Dear God, I hate that Random button sometimes. Especially at times like these, when it chooses to spew up a game that I already know I don't like.There are only three games that genuinely unsettle me. The first is the Silent Hill series, 'cause they're terrifying. Second is Phoenix by Centuri (hey, don't laugh! It's the sounds the fighters make, and the way they move, it freaks me right out). Third is Chiller, by Exidy.
Not because of the subject matter, mind. Just by nature of its very existence - human beings coded this, drew the artwork, bought the cabinets, and paid to play it. Makes me shiver.
Maybe I should explain. Chiller is a game made in 1986 that makes Manhunt look like Rainbow Islands. Exidy - who had previously made a series of gun games - were desperate for cash, and decided to go all-out and make the most bloody and sadistic game ever created.
In Chiller, the objective of the game is to shoot as many ghosts, ghouls and zombies as you can. It was supposed to be a fun cash-in on the popularity of gory horror movies of the era, but it never really achieved success because even the arcade operators of the time thought it was a little too much.
The reason for this is that playing the game according to the stated instructions - shooting the flying ghosts and monsters for points - is impossible. There simply aren't enough things to shoot. However, you're also awarded points for blowing the fucking limbs off the tied-up naked people.
You start off in a torture chamber (which already has bucketfuls of blood and severed limbs scattered over the floor before you even get started), blasting away at non-moving targets (and the occasional flying ghost thrown in as an afterthought). Exidy have put plenty of detail into the scenes; shooting the rope on a guillotine will release the blade and decapitate the woman held inside, shooting the handle of a vice will crush the poor victim's head, and shooting pretty well anything will result in a bloodcurdling scream piercing from the speakers and chunks of flesh falling from the target, exposing the bone and gore beneath.
And don't think you can make the screaming stop by shooting folks in the head, oh no - Exidy have thought of that, and set things up so that the victims continue to scream in agonised horror even after you've reduced their faces to bloody chunks of meat and bone.
Now, senseless and over-the-top violence is all well and good, so long as there's some sort of reprieve. Some sort of comic relief. If, for example, the background music for level one had been the chase music from the Benny Hill show instead of the fucking death march, this game might have scored higher. If the dog that occasionally showed up to steal a severed limb didn't die in such a sad and pathetic way when you shot it, the game would have scored higher. If the game didn't reward you with text saying "Good Shooting!" after blasting the flesh off stationary targets, the game would have scored higher.
In England, the game was banned outright. In the US, few arcade owners would carry it, despite their patron's appetites for blood and gore, because it was just too much of an abomination. It did quite well in third-world countries, but not well enough for another manufacturer to try to emulate it. The game was, in short, too violent - too violent for the tastes of 1986, and still too violent twenty years later. Too violent for me, in fact, and I love violent games.
If you run a Google search, you can find all sorts of info about the game; the unlicensed NES port, the girl in the cemetary level whose clothes (and eventually head) can be blown off, the plague of spiders that descended upon Exidy's offices while they designed the game... but I think I'll leave all that out, and just skip to the final verdict.