Little known game publishers like to try to make a big splash in order to get noticed.  It seems that the Polish based Destructive Creations has found a way to make a hell of a splash by releasing a trailer for their upcoming game Hatred. The game is quite simply a murder simulator. Sure there’s plenty of sandbox games where one can make a hobby of hunting down random civilians and bystanders such as the Grand Theft Auto series, but even in those games there’s some impetus to dissuade the player from doing so (such as the cops coming out in droves to try to hunt you down and kill you). In Hatred there’s no negative reinforcement, it’s just find some innocents and see what kind of pleading and begging you can get out of them before you shoot them in the mouth.

Their website notes that:

These days, when a lot of games are heading to be polite, colorful, politically correct and trying to be some kind of higher art, rather than just an entertainment – we wanted to create something against trends. Something different, something that could give the player a pure, gaming pleasure. Here comes our game, which takes no prisoners and makes no excuses. We say ‘yes, it is a game about killing people’ and the only reason of the antagonist doing that sick stuff is his deep-rooted hatred. Player has to ask himself what can push any human being to mass-murder.

So in short, pure gaming pleasure is to be expressed as helping find the reason to step across the line from being angry at the world to expressing it by killing everyone they can find.

Over the decades I have scoffed often at the parallels drawn between violence by youth to their exposure to violent video games. This however finally doesn’t just step across that line but rather does a running long jump across it. It’s a game specifically tuned to help convince a player that there’s a point where it’s ok to take the anger from an internal emotion to and external expression.

This does harken back to the original game of Postal, with the young girls crawling across the ground after being shot and crying that, “mommy, it’s getting dark”. But this game is even more finely tuned, encouraging the anger out. In Postal the player wasn’t represented with an emotional hook for the player to jump onto, it was just “go for it.” That game too garnered a particular level of distaste, but this does indeed take it to the next level.

The game is so profoundly distasteful that even Unreal Engine (which is the game engine that powers Hatred) maker Epic Games has distanced itself from the title and requested that Destructive Creations remove the Unreal Engine logo from the game trailer and press release.

Most of the development team which they express as “experienced,” though most of them have only nominal credits and the bulk of them are from the company Farm 51.

To give a sense of class and professionalism that the group exudes, I give you this tidbit from their team description of one of their 3D artists, Tomasz Schneider:

Keeps good morale in the team by finding pictures of beautiful women in the internet and sending them around.

The gaming community is in the midst of it’s own turmoil as basement-dwelling mouth breathers with a sense of entitlement are losing their minds as it becomes clearer that while they’ve been in their man caves, women and minorities have come into the fold and have begun to take their place at the gaming table. Sure, their presence will help expand the world of gaming, and lets face it, if Hatred is where the good-ol-boy’s club has taken things, the industry needs all the help it can get.