Once upon a time in a school playground in Glasgow, Scotland, a teenage boy received a CD-R in a clear jewel case and turned it in his hands with hushed reverence. The disc was blank except for two words scrawled in blue pen: Thrill Kill. This pirated PlayStation game was a coveted item in the school, its case scuffed and scratched from being tossed into countless school bags. Finally, after several long weeks of waiting, it was his turn.
That teenager was me, and I vividly remember the excitement of getting home that night and dropping the disc into my PlayStation. I had to use the infamous 'disc swap' technique to make it work, tricking the console into thinking the lid was shut with the inside of a ballpoint pen, then quickly swapping a legit game with the CD-R when the drive made a certain sound. That, or getting your PS 'chipped', was the only way to play Thrill Kill.
Thrill Kill was a fighting game developed exclusively for the PlayStation by Paradox Development. This LA-based studio (not to be confused with the Swedish Paradox behind the Crusader Kings series) existed from 1994 to 2008. In that time it launched a relatively small number of games, including X-Men: Mutant Academy and Backyard Wrestling. But it's the game it didn't launch that has come to define the developer's legacy.
Thrill Kill was cancelled in 1998, but somehow made it to playgrounds all over the UK—and almost certainly other countries too. When it was circulating in our school, no one knew where it originally came from. It's likely someone bought it from the Barras, a market where all manner of pirated games and software could be purchased in the late 1990s. Someone, somewhere, leaked a 99 percent complete version of the game and a cult legend was born.
Thrill Kill is a 3D beat-'em-up set in Hell. Ten cursed souls are forced to fight to the death, with the winner being reincarnated and freed from their eternal torment. Fighters include Dr. Faustus, a scalpel-wielding plastic surgeon who purposefully disfigured his patients, husband-murdering dominatrix librarian Belladonna, and The Imp, a dwarf who's into BDSM and walks around on stilts. His reason for being in Hell is never revealed.
The game itself is filled with sexual imagery, orgasmic moaning, bloody violence, and the titular thrill kills, which see you finishing your opponent off in the most gruesome way possible. By modern standards it's pretty tame (and pretty stupid) but in the late '90s, outrage over violent video games was at an all-time high. EA inherited the game following an acquisition and decided to pull the plug on the project, despite it being close to completion.
Self-consciously 'edgy' content aside, Thrill Kill was a decent 3D brawler, especially with 4 players. Realising this, Paradox took the engine and reused it to make Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style—which was both much better and less embarrassing. It still featured a fair amount of gore and violence (the most extreme of which had to be unlocked by entering a code found in the instruction manual), but was still notably tamer overall.
That night when I played that well-thumbed copy of Thrill Kill for the first time, making sure my bedroom door was firmly closed, I was giddy with excitement. It wasn't an especially interesting game, and I ultimately found it quite boring to play. But the illicit thrill of the mythology surrounding it—and the knowledge that it was so incredibly evil that it had to be outright banned—was enough to convince me I was playing something special.
It was the 1990s equivalent of when Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange was banned in the UK and bootleg VHS copies began to widely circulate. Tell people they can't see something and they'll find a way. I gave the Thrill Kill disc to the next kid after my time was up, making a big show of how shocking it was, and how it was going to blow his mind, thus perpetuating the myth. He probably said the same to whoever was next in line too.