(The version I played is known by gamers for being ‘Haitian-friendly’.) Rockstar North, who made the Grand Theft games and the first Manhunt, are based in Edinburgh, and there seemed to me something very British about the sensibility of the game, specifically its outsider’s cartoon version of America, all cars and gangsters and mad radio stations. The soundtrack to this is provided by the radio stations available in the player’s car, which play the relevant music with an often hilarious commentary.Ī couple of years ago I spent some time playing Vice City, in the slightly expurgated version then available the game had caused a fuss because an earlier edition had awarded points for a rampage in which the protagonist ran over members of a Haitian gang. The missions include tasks such as breaking up union meetings, murdering a pizza delivery guy by running him over, buying clothes appropriate for Miami Vice-era Florida, and arranging drug buys. The player can drive cars (a zillion different types), fly planes or helicopters, run or swim or parachute, and can get in fights using any weapon from bare fists (he can go to a dojo to learn martial arts) to wrenches to pistols, machine-guns and rocket launchers. These are known as ‘sandbox games’ from the free-form nature of the play. In San Andreas, the game world includes versions of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, as well as the landscapes in between. The games can be played in a linear way, by following predetermined missions, or can simply be explored, at leisure and at random. These games involve a protagonist who drives around a fictional 2001 New York (in Grand Theft Auto III) or mid-1980s Miami ( Grand Theft Auto: Vice City) or early 1990s California ( Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas). Step forward that proud flower of modern Britain, the maker of Manhunt 2, Rockstar Games.Įven people who don’t know anything about video games have heard of Rockstar’s most famous product, the Grand Theft Auto series. It’s just that nothing makes a game hit the headlines quite like a good scandal and several of the most recent moral panics have all been generated by the same company. But there are thousands of video games, of which most aren’t violent. The outrage that brews up whenever one of these stories hits the press can give the impression that all video games are violent in a depraved, Clockwork Orange-ish way.
(MSNBC headline: ‘Were video games to blame for massacre?’) It turned out that Cho didn’t own any video games, and according to his roommate never played them (nor did he own a TV), which must have put him in a tiny minority of 23-year-old American men. When Seung-Hui Cho committed his murders at Virginia Tech, there was an immediate fuss about the contributing part that might have been played by video games. Not to worry: questions were anyway asked in Parliament by the local MP, Keith Vaz.
The police disagreed: they said that the game had not played any part in the murder, which had been a robbery motivated by the need for drug money, and pointed out that it was the victim, not the killer, who owned a copy of Manhunt. The first Manhunt game was denounced by the parents of Stefan Pakeerah, a 14-year-old who was murdered in Leicester in 2004, as a factor that contributed to his death. The decision by the BBFC probably headed off a moral panic.
#Manhunt 2 kills full#
An appropriate fate, one could argue, since Manhunt 2 is a horror game full of killing it exhibits, according to the BBFC, ‘a sustained and cumulative casual sadism in the way in which these killings are committed, and encouraged’. The decision by the British Board of Film Classification singled out the game’s ‘unremitting bleakness and callousness of tone’, and made it illegal to sell the game along with a comparable ruling in the USA, this effectively kills Manhunt 2. ‘Manhunt 2’ has just become the first video game to be banned in the UK in a decade.
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