I am sitting in the Santa Clara office of Namco Bandai with five producers who are deeply, fiercely engrossed in expressing the fine distinctions between blood viscosities, brain fluid, and pus-filled blisters. I’ve seen my share of gore flicks, having grown up with Friday the 13th, Halloween, and The Exorcist, but there was never much intellectual discussion about it.
Today is different. Over the course of a four-hour session, I am thrown into Namco’s new action game, Splatterhouse, a gory, modern-day re-envisioning of the 1980s arcade brawler. It’s about thirty minutes into the session when Producer Mike Boccieri says something that resonates beyond the nuances of thin and thick blood.
“Splatterhouse is about dragging the player down the path of brutality,” says Boccieri. “This isn’t Fable; Splatterhouse is not about choice. It’s about brutality. I personally feel that after a half hour of playing, you’re going to want to put the game down for a minute because you’re going feel a little dirty.”
Namco is more than excited about the blood and gore in Splatterhouse. The M-rated third-person beat-’em-up, set to release sometime near the middle of 2010, originates from the company’s arcade roots. As the day session progresses, I learn how important this title is for the growth of the worldwide game maker. Splatterhouse is a symbol for Namco’s evolution. It bridges the Japanese headquarters with the Western studios developing it, a process that’s involved many personnel and high-level meetings. It’s Namco’s stab at forging a “new” IP in the rather unimaginative console landscape of 2009. And it’s a keystone for the worldwide company as they identify the cultural differences between Japanese and Western horror sensibilities, and bridge them.
School of Horror
On the surface there is little doubt about where Splatterhouse’s sensibilities lie. The original coin-op game hit Japanese arcades in 1988 (1989 in North America) and followed the common side-scrolling action formula and time-based mechanics of the time. Gamers played the role of Rick, a teenager who discovered a magic mask that gave him super human powers to chop, hack, beat, and splatter anyone or anything that stood in his way. The original “story” was essentially an 8-second long cutscene of Rick putting on the mask and transforming into a supernaturally powered human who would make former body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger cringe with jealousy.
Japanese arcade makers cranked out sequels and movie-related one-offs, occasionally exploring new variations and different themes. Namco’s Splatterhouse was one of the first coin-op games to truly explore the Western theme of horror, which for the time, was different because it was so violent. Splatterhouse hit the Turbo Grafx-16 and PC Engine in 1990 and for 20 years remained the only teen-rated TurboGrafx-16 game in North America. It was followed by two sequels, both on Sega Genesis.
There is a deep irony to its origins. The game’s original designer, Atsuhiro Hayakawa, created the game with Western-themed movies as their influence. Namco’s original team cites Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, Evil Dead, and Friday the 13th as its main influences. One glance at transformed Rick and it’s clear Friday the 13th influenced the original game’s look, which altered in shape and color of the mask for obvious legal reasons.
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