Painful Moments in Gaming: Thrill Kill

I can't remember quite how but one of our group of friends had managed to get hold of a not so legal version of the PlayStation game, Thrill Kill. Thrill Kill, for those of you who don't know was infamously unpublished, at the time 'unpublishable' due to its violence and mature content. BDSM, cannibalism, Gimps and various circus acts duked it out in such gritty locales as a sewer, a car park, a car park sized mental institution and a car park in hell. Remember kids, this was back when Carmaggedon had to be heavily edited in order to see release. Thrill Kill obviously piqued our interest because of the 'senseless violence' promised but more appealing to our small gaming clan was that it was essentially a four player beat em up. Yes, the amazing Shaolin offered up to Eight player fighting (still one of the best multiplayer experiences ever) and later Gekido allowed for a similar four player fighting experience but for this one day we had Thrill Kill, a chipped PlayStation, four controllers, several eager players and a multitap.



The problem was, because the copy wasn't exactly 'legit' we had to hot swap the discs in order to get the game load. One of the entrepreneurs of the group had memorised the instructions which involved putting in a legitimate disc, sticking a pen in the PlayStation so it would think it was closed and start to spin, wait for the PSX logo to come up and the spinning to slow down and then swap in the Thrill Kill disc. Initially, the group sat round holding the pads eager to get playing but the disc swapping wasn't exactly a scientific technique and was taking longer than anticipated. A couple of hours later and we were taking it turns to try to get it to load up, not because we were that desperate to play it but because we'd all now invested a lot of time in the endeavor. Eventually,after another hour of disc, pen, power, wait, logo, swap, wait and restart something different had happened. We'd done it. We had finally loaded it up and were now faced with a warning screen along the lines of "This game contains scenes of violence and gore, you have to be over 18 to play this game. Are you over Eighteen?" with a selection between yes or no. To which, Chuff_72 (long term readers may recognise the name) who had done the lion's share of the disc swapping work sat back on the couch, picked up the pad and clicked "No" immediately booting us out of the game again. Hours and hours watching a black screen wasted. We did eventually get into the game after hours more spinning. It was 'okay', certainly not unpunishable and absolutely candy-cane compared to the dross that gets casually bought for minors today but by far the most memorable thing about it was Chuff's mistake.