April 1986: if he says Netflix and Chiller, run
by Diamond Feit
Ever since I saw the 1994 biopic Ed Wood, I've thought long and hard about the phrase \"there's no such thing as bad press.\" Martin Landau\u2014playing actor Bela Lugosi\u2014delivers the line when he checks himself into rehab and reporters suddenly start knocking on his door again. After years of struggling to pay his bills, Bela would rather see his name in the paper for having a drug habit than be forgotten.
I understand Bela Lugosi's point of view but decades of social media kerfuffles and high-profile public scandals have shown us that bad press is very real and potentially fatal to a career. I'm sure that Ed Wood costar Jeffrey Jones would prefer people remember him for his substantial work as a character actor and not as a registered sex offender.
That said, there's certainly a gray area where a little outrage can help nudge an otherwise unremarkable person or product into the spotlight. The history of video games includes dozens of titles that benefitted from free publicity concerning their perceived content. Mortal Kombat proved popular enough to outlast the moral panic surrounding its initial release, while lesser blood-soaked 90s titles faded into obscurity.
Yet violent video games made headlines long before Sub Zero tore Scorpion's head from his neck. In 1976 arcade maker Exidy took struggling cabinet Demolition Derby and rebranded it as Death Race to capitalize on the then-recent Paul Bartel film. Instead of crashing cars into other cars, players could now run over stick figures which leave behind tiny tombstones.
In their official newsletter, the National Safety Council cited safety consultant Dennis Rowe as saying \"[Death Race] is sick, sick, sick.\" The same article also extensively quotes a Dr. Gerald Driessen who condemned the game as \"another gross example of commercial gain based on the aggressive and destructive tendencies in people.\" Exidy did indeed gain commercially from this gambit; sales of Death Race exceeded those of Demolition Derby by hundreds or possibly thousands of units.
More importantly, a lot of people now knew the name Exidy whether they saw a Death Race cabinet or not. I was too young for any of this news but I later inserted many a coin into Exidy's Crossbow, a light gun shooter where I fired at on-screen hazards to protect defenseless pedestrians. Hearing the people scream when I failed gave the game a slightly morbid edge that kept me coming back.
40 years ago this month, Exidy debuted yet another arcade shooter, although this one took the opposite approach to Crossbow. Rather than protecting the helpless, Chiller has players take aim at them.
After booting up and playing a series of spooky sounds, Chiller puts forth a dubious explanation for the macabre events that follow. The title screen describes the high score list as Top Monster Killers and when players start shooting a Monster Meter counts down with each hit. Successfully splattering enough targets before time runs out awards points for the remaining seconds on the clock which fuels an Ectoplasmic Tabulator.
Yet much like Exidy's insistence that the humanoid victims in Death Race were Gremlins, there's simply no reason to believe that playing Chiller involves gunning down Monsters. The first stage takes place in a Torture Chamber with four people locked into various states of agony. Severed heads and assorted limbs also litter the room, all of them with bright red bloody stumps. While their ashen skin looks unhealthy, there's absolutely no visual indication that anyone on screen is less than human.
On the contrary, shooting a person in Chiller tears off their skin revealing muscle and bone underneath while they shriek in pain. Players can also blast the equipment to trigger animated executions such as turning a vice to crush a man's head into pulp. It's on par with the recent Resident Evil games gore-wise in that you deal damage to specific body parts, except in that case you're clearly shooting decaying tissue.
The second stage keeps things just as grim with five prisoners trapped in the Rack Room. Two unhappy occupants are shackled to the titular device; hitting the ratchet at the bottom tears the victim in half. Another poor soul hangs in mid-air over a river of blood; shooting the crank that keeps him in place will lower him into the waiting jaws of a crocodile one bite at a time.
The back half of Chiller\u2014while still loaded with graphic violence\u2014offers far less shock value. The Hallway looks like a scene straight out of Scooby-Doo with ghosts crossing back and forth and a mummy laid out inside a coffin. The Graveyard presumably serves as the final resting place for everyone dispatched in the first three levels, though one lady buried waist-deep in the ground seems very much alive until you blow her to pieces. Your first two shots take her clothes off before you strip her of her flesh.
This progression betrays Exidy's intentions with Chiller. Front-loading the game with grotesque material ensures that any players or spectators will get grossed out right away. Only those who stick with the game will last long enough to see the relatively timid stages. Chiller also lacks any kind of finale; clearing all four stages simply restarts the cycle. That wasn't uncommon for arcade games in 1986, but Crossbow crescendoed with a battle against a giant face three years earlier.
It's clear to me that Exidy hoped to recapture the Death Race buzz from a decade earlier by deliberately courting conflict with Chiller. The arcade flyer certainly assumes that the game's reputation precedes it with the header \"You've heard about it! You've read about it! Now you can howl about it!!!\"
Speaking to Kotaku in 2018, former Exidy programmer Vic Tolomei confirmed that management encouraged them to push the envelope. \"During development we would sit around and say, 'How can we make this disgusting? How can we do the graphics so it\u2019s not just blood on the wall, but you actually see body parts and tissue?'\" Tolomei said, \"It\u2019s the same thing that horror movies do.\"
Tolomei likewise acknowledged the disparity between Chiller's first and second halves. \"If you don\u2019t hook the audience in the first 15 seconds or 30 seconds, it doesn\u2019t matter what\u2019s going in the rest of the thing,\" he said.
I had no opinion on Chiller at the time because\u2014despite the arcade flyer's assertions\u2014I never saw or heard about it. Indeed, there are no records of anyone alarmed by Chiller like there were for Death Race. A 2007 GameSpot story tracking the history of controversial video games noted an absence of written ire regarding Chiller, with author Steve Kent suggesting that it failed to fan any flames because \"nobody would buy the damn thing.\"
Today Chiller sits alongside Custer's Revenge and RapeLay as video games only notable for their perceived affronts to decency. In Chiller's case, it achieved infamy in hindsight decades after its original release; not even an unlicensed port to the NES garnered much attention from critics, parents, or safety councils. Exidy, too, faded from view in the years that followed, releasing few titles post-Chiller before closing its doors in 1999.
On a scale of Utterly Benign to Duke Nukem Forever, Chiller ranks quite low in the annals of digital atrocities. It's extremely one-note in its approach and lays all its cards on the table on the very first screen. For all the viscera on display there's very little game to play here which lessens any impact Chiller might have had. Ripping a guy's guts out only means something if he exhibits emotions and a personality first; otherwise he's just a glorified background element, a breakable object that squirts red.
If Bela Lugosi or Martin Landau were still with us today, perhaps they might impart a refined lesson along the lines of \"there is such a thing as bad press, but no press is the worst press of all.\" Chiller arrived in arcades 40 years ago expecting an angry mob but when your entire business plan relies on complaints to drive sales, silence hurts more than getting fed to a crocodile feet-first.
Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.
", "contentSnippet": "April 1986: if he says Netflix and Chiller, run\nby Diamond Feit\nEver since I saw the 1994 biopic Ed Wood, I've thought long and hard about the phrase \"there's no such thing as bad press.\" Martin Landau\u2014playing actor Bela Lugosi\u2014delivers the line when he checks himself into rehab and reporters suddenly start knocking on his door again. After years of struggling to pay his bills, Bela would rather see his name in the paper for having a drug habit than be forgotten.\nI understand Bela Lugosi's point of view but decades of social media kerfuffles and high-profile public scandals have shown us that bad press is very real and potentially fatal to a career. I'm sure that Ed Wood costar Jeffrey Jones would prefer people remember him for his substantial work as a character actor and not as a registered sex offender.\nThat said, there's certainly a gray area where a little outrage can help nudge an otherwise unremarkable person or product into the spotlight. The history of video games includes dozens of titles that benefitted from free publicity concerning their perceived content. Mortal Kombat proved popular enough to outlast the moral panic surrounding its initial release, while lesser blood-soaked 90s titles faded into obscurity.\nYet violent video games made headlines long before Sub Zero tore Scorpion's head from his neck. In 1976 arcade maker Exidy took struggling cabinet Demolition Derby and rebranded it as Death Race to capitalize on the then-recent Paul Bartel film. Instead of crashing cars into other cars, players could now run over stick figures which leave behind tiny tombstones.\nIn their official newsletter, the National Safety Council cited safety consultant Dennis Rowe as saying \"[Death Race] is sick, sick, sick.\" The same article also extensively quotes a Dr. Gerald Driessen who condemned the game as \"another gross example of commercial gain based on the aggressive and destructive tendencies in people.\" Exidy did indeed gain commercially from this gambit; sales of Death Race exceeded those of Demolition Derby by hundreds or possibly thousands of units.\nMore importantly, a lot of people now knew the name Exidy whether they saw a Death Race cabinet or not. I was too young for any of this news but I later inserted many a coin into Exidy's Crossbow, a light gun shooter where I fired at on-screen hazards to protect defenseless pedestrians. Hearing the people scream when I failed gave the game a slightly morbid edge that kept me coming back.\n40 years ago this month, Exidy debuted yet another arcade shooter, although this one took the opposite approach to Crossbow. Rather than protecting the helpless, Chiller has players take aim at them.\nAfter booting up and playing a series of spooky sounds, Chiller puts forth a dubious explanation for the macabre events that follow. The title screen describes the high score list as Top Monster Killers and when players start shooting a Monster Meter counts down with each hit. Successfully splattering enough targets before time runs out awards points for the remaining seconds on the clock which fuels an Ectoplasmic Tabulator.\nYet much like Exidy's insistence that the humanoid victims in Death Race were Gremlins, there's simply no reason to believe that playing Chiller involves gunning down Monsters. The first stage takes place in a Torture Chamber with four people locked into various states of agony. Severed heads and assorted limbs also litter the room, all of them with bright red bloody stumps. While their ashen skin looks unhealthy, there's absolutely no visual indication that anyone on screen is less than human.\nOn the contrary, shooting a person in Chiller tears off their skin revealing muscle and bone underneath while they shriek in pain. Players can also blast the equipment to trigger animated executions such as turning a vice to crush a man's head into pulp. It's on par with the recent Resident Evil games gore-wise in that you deal damage to specific body parts, except in that case you're clearly shooting decaying tissue.\nThe second stage keeps things just as grim with five prisoners trapped in the Rack Room. Two unhappy occupants are shackled to the titular device; hitting the ratchet at the bottom tears the victim in half. Another poor soul hangs in mid-air over a river of blood; shooting the crank that keeps him in place will lower him into the waiting jaws of a crocodile one bite at a time.\nThe back half of Chiller\u2014while still loaded with graphic violence\u2014offers far less shock value. The Hallway looks like a scene straight out of Scooby-Doo with ghosts crossing back and forth and a mummy laid out inside a coffin. The Graveyard presumably serves as the final resting place for everyone dispatched in the first three levels, though one lady buried waist-deep in the ground seems very much alive until you blow her to pieces. Your first two shots take her clothes off before you strip her of her flesh.\nThis progression betrays Exidy's intentions with Chiller. Front-loading the game with grotesque material ensures that any players or spectators will get grossed out right away. Only those who stick with the game will last long enough to see the relatively timid stages. Chiller also lacks any kind of finale; clearing all four stages simply restarts the cycle. That wasn't uncommon for arcade games in 1986, but Crossbow crescendoed with a battle against a giant face three years earlier.\nIt's clear to me that Exidy hoped to recapture the Death Race buzz from a decade earlier by deliberately courting conflict with Chiller. The arcade flyer certainly assumes that the game's reputation precedes it with the header \"You've heard about it! You've read about it! Now you can howl about it!!!\"\nSpeaking to Kotaku in 2018, former Exidy programmer Vic Tolomei confirmed that management encouraged them to push the envelope. \"During development we would sit around and say, 'How can we make this disgusting? How can we do the graphics so it\u2019s not just blood on the wall, but you actually see body parts and tissue?'\" Tolomei said, \"It\u2019s the same thing that horror movies do.\"\nTolomei likewise acknowledged the disparity between Chiller's first and second halves. \"If you don\u2019t hook the audience in the first 15 seconds or 30 seconds, it doesn\u2019t matter what\u2019s going in the rest of the thing,\" he said.\nI had no opinion on Chiller at the time because\u2014despite the arcade flyer's assertions\u2014I never saw or heard about it. Indeed, there are no records of anyone alarmed by Chiller like there were for Death Race. A 2007 GameSpot story tracking the history of controversial video games noted an absence of written ire regarding Chiller, with author Steve Kent suggesting that it failed to fan any flames because \"nobody would buy the damn thing.\"\nToday Chiller sits alongside Custer's Revenge and RapeLay as video games only notable for their perceived affronts to decency. In Chiller's case, it achieved infamy in hindsight decades after its original release; not even an unlicensed port to the NES garnered much attention from critics, parents, or safety councils. Exidy, too, faded from view in the years that followed, releasing few titles post-Chiller before closing its doors in 1999.\nOn a scale of Utterly Benign to Duke Nukem Forever, Chiller ranks quite low in the annals of digital atrocities. It's extremely one-note in its approach and lays all its cards on the table on the very first screen. For all the viscera on display there's very little game to play here which lessens any impact Chiller might have had. Ripping a guy's guts out only means something if he exhibits emotions and a personality first; otherwise he's just a glorified background element, a breakable object that squirts red.\nIf Bela Lugosi or Martin Landau were still with us today, perhaps they might impart a refined lesson along the lines of \"there is such a thing as bad press, but no press is the worst press of all.\" Chiller arrived in arcades 40 years ago expecting an angry mob but when your entire business plan relies on complaints to drive sales, silence hurts more than getting fed to a crocodile feet-first.\nWriter/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. 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