before Virgin Interactive was acquired by Electronic Arts Pacific for £122,500,000 in the late summer of 1998.
By this point Thrill Kill had already finished development in entirety, and a Californian-based industrial metal band, Contagion, had even recorded numerous songs and an entire score for the game. A few weeks before shipping, the game was cancelled by EA because they didn’t want to “publish such a senselessly violent game”, as they felt that it would harm their image. They also stated that they deemed the game so offensive that they would not even attempt to sell the game to be released by another publisher either.
Later, former employees that had worked on the game released the full game onto the internet, along with various beta versions, and bootlegs of the game flooded the market and were still seen by a large share of its original intended audience nevertheless. All files are still widely available through filesharing, and playable through emulators.
Gameplay consisted of a closed 3D room where up to four opponents would fight to the death, and proceed to finish each other off with Thrill Kills, much like the fatalities of Mortal Kombat. However the characters, because they are already dead, cannot be physically injured, although they audibly feel the pain of attacks, and blood is still present.
Every attack made will result in a character’s bloodlust to rise. Instead of the usual life bar, characters build up a “kill meter”. Once this meter was full, and therefore bloodlust at its strongest, a player’s character would be electrocuted to give them superhuman strength enabling a Thrill Kill move to brutally slay an opponent, depending on what button was pressed upon grabbing someone.
The game was later reworked and released by another publisher as Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style
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