History and Controversy
Thrill Kill was developed in the late 1990s for the Sony PlayStation by Paradox Development, now Midway Studios - Los Angeles. There was much hype surrounding the game, billed as the new Mortal Kombat, and expectations were high in the gaming community. The original publisher was to be Virgin Interactive, which was acquired by Electronic Arts Pacific for £122,500,000 in the late summer of 1998.
By this point Thrill Kill had already finished development in entirety, and a Californian-based industrial band, Contagion, had even recorded numerous songs and an entire score for the game (which later ended up on their album "Infectant"). A few weeks before shipping, the game was cancelled by EA because they didn't want to "publish such a senselessly violent game", as they felt that it would harm their image. They also stated that they deemed the game so offensive that they would not even attempt to sell the game to be released by another publisher either.
Later, former employees that had worked on the game released the full game onto the internet, along with various beta versions, and bootlegs of the game flooded the market and were still seen by a large share of its original intended audience nevertheless. All files are still widely available through filesharing, and playable through emulators.
Read more about this topic: Thrill Kill
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or controversy:
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)