By Andrew SheivachmanThe Daily Northwestern
The next great violent game is almost here and I couldn’t be more excited.
Rockstar Games announced Tuesday that a sequel to their controversial murder-stealth game, Manhunt, is in development and slated for a 2007 release. Not only is the game slated to be released on the Playstation 2 and PSP, but also the family-friendly Nintendo Wii.
The original Manhunt was one of the most violent and extreme games ever created. The goal of the game was to murder your way through an industrial wasteland planted with psychotic gang members focused solely on hunting you down. Using stealth, the player had to utilize darkness and use whatever weapons available to brutally kill gang members. Successfully executed kills used camera angles reminiscent of snuff film to show the barbarity of your survival. A plastic bag, for example, could be wrapped around an enemy’s head to suffocate him while the player beat his head in. Not exactly Lifetime Movie of the Week material, right?
As such, the game faced heavy resistance at release and was banned immediately in New Zealand, Australia and Germany. Manhunt became the first game to be classified as a film in Canada, and was given an ‘R’ rating to restrict its sale to youth. In the United Kingdom, the murder of a 17-year-old by a 15-year-old friend with a hammer was blamed on the game and many copies were pulled from stores in the resulting uproar. Lawyer Jack Thompson led a crusade against the game, telling the BBC that “(playing Manhunt) encourages you to enter into the notion that acting in this way is appropriate.”
In the United States, Manhunt met little opposition. While media outlets covered the release of the game, there was little talk of the game’s content. There seemed to be at the time a level of understanding, especially in the gaming press, that Manhunt was a quality game in which intense violence served to create a more immersive and engrossing experience.
Trivializing death by making it less gruesome would have eliminated the feeling of fear that pervades throughout the game environment. Imagine lurking through the shadows, ostensibly afraid, only to lose a life after being clocked on the head.
Rockstar Games is making a bold, but wise, move with the development of Manhunt 2. No developer has utilized violence in their titles quite as creatively as Rockstar has, especially since the release of the original Grand Theft Auto in 1997. Despite the public stigma against the violence present in Rockstar produced and developed games, Manhunt is really the only title in their collection that focuses closely on human injury. Running someone over in GTA, for instance, results in a cartoon splat noise and a blood stain, not a crunch of broken bones. Many of Manhunt’s murder scenes make Grand Theft Auto’s worst seem like Veggie Tales.
Developers that specialize in violent games, like Doom’s id Software and Unreal’s Epic Games, often include so much violence in their titles that the violence itself means nothing. After exploding your fiftieth alien skull in Quake 4, the violence becomes mind-numbingly tedious. Manhunt, on the other hand, is an important game because its slow pace and intense tension forces the player to really consider and ponder the violence one inflicts upon others.
Imagine eviscerating your foes with just a stabbing gesture, and you probably have a solid impression of what Rockstar is looking to create for the Wii. A player can now transcend button presses; actually stabbing someone can elicit an incredibly visceral emotional reaction. Maybe the next time you creep up behind a thug, you’ll stop and think.
Reach Andrew Sheivachman at [email protected].
