Thrill Kill is an unreleased ultra-violent fighting game for the Sony PlayStation. Set in an urban version of Hell, the characters were all incredibly evil mortals, damned for various atrocities, including murder. However, rather than being sent directly to their just desserts, they're able to fight each other for another chance in the mortal world, watched over by Marukka the Goddess of Secrets, who has organized the infernal tournament (simply because she's bored) and promised the winner reincarnation on Earth.
The game is notable for a number of reasons. The first is for having a four-way 3D battle system, something that had never been done to the fullest like this before. The game is also quite notable for the controversy surrounding it. The game's ultra violence and dark sadomasochistic themes caused it to get quite a bit of flack from Electronic Arts, who then-recently had bought the game's publisher, Virgin Interactive, and then forcibly shelved the game from release to avoid it tarnishing their image. EA also shot down any chance of the game getting a release by any other publisher, believing the game to be too violent to release. Thrill Kill is also notable for being one of the first video games to receive an AO (Adults Only) rating, though the rating never went to full use due to the game never being officially released.
Even though the game was officially unreleased, the developers leaked the game unto the Internet, allowing many people to find and download unfinished versions.
This game contains examples of:
- Abnormal Limb Rotation Range: Violet's bones appear to be made of rubber considering how flexible she is. Her Bio mentions her as nothing more than a skeleton.
- An Arm and a Leg: Almost all of the finishing moves involve completely dismembering the opponent, sometimes to the extent that they are in small pieces. Almost all of them.
- Cletus uses a disembodied leg as a weapon. After winning a match, he will sometimes begin to
chew on it.
- Cletus uses a disembodied leg as a weapon. After winning a match, he will sometimes begin to
- Artistic License – Law: Tormentor's ending involves him releasing the serial killer who murdered (among others) his wife, so he can torture and murder the sicko himself. A real-life court system would never give a judge authority over any case where the judge has a personal connection to someone involved, for this exact reason.
- Ax-Crazy: Everyone, with special mention going to Dr. Faustus, Oddball, Mammoth and Cletus.
- Bloodier and Gorier: Was hyped as being more hardcore than even Mortal Kombat. In most cases, it wasn't lying.
- Body Horror: Most characters. Faustus and the Imp actually start there, within the game's context. It was also what killed Violet in the first place (bodies can only bend so far, after all). Special mention should also go to Judas, for obvious reasons.
- Bondage Is Bad: This is Belladonna's theme.
- Each character has at least four costumes, many of which are bondage or fetish wear.
- Bowdlerise: One version of the game removes Cletus's "Yummy" when he starts eating and replaces Belladonna's erotic moans with Violet's laughter. It also takes out one of Belladonna's more suggestive finishers.
- Combat Sadomasochist: Belladonna is essentially a fighting dominatrix.
- Conjoined Twins: Judas. The figure is comprised of two men connected from the waist like a human CatDog. During fights, one man attacks with his fists while the other acts as the legs, rotating positions if needed.
- Dance Party Ending: Every character has one finishing move that involves the winner and the last guy standing dancing. Unless it's Cain, who burns the last fighter before dancing.
- Deadly Doctor: Dr. Faustus, a doctor who murders people on the operating table (assuming he doesn't just gut them outright).
- Digital Piracy Is Okay: A few of the original designers releasing bootleg versions of the game all over the web is the reason why this game hasn't been completely forgotten.
- Evil Laugh: Cain delivers one after performing a Thrill Kill.
- Evil Versus Evil: All the characters are damned souls entering the tournament in hopes of being reincarnated out of hell.
- Finishing Move: The game is built around inflicting these. Instead of health, you have a "kill meter", which fills up as you damage your opponents. Once it's full, you can kill one of your opponents. When you're down to just one opponent, you can unleash a more traditional fatality, known as a "Thrill Kill".
- Belladonna has one finisher that subverts this. She crouches out of frame directly in front of her dazed victim while they start to make perturbed noises, but then the camera zooms out to show that she's merely tickling their foot.
- For the Evulz: The only explanation for Dr. Faustus's backstory. He just really loved seriously harming his patients.
- Freudian Excuse: If you listen closely to the news reporter during the Tormentor’s ending, you’ll hear that his wife was murdered by a Serial Killer.
- Gorn: Blood flies everywhere with each hit, and a match isn't over until all but one fighter is reduced to a pile of bloody limbs.
- Hanging Judge: Tormentor was one before he went to Hell, declaring many who entered his court guilty just so he could personally torture them to death later.
- He Who Fights Monsters: Oddball was an FBI analyst who, after long exposure to the worst elements of mankind, snapped and became no better than the killers he was investigating.
- Humble Pie: Mammoth. Frail soul within a hulking body, went postal after being fired, and committed suicide. Franklin just couldn't catch a break.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Cletus. Some of his finishing moves even involves him gruesomely eating his opponents.
- Karmic Death: Many of the characters die in ironic fashions in their back stories.
- Kill It with Fire: Cain is literally on fire, and uses fire as his chief weapon. His "dance" Finishing Move sees him light the opponent ablaze and then dance around their burning corpse.
- Life Meter: Notably inverted with the "Kill Meters". Instead of going down when you take damage, it fills up when you inflict damage (it usually forces players to be more aggressive in their gameplay strategy). When the Kill Meter is full, you can kill off one of the other 3 opponents. You repeat this process until you're down to the last opponent, at which point you can unleash a "Thrill Kill".
- The Napoleon: The Imp is a man with dwarfism who is obsessed with being a normal height. He fights on stilts, and is in Hell because he died of an infection after cutting off his legs to replace them with even taller stilts.
- Orifice Invasion: One of the Imp's Thrill Kills sees him leaping into his opponent's mouth and climbing into their body before exploding out of them.
- Palette Swap: Each character has four alternate costumes they can wear, with at least one of each BDSM themed.
- Pyromaniac: The reason Cain is in Hell - he was a serial arsonist who now, in Hell, burns eternally.
- Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: All the characters have at least one thrill kill that involves them hitting the opponent with a barrage of strikes until they explode. Then there's that one attack of Dr. Faustus's where he rapidly stabs the opponent so many times with his scalpel that he needs to stop his attacking arm with his other arm.
- Reincarnation: The main goal for every character, as this is their reward for winning the tournament.
- Serial Killer: Cletus, Tormentor and Oddball were all this in their past life. In Oddball's backstory, he was a FBI profiler meant to investigate them, but later went insane and became one himself.
- Serial-Killer Killer: Tormentor's backstory involves him killing criminals that he himself convicted. He was eventually caught and put on trial as one for his actions.
- Shout-Out:
- One of Judas's costumes has the twins cosplaying Ryu and Ken.
- The name "Violet Boregard" sounds awfully familiar. Becomes funnier in hindsight when her namesake character gains incredible flexibility near the end of the 2005 film.
- The devil face on the title screen (as seen on the page image), is quite blatantly ripped off from Chernabog.
- Spiritual Successor: Since this game was never released to the public, its engine was then used to make the more mediocre (yet still pretty violent) Wu-Tang Shaolin Style.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Faustus and the Imp both died because they tried to implant metal into their bodies, which - far from giving them new powers - caused their forced-open wounds to become infected.
- Tragic Villain: The Tormentor is the closest we get, as his Freudian Excuse is that his wife was murdered by a Serial Killer.
- Training Dummy: The training mode lets you beat on a man in a gimp suit who never seems to die, and actually loves the violence you inflict on him.
- Villain Protagonist: Pretty much everyone, though some characters are more sinister than others.
- Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Discouraged; while you could technically just sit back in the first two rounds of a fight and let your opponents kill each other, the character who lands a kill in a given round starts the next round with a "Kill Bonus" added to their Kill Meter, encouraging you to actively go for the kill every round of the match.
- With My Hands Tied: Oddball. He is in a straitjacket after all. Some of his alternate costumes take it a step further by having him not have arms at all.
