A Brief History of Gore

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Bloody video games.

They've caused their fair share of drama over the years, with violent action and gory killing attributed to all kinds of societal harm.

These days, a certain amount of bloodshed is tolerated - but not so long ago a splash of red pixels was all it took to start a fuss.

Join me as I prepare to dive knee deep into blood, guts, and video games.

Covered are classic horror titles such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the Atari 2600 and torture-themed light gun game Chiller: action shooters such as the digital rendition of Charles Bronson in Death Wish 3, Ikari Warriors; Decapitation in Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior, demon slaying in Splatterhouse and exploding drug barons in the 32-bit Narc.

Tecmo Knight was a decapitation-laden beat-em up, Space Gun and Beast Busters rail shooters with liberal dismemberment and copious blood.

The dawn of Full Motion Video spawned games like Night Trap, and the realistic digitised sprites of Mortal Kombat: with the violent fatalities courting controversy - and leading to the formation of the ESRB.

MK also spawned a number of clones, including Blood Warrior, Time Killers and Eternal Champions on the Mega Drive and Mega CD.

The rise of the FPS genre in the 90s followed in the footsteps of the violent shooters of the late 80s - such titles would cement the word 'gib' into the gaming lexicon.

Doom saw enemies explode into a red paste, Rise of The Triad flung eyeballs at the screen with its ludicrous gibs - and Quake features the first seen polygonal gibs.

Gibbing became the hallmark of the genre, with most later examples permitting the reduction of your opponents into fleshy chunks - at least until ragdoll physics took hold.

Meanwhile horror adventure games such as Phantasmagoria and Harvester took advantage of CD-ROM's storage to use realistic death scenes - and survival horror games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill saw bloody scenes to ramp up tension.

Both Carmageddon and Thrill Kill found controversy in the late 90s, with the former featuring reckless driving and pedestrian slaughter, and the latter with sadistic thrill kill finishing moves.

Meanwhile, FPS games had matured to the point where a little gore was accepted: the cerebral bore in Turok 2, the intagib rifle of Unreal Tournament and the dismemberment of Soldier of Fortune.

Games in which you play a psychopath proved more disruptive: such as the Grand Theft Auto series, Postal 2, or murder-em-up Manhunt and its sequel.

Post Manhunt, there's been little outrage: Half-Life 2 is very gory in places, as is Resident Evil 4 - but only the more gruesome deaths such as a chainsaw decapitation caused a stir.

Recently, mainstream games such as Gears of War, Dead Space and Fallout 3 have all featured gory violence, but such bloodshed is now deemed acceptable.

As with the revived Fallout series, we've also seen the return of a few other gory classics, such as the 2010 remake of Splatterhouse, the return of brutal fatalities in Mortal Kombat 9, and yet more ludicrous gibs in ROTT 2013.

Some games use violent scenes as part of their story, such as No Russian in Modern Warfare 2 - or in the key moments of Spec Ops: The Line.
Hotline Miami is a top-down exercise in hyper-violence, that sometimes gives the player pause for their actions, asking: 'do you like hurting other people?'

The God of War series is a prime example of a spectacle fighter: in which you brutally slay, decapitate or gouge out organs from an entire bestiary of mythological beings.

Similarly stylish is 2009's Madworld: with comic-book visuals inspired by Sin City, the monochrome combat is liberally splashed with huge amounts of crimson as you perform sadistic finishing moves.

Gore is par for the course in the horror genre - Left 4 Dead features hordes of zombies and a host of ways to despatch them: Killing Floor offers similarly gory co-op, Call of Duty: World At War introduced Nazi Zombies was the goriest COD, and the one which introduced zombies to the series - and every detail of your gory destruction is captured in Sniper Elite 2, and its Nazi Zombie Army variant: with the awesome slow-motion terminal arc of bullets, paired with gratuitous X-Ray vision: tearing flesh, piercing organs and smashing bone.

No doubt, rent flesh and rivers of claret are an arousing visual - appealing to human instinct at a very basic level, and acting as an effective way to communicate injury.

Taken to extremes, flinging gore at a player is a caricature of carnage - reassuring the concious mind that it's all just a game.