Violent video games cause violence. This is complete nonsense, and every gamer worth their salt knows it. Not that it stopped various “concerned” groups to decry video games and all who play them, especially religious groups. However, there is evidence to show that violent video games do desensitize gamers to violence. This doesn’t mean gamers are going to become psychopathic killers, but it does mean that if video games want to shock us, they have to try really hard.

Not all violent video games are good. Not all of them are bad either. Some hyper violent games like the 2016 Doom reboot are a ton of fun. Then there are those like Hatred that take it too far. Certain games earn their reputations for having deaths so violent they’ll make you ill, or scenes so horrifying you can’t help but look away from the screen. Heck, this gruesome quality can often ruin games. However, there are those that stand out from the crowd. There are video games that are one giant, horrifying, nightmare of blood, guts, and gore. These are the games that most people are unable to play. Still, some people do play them.

There are spoilers for a few games ahead. There are also depictions of graphic and disturbing imagery that may be too much for some people to handle. Take caution or throw it to the wind as we go through some of the most violent games in video game history.

15 Mortal And Brutal: Mortal Kombat

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It might not seem like much today, but Mortal Kombat was unequivocally the most violent video game of its day. The original Mortal Kombat released in 1992 on an arcade system before porting over to the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo. It featured things like ripping people’s spines from their bodies, fighters impaled on spikes, and copious amounts of blood. The game spawned a giant controversy that culminated in a U.S. Senate hearing and the creation of the ESRB rating system. On a brighter note, Mortal Kombat and a few others like it are also the reason why E3 exists.

Despite all the controversy over the first Mortal Kombat, the series continued to evolve and only became more gruesome with each new installment. Now, players can enjoy high definition renderings of disemboweled corpses and the strings muscle tissue as bodies are ripped limb from limb.

14 Anger Leads To Hate: Hatred

Hatred
via PC Games on YouTube

Hatred, like another game on this list, is obsessed with three colors: black, white, and a shade of red so dark it might as well go into the black category. Granted, there are the occasional spurts of bright color as the light show on top of the cop cars tries to blind you. However, this isometric gorefest of a shooter does its best to make its colors match the bleak tone. Mr. Gravel Voice (his real name goes unspecified) hates the world and wants to take as many people out as he can while spouting as much angst as a surly teenage anime character. Hatred turns the world into a giant shooting range where all you do is murder innocents until the cops eventually mow you down. The game was so violent that Steam pulled it from its store page and sparked a giant controversy.

13 The Original And The Remake: Doom

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Doom was a groundbreaking and fairly controversial game back in 1993. It featured a ton of graphic violence and satanic imagery that sent the religious communities into a fervor. They hated it and even blamed Doom for the Columbine School shooting. It only helped to further the false belief that violent video games encourage violence in children. However, if you thought the 1993 Doom was bad, just wait till you take a look at the 2016 reboot. Doom 2016 is one giant power fantasy. You start the game by crushing a demon’s skull with your bare hands. You are the demons’ boogeyman. There is real fear in their eyes before you pull them apart and brutalize them until they are mere piles of lifeless flesh. The entire game is steeped in gore. It even managed to shock audiences in 2016, which is saying something.

12 Nintendo's Cold Heart: Chiller

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Arcade games were once the backbone of the video game industry. Each machine played a single game that was designed to suck as many quarters out of adolescents pockets as possible. One of the more popular genres was the shooter. Chiller took a creative twist on the familiar genre. Instead of trying to shoot as many enemies as you could, your goal was to torture as many people as possible. Players would use the gun to interact with the screen. They could shoot the person hanging from the ceiling or hit a rope to drop a guillotine blade onto someone’s neck. Severed heads decorated the walls and blood painted the floors. Chiller boasted a total of four rooms with eight goals. Once you were finished with the torture devices and mangled your victims, the game would award you with text that said “good shooting.”

Somehow, Chiller received an NES port, although it was heavily censored. The evisceration and nudity was removed. Even so, it’s a rather strange choice for the family friendly company.

11 Deicide: God Of War

6- God of War 3 Helios
Via: i.ytimg.com

Although the popular deity destroying God of War series is, it is absolutely one of the more violent series out there. You play as Kratos, a Spartan warrior turned god killer, as he sets out to murder every deity who has the misfortune of coming across him. The murders Kratos performs are brutal and rendered in excruciatingly fine detail. Kratos disembowels Cronos from the inside. He lops off Hermes’ legs while the god pleads for mercy. Kratos even puts his thumbs through Poseidon’s eyes after savagely beating him, and you get to watch it all happen from Poseidon’s perspective. However, the worst offender is Helios, who screams in agony as Kratos rips Helios’s head from his shoulders with his bare hands. Although the series started out steeped in Greek mythos, the next game has set its sights on Norse mythology. Look out Loki. You might be next.

10 Grateful That Their Dead: Dead Space

5- Dead Space Eye Play
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Dismemberment is one thing a lot of games on the list have in common. It is, for the most part, one of many gruesome options to destroy your opponents. However, Dead Space developers decided that it wasn’t enough to just give players the option to dismember NPCs. No, they had to develop an entire game around that idea. The Dead Space games were banned in Germany, China, and Japan. In this horror franchise, the only way to stop the reanimated corpses of your crew, also known as Necromorphs, is to dismember them until they stop moving. Of course, the developers prefer to call it “strategic dismemberment.” Either way, it means having to remove everything from the unearthly abominations before finally stomping the last bit of afterlife out of them. Just try not to let the Necromorphs get too close or you’ll quickly learn that they aren’t the only things that can be strategically dismembered. Welcome to the living impaired in space.

9 Down The Rabbit Hole: MadWorld

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MadWorld is a game that only features four colors: black, white, yellow, and copious amounts of red. The aesthetic of the game resembles that of a comic book with yellow to highlight text and red to make sure no one misses the gore. Your goal in each level is to get enough points to unlock the poss. All you have to do to rack of points is violently kill everyone you see. The more explosive your kills, the more points each kill is worth. The game starts you out with a chainsaw and only gets worse from there. You can impale opponents on spikes, hold them so that oncoming trains can rip the pieces, toss them into spinning turbines, or straight up slice them in two. Somehow, this controversial title that was straight up banned in Germany managed to become an exclusive Wii title.

8 Live Action: Phantasmagoria

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You wouldn’t think a simple point and click adventure would make it onto this list. However, Phantasmagoria is anything but simple. Phantasmagoria features live actors and fully rendered cutscenes that can make anyone’s stomach churn. It follows the story of a young, female author as she tries to navigate a demonic mansion. Although it might not be as graphic as other video games, the fact that it featured a live actress makes the violence that is there worse. Men and women are brutally tortured to death on screen either through mundane murders like gardening tools shoved into people’s skulls or through the use of torture devices. It even featured a full rape scene that left little to the imagination. CompUSA, the largest American retailer at the time, refused to sell the game and it was outright banned in Australia.

7 Racing Plus: Carmageddon

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Racing games are a lot of fun and fairly popular in their own right. Although the true objective of a racing game is to be the first across the finish line, there are certainly those of us who prefer to create our own objectives. Namely, run over as many people as the game will allow and try to take out as many opponents as physically possible. Thankfully, that’s where Carmageddon comes in. It’s pure carnage and explosive mayhem dressed to look like a racing game. While getting to the checkpoints and finishing the race are all well and good, the true purpose of Carmageddon is to run over cows, nuns, and any other poor bystander that is unlucky enough to be in frame. Its sequel, Carmageddon: Max Damage was able to beautifully recreate the mass murder of the first game while adding in even more destruction just because it could. Murder comes in a ton of hot rod fueled flavors with power ups like anvil launchers and lightning rods. However, countries like Germany and the United Kingdom censored the blood, guts, and gore by swapping nuns and old people with zombies and robots. Somehow, that’s just not as much fun.

6 Going Postal

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It takes a really sick and twisted mind to warp the simple task of everyday chores into the offensive and graphic violence seen in any Postal game. Similar to adult animated comedy shows, Postal does not care who it insults or how many people it nauseates. The developers for the Postal series insist that their games are only as violent as the players. Yet, a game that allows you to wantonly set protesters on fire and then urinate on their corpses to extinguish said fires falls under the deliberately violent category. It even allows you to “decorate” your guns with live cats who screech in pain with every shot. The violence isn’t even limited to the player. NPCs will get into firefights with one another without any provocation or action on the player’s part. It’s not hard to see why some countries would ban the Postal games.

5 Snuff Films: Manhunt

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This third-person, stealth based, nihilistic, psychological horror series managed to get banned in at least six different countries. It is a game series with zero humor and just as much mercy. Each level, or scenes, gets increasingly more violent as the game progresses. Your objective is to murder your targets in the most gruesome manner possible. The game will even grade you based on how brutal the kill was. It doesn’t just leave you with the normal weapons either. Manhunt encourages the use of impromptu weapons like shards of glass or plastic bags. Additionally, the developers went to great pains to make each type of kill look and sound hyper realistic. Finally, the Director, aka your boss, takes a sick and perverse amount of pleasure from all the murder.

4 Lights Out: The Darkness

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Would you like some horror with your gore? If so, then you don’t have to look any farther than The Darkness series. The game series is an adaptation of a comic book where you play as a hitman for the mob. He just so happens to have the power to summon a demon. The first game doesn’t start off too bad. It begins with a standard police chase and a quick shooting tutorial. However, after the tutorial ends you are greeted with the sight of a bone popping out of an NPCs broken leg. However, the real violence starts once you get into the meat of the game. Eventually, the little demonic voice in your head decides its had enough of just watching and erupts into twin tendrils with teeth that love to devour human flesh. It doesn’t really matter to the demon if said flesh is still alive once it starts. Combine that with modern graphics and the horrified expressions of your victims as your demon devours their hearts and you’re in for one gorey ride.

3 The Most Dangerous Game: Thrill Kill

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Plenty of games eagerly welcome controversy. In fact, games like Grand Theft Auto and Far Cry are intentionally designed to create controversy as a marketing ploy. However, none went as far as Thrill Kill. This 1998 fighter supported up to four players in a tiny arena as they fought to the death in the bloodiest manner possible. One character even used a severed leg as their main weapon. However, the game took things a few steps too far. EA bought the game’s developers, Virgin Interactive, and cancelled it just a few weeks before its launch. If Thrill Kill had made it to release it would have been the first game to receive an AO rating from the newly created ESRB. Although the final version of the game never saw the light of day, a beta version is available on some file sharing websites.

2 Boots On The Ground: Soldier Of Fortune

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The Soldier of Fortune series made its claim to fame through precision. Plenty of games allow you to blow people’s heads off or disembowel your enemies, but none do it quite like Soldier of Fortune. The first game used a combination of a modified Quake II engine and the GHOUL damage model engine. The GHOUL engine is the main driver behind the horrifying graphics. It allows players to blow NPCs limbs off at precise points or shoot off half of someone’s head. Soldier of Fortune’s sequels just continued this gruesome trend. Players have enough control that they can slice chunks off of NPCs with a knife. If you shoot an enemy’s gun out of their hand, they will clutch the mutilated appendage in agony. This is one of those game series that makes you wonder if the developers went too far in their quest for realism.

1 Tasteless Violence:

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This game isn’t violent in the traditional sense. You won’t find copious amounts of blood or painfully rendered gore. It’s a 16-bit styled RPG game created by Danny Ledonne and released in 2005. Super Columbine Massacre RPG (SCMRPG) is free to play and available for anyone on its official website. However, unlike Mortal Kombat or MadWorld, SCMRPG depicts the tragic events of the Columbine Massacre with startling accuracy. Players take on the role of the shooters and go through the school as they kill the 16-bit renderings of real people. However, the game has real photographs of the victims in addition to the picture of the dead shooters, Harris and Klebold, after they died. A survivor of the massacre, Ryan Kovacs, said “One of the girls who died was a friend of mine. Rachel. We were in the same church group. Anyone playing this game can kill Rachel over and over again.”