Celebrating its 45th anniversary this year, Namco’s classic coin-op Splatterhouse has even more movie connections than its Friday The 13th-aping hero suggests.
Splatterhouse wasn’t the first horror videogame, but it was arguably the earliest to have any kind of lasting global impact. Friday The 13th, Halloween and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre all got tie-in games on the Atari 2600 in 1983, but the console’s hardware was too limited to truly re-create their source movies’ gore and carnage.
One game that did feature plenty of gore was 1986’s Chiller, an arcade shooter that involved blasting restrained bodies in a torture chamber. A bizarre concept to begin with, Chiller probably would have been more controversial if it wasn’t so obscure; the coin-op was so rarely seen in public that it largely came and went. Years later, Kotaku tracked down one of its designers, who admitted that Chiller was calculatedly designed to attract attention through its gore and violence – a tactic that worked too well, since few proprietors chose to put it in their arcades. The company behind it, Exidy, released an unlicenced port of Chiller on the NES before quietly going bankrupt in 1989.
Developed by Japanese arcade giant Namco, Splatterhouse was quite unlike anything else that came before it. At heart, it was a scrolling brawler in the vein of Kung Fu Master or Double Dragon – a genre that rapidly grew in popularity at the end of the 1980s. What separated Splatterhouse from its side-kicking rivals, however, wasn’t just its horror theme, or even its eye-catching gore, but its numerous and affectionate nods to horror movies and literature.
The most obvious reference is right there on Splatterhouse’s burly protagonist: student Rick Taylor, clad in what looks like a tattered boilersuit and white hockey mask, is evidently modelled on Jason Voorhees from later entries in the Friday The 13th series – so much so that the mask was gradually changed by Namco’s designers in later ports and sequels.
Other horror homages are less blatant, or at least copyright-infringing; there are snarling monsters that look like the chestburster from Alien; a chainsaw-wielding boss who looks like Leatherface after a house fire; and mutant bodies straight out of John Carpenter’s The Thing or David Cronenberg’s The Fly.
Splatterhouse was quite a striking departure for Namco, previously best known for the cartoonlike maze action of its global smash Pac-Man, or the colourful space bees of Galaxian and Galaga. The firm’s closest dalliance with horror was 1987’s Yokai Dokuchi, a platformer steeped in Japanese folklore and little-seen in the west. (Interestingly, Splatterhouse's chief planner, Kazumi Mizuno, had previously worked on Yokai Dokuchi, as revealed in this 1988 interview translated by Shmuplations.)
Namco had so little horror experience, in fact, that it had to get in a new artist to work on Splatterhouse. Young artist Takashi Oda was only just out of university, and working in a Tokyo coffee shop, when he saw a recruitment advert in a magazine at some point in the late 1980s. Oda, who’d studied makeup effects at university, replied to the ad and was offered an interview; when he showed up at Namco’s offices, he had no idea that there was a horror game in the early planning stages.
In an especially revealing 2022 interview, Oda recalls sitting down for his interview with Hiroshi Ono, the legendary pixel artist behind some of Namco’s biggest hits, including Galaga, Dig Dug and Mappy. Ono was so impressed by Oda’s drawings of monsters that he offered the young artist a part-time job. And so it was that Oda began designing many of Splatterhouse’s most familiar creatures, including the Leatherface-esque Piggyman (or Biggyman, depending on the source) and protagonist Rick Taylor.
The concept for Splatterhouse, according to Oda, came from producer Kazumi Mizuno, who noted the wave of popular horror movies coming out of the US in the mid to late 1980s and decided that a brawler that followed the trend might be good for business. Oda was asked by his superiors to come up with a central character who wore a hockey mask, and recalls that the filename for the resulting graphics openly referenced Jason Voorhees (“The filename was JSON because there was a four character limit”).
The hero’s name, meanwhile, springs directly from Oda’s knowledge of horror – he’s named after Rick Baker, the legendary makeup effects artist who worked on the likes of Videodrome, Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and too many other movies to list. Indeed, Splatterhouse owes a lot to Oda’s love of artists working in the horror genre, with his assorted water zombies and other monster designs drawing on such luminaries as HR Giger (who worked on Alien) and Rob Bottin, whose brilliantly twisted work lit up The Thing.
Appearing in Japanese arcades in 1988, Splatterhouse was a decent hit for Namco, such that it inspired two sequels and even a cartoonlike parody, Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, released exclusively for the Famicom (Japan’s NES) in 1989. The latter had, if anything, even more references to horror crammed into it than the original, including a quite amusing nod to Jaws and even an 8-bit dance routine parodying the aforementioned Thriller.
Takashi Oda, however, had no involvement in those other 90s Splatterhouse games, and his time at Namco amounted to less than a year. It’s here that another fascinating movie connection comes in; after his brief stint in videogames, Oda returned to his first love – special makeup effects. Scoring his first feature film credit with 1991’s Hiroku The Goblin, Oda subsequently collaborated with wayward director Shinya Tsukamoto elsewhere in the 1990s and 2000s, working on the phantasmagorically gory Tetsuo II: The Body Hammer (1992), Tokyo Fist (1995) and A Snake Of June (2005). Another high-profile credit was ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano’s bloody gangland thriller classic, Sonatine (1993).
Splatterhouse therefore occupies a unique and quite unusual position in videogame history. Its anarchic tone anticipated the more high-profile controversies of games like Mortal Kombat and Night Trap (both 1992), as well as Sega’s similarly horror-referencing House Of The Dead series of gun games, beginning in 1997. (Confusingly, those House Of The Dead games were all directed by someone else named Takashi Oda.)
Namco’s 2010 attempt to revive the franchise – simply titled Splatterhouse – was greeted with a mixed reception, perhaps because, despite amping up the gore and violence, it missed something important about the 1988 original. Unlike the infamous Chiller, or Bally Midway’s Narc, also released in 1988, Splatterhouse’s appeal went beyond button-pushing bloodshed. Its horror is often as comic as it is disgusting, whether it’s bodies squelching against a wall when struck with a plank of wood or heads rolling away in streaks of green goo when they’re sliced off with a cleaver. Its movie references are also imaginative and occasionally quite clever – not least a startling sequence where the player’s led to think they’ve rescued Rick’s missing girlfriend, only for the woman to mutate into a hideous monster akin to The Fly’s Seth Brundle.
“Most games before Splatterhouse involve you saving the girl and everyone living happily ever after, you know?” said one of the game’s planners in that same Shmuplations interview. “We didn’t want to do that.”
Mischievous, violent, Splatterhouse pushed the boundaries of what counted as good taste in mainstream videogames. For 1980s and 90s gamers who also happened to like horror movies, there really was nothing else quite like it.
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