Written By: Jase Marsiglia
It sounds like something you could have found on the Dark Web. The number of people who have actually played it in the arcade could not have been too high, because it was quickly banned outright from America’s shores. To describe the visuals and gameplay would give someone pause. This could not be a real game. Could it?
Most gamers coming up in the 90s likely remember the uproar over Midway’s "Mortal Kombat", a pretty standard fighting game created by Ed Boon and John Tobias that paid tribute to martial arts films like "Enter the Dragon" and "Bloodsport". It was meant to compete with the wildly popular Capcom hit "Street Fighter II", except Mortal Kombat had another cinematic influence tucked up its sleeve, the Hong Kong gore fest "Riki Oh: The Story of Ricky". In this style, Mortal Kombat included not only a number of moves that expelled pixelated blood from its fighters, but notorious Fatality finishers that saw fighters ripping heads, with trailing spinal cords, from bodies, tearing hearts from chests, causing cranial explosions, bodily immolation, explosive electrocution, or simply uppercutting someone over a bridge and into a pit of spikes to be messily impaled.
Stuffy congressmen like Democratic Senators Herb Kohl and Joe Lieberman led a charge, sending Mortal Kombat, the zombie classic "Resident Evil", and the silly interactive slumber party farce "Night Trap" in for a Congressional hearing about video game violence.
These little moral panics are always hilarious, particularly considering just how much worse, and more realistic, the violence in video games would become, and how no one bats an eye anymore. Nothing like hindsight to remind you how quaint video game violence was, and how badly it got panties in a twist on Capitol Hill. These guys would have had heart attacks if they saw what kids were playing today.
Which brings me to "Chiller", a short lived light gun arcade game released in 1986 by Exidy, who had previously developed such vanilla timewasters as TV Pinball, the Pac-Man-like "Mouse Trap", and the spy vehicle game "Top Secret".
What do you do in "Chiller"? You have a light gun stationed on the control board, slimy green title font on the screen, and a Vault Keeper-like hooded host on the sides of the cabinet, beckoning you to drop your quarter in and test your aim. A horror game. Sweet. What are we fighting today? Zombies? Werewolves? Vampires? Sure. There is some of that.
The point of "Chiller" was sadistically simple. Kill. Everything. That is right, if it is on screen, kill it. And kill it good.
Four short levels and a couple bonus chances at a free game stand between you and the end, and within those four short levels, you enter a house of absolute horrors. Screaming, helpless, nude or semi-nude people are trapped in medieval torture devices, completely immobile, unarmed, and posing zero threat to you. Your job is to take the gun and render these people into bloody chunks of bone, guts, and gore.
That is it. That is the point. The guy in the Iron Maiden? Shoot him until his ribcage is spilling out. The couple on the stretching rack? Crank it until they rip in half, then blast their faces into pulp. That woman buried up to her waist in the cemetery out back? Blast the shirt off her chest before shooting her limbs off, piece by piece, until she is left a bloody stump with a navel. All of this is set to a score that sounds like a demented carnival ride, and a collection of tortured groans and screams.
(Image Courtesy of Wikipedia)
Killing people as thoroughly as possible is the entire game, and you get more points for shooting their corpses into various states of dismemberment. M for Mature did not exist yet in gaming, but if ever there was an impetus, "Chiller" would have been it. I imagine some kid having won the game, munching arcade pizza with a thousand-yard stare, questioning his morals after having fed a screaming man limb by limb to a hungry alligator in a river of blood, and wishing he had one more quarter for "Donkey Kong" just to rinse the palate and feel like he has not aged ten years.
Does this even sound like something that would exist in 1986? Well, it barely did. Despite the eighties all-or-nothing approach to horror in cinema, literature, and television, people just were not ready for digitized carnage on this level, and "Chiller" was quickly ousted from arcades that understandably were not willing to carry it. Exidy would have taken a bit of a bath on its production were it not for sales to developing countries, where it did pretty well in those markets.
Having caused something of a stir ten years before "Chiller"’s release with a roadkill game called "Death Race", surprisingly no relation to the Roger Corman film of the same name, Exidy was no stranger to controversy. The game was morbid but successful, even if the point was to run down gremlins and not humans, but Exidy caught plenty of heat because of it. Whether "Chiller" was meant to court a similar uproar, hoping to cash in on further notoriety, is unknown. The alleged orders from the company’s top brass to their designers for this new project were to go absolutely crazy.
Absolutely crazy they certainly went.
The Torture Chamber, the Rack Room, the Haunted House Hallway, and the Graveyard all offered ample opportunity to ply your skills in target practice, not only in blasting people into crimson, bullet-riddled dismemberment, but in shooting hidden areas for bonus objects and points. Activate torture devices for added thrill if you like, but the real points are in bodily damage to people already screaming from rooms filled with severed limbs and locked or shackled into devices meant to kill them anyway.
I, for one, find this game thoroughly fascinating. I am well aware of the irony that in today’s environment, more than ever, a game like "Chiller" would still be banned outright for being a tone deaf, classless horror show that celebrates the very type of violence we see on the news every day. I would be inclined to agree. It missed its time and will never have another.
But that is today. 1986 was forty years ago. Sensibilities were more amorphous in those days, and the idea that a game designed solely on sadism, created intentionally to spill pixelated blood, making you the villain, still was not embraced by horror crowds, is both sweetly humanitarian and mind-boggling, considering the wild west ideology of the genre in the mid-eighties. Splatterpunk was all the rage on bookshelves. Freddy, Jason, and Leatherface were finding new and horrific ways to separate limbs from bodies, with the sadomasochistic carnage of Pinhead on the horizon. Heavy metal, comic books, and late-night horror shows were all pushing envelopes in their respective fields, not to mention the Satanic Panic and Video Nasties.
And yet, here lies "Chiller", a game that for all intents and purposes would have fit right in with the guts and gore of its era, pushed into obscurity because it was too much. There is hardly a defensive element about it that I can stand behind, outside of its graphics and its take-no-prisoners plot, if you can call it that. It truly does feel like something wrought of pure evil intent. Something that shed the EC Comics cloak of just desserts and irony and proudly said there are no lessons here. Kill them all and kill them good.
CHECK OUT A FULL PLAY-THROUGH OF "CHILLER" BELOW
I am amazed at its audacity, and even more so at its timing. It is the type of cultural curiosity that I live for. Something perpetually in time out for causing too much of a ruckus, and yet swept so deeply under the rug that few people today have ever even heard of it.
"Mortal Kombat", in comparison, is far less violent, far less offensive, and far less extreme than "Chiller" ever attempted to be, and yet it was called to the carpet for its transgressions. It was made an example of the depravity being foisted upon kids who were playing it.
Meanwhile, in the dark corners of cultural obscurity, "Chiller" sits. Its screen flickers in the darkness of its basement in time. The screams of victims echo loudly as that funeral dirge plays on the menu screens between massacre sites. It sits, waiting for a re-release it knows will never come, knowing that adventurous gamers and horror fans will come down every now and again and look inside the maw of a game simply too nasty, lurid, and mean-spirited to find its place in either its time or ours.
"Chiller" waits. An urban legend in gaming. A holy grail collectible. A pixelated nightmare, waiting to leer lasciviously at you through YouTube uploads, mods, emulators, and websites. Too gruesome for the eighties. Too offensive for the present. Too disturbing and gleefully sadistic to ever forget about.