A History of Violence: 6 Old School Games as Brutal as GTA

Violent video games were around long before Grand Theft Auto and Dead Rising showed kids the fun of drunk driving and hitting golf balls into a crowded food court.

Here are some early generation video games that set the bloody tone for today's games. Even if you're too young to remember these, your parents probably played them, whether they admit it or not ...

Very few Atari games let you be the bad guy. Just about every game involved eating dots, dodging dots or shooting at dots with more dots in order to stamp out the face of evil. The unauthorized video game version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tied that unspoken rule to a tree and vivisected it with a circular saw in 1983.

Players took control of Leatherface, or in this case, a pudgy bobblehead version of Leatherface if he dressed in light-blue spandex and styled his hair like Coach Buzzcut from Beavis and Butt-head.

As Leatherfaces, your goal is to run around your never-ending front yard and kill people with a chainsaw, or what appears to be a large blue tumor sticking out of your abdomen.

The game sold poorly (basically no stores would stock it) and has since become a rare and highly sought-after title from game aficionados.

So How Bad Was It?

There isn't any blood to speak of, so apparently the developers wanted the violence to be more psychological than physical. Or maybe it was the fact that having to draw three more red pixels back in the '80s would have added an extra three months and $2 million dollars to the game's development budget.

The victims are among the more pathetic opponents in gaming history. Their only defense is to hope you trip over one of the obstacles that randomly pops up while you stalk them (mostly sections of white fence, for some reason). As Leatherface, you don't run out of life, your chainsaw just runs out of gas. After all, we wouldn't want kids having to think about mortality while they stalk unarmed victims around a steeplechase course.

The makers of Mortal Kombat took the brunt of the anti-video game violence brigade's fire catapults in the '90s for starting the violent fighter-game revolution, but Barbarian was doing it years earlier.

Barbarian took a page (ripped off) from the Conan the Barbarian series and featured two unnamed sword-wielding meatheads, swinging and slashing at each other until one of them died. That was it. Wow, what a long way we've come. Back then, you could buy a game and play the whole thing without spending two weeks vacation mainlining Red Bull.

The game did attract some controversy for its violence, but its critical acclaim overshadowed it. After all, how are you going to criticize a game with a cover that mechanics could hang in their garages.

You have to wonder how much of the game's budget went to chest oil.

So How Bad Was It?

The game could end one of two ways: Someone falls down with a single death-blow or someone's head gets cut clean off. Then to add insult to incapacitating injury, the head bounces off screen like a mound of bloody Silly Putty and the loser's lifeless corpse is carried off screen by a slave elf whose frowning face looks like he doesn't get the greatest health benefits for his hard work.

Here's another title that takes a gory grindhouse classic and cuts to the good parts without pesky things like plot, exposition and dialog getting in the way.

This game, developed by Exidy in the '70s and loosely based on the Paul Bartel film Death Race 2000, appeared on two different systems, but had the same fundamental idea: Run over people with your car and score points.

The arcade version was a simple black and white screen that awarded players a single point for every gremlin they ran over and assigned them a rating at the end of the game of "skeleton chaser," "bone cracker," "gremlin hunter" or "expert driver." We're assuming skeleton chaser was the lowest ranking because in real life it's totally easy to catch a skeleton.

The NES version had a little more advanced graphics than its predecessor, which is like comparing New Coke to a lukewarm puddle of whale vomit. American Game Cartridges resurrected (ripped off) the original game with 8-bit color and the option to pimp your death mobile with weapons like guns, missiles and flesh mulching tires called "cutters," "slashers," "slicers" and "dicers" which we're guessing also gave much better traction in the winter.

So How Bad Was It?

By comparison, the NES version was more violent, but the arcade version became one of the first titles to cause public controversy. According to The Dot Eaters' website, the game's cabinet featured some gruesome artwork, plus the victims would scream when you ran over them and, in a classy touch, would turn into little crosses to mark the spot where they became one with the road. Presumably, somewhere a young, starry-eyed Jack Thompson was getting an idea.

The game got skewered in the press and eventually was pulled off the market leaving gamers to take on more wholesome, less controversial titles for kids like Combat, Rampage and Pete Rose Baseball.