As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #89, October 2011.

For a video game console mainly marketed to children, there were a surprising amount of horror themed games on the NES.  Of course we all know about the games based on Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street and of course the spectacular Castlevania series.  There are still many other titles that could be loosely considered horror themed or at the very least Halloween appropriate.  However there is one game that is both distinctly horror themed and is also a conversion of an original arcade title, that game is Chiller.  Originally released in 1986 by early arcade powerhouse Exidy, Chiller is a shooting game that uses a fixed mount lightgun, similar to other Exidy titles Cheyenne and Crossbow.  What makes the game different from those titles, and pretty much every other shooter, is the subject matter.  Instead of blasting away at objects simply for points or to protect characters on the screen, here you take on the role of the bad guy.  Yes, in Chiller nearly everyone and everything can be blasted away.  Still doesn't sound like anything different?  Well the gruesome detail and the horrific nature in which your targets meet their demise is what set Chiller apart.

The first screen opens up to a torture chamber with nearly nude men and women chained to the walls or strapped into various torture devices.  Blood and body parts litter the floor with decapitated heads displayed upon a shelf.  Free these people? Stop whoever did this to them?  No, not here, your objective is to blast them apart.  The poor fool in the guillotine?  Shoot the blade free and watch his head pop off.  The guy with his head in a vise?  Be sure to shoot the crank to get the vise to crush his head.  As the tortures are performed and the bodies are shot to shreds, more blood and gore is displayed.  The objective is to kill every victim as quickly as possible.  While simply shooting everyone to death will take care of the objective, incredibly, you are actually awarded more points for using the torture devices.  There are a set amount of shots you must connect with before the timer runs down to advance to the next screen.  Missed shots will cause the timer to run down faster.  Eliminating key targets will award a slot machine based bonus round upon competition of the current stage.  The second area is a rack room, complete with a river of blood and various victims helplessly secured to torture devices.  Area three is a hallway in a spooky mansion filled with ghosts and ghouls.  The fourth and final area is a graveyard with the dead rising from their graves.  If you're able to clear out all the key targets in each of the four areas then you are taken to the bonus round, a rather tame target shooting experience compared to the rest of the game.

I'm sure no one in their right mind at this point would expect a home version to be licensed by Nintendo and it isn't.  Chiller made its way to the NES in 1990, courtesy of an unlicensed release by American Game Cartridges which was actually a subsidiary of ShareData, a small computer software publisher.  Chiller was their first NES release and while the ties between AGCI / ShareData and other unlicensed third party developers goes beyond the scope of this column, Chiller was not developed in-house.  This explains the title screen on the NES version, "Chiller For ShareData."  The NES version is interesting in that it is the only game on the hardware that can use two Zapper lightguns.  Alternatively the game can also be played via the standard NES control pad, in which an on screen cross hair is moved with the directional pad.

While each of the four areas make it over onto the NES, there are quite a few changes.  Most notably the stage order has been reversed, so the NES version begins at the graveyard, saving the more graphic areas for later.  The coloring is a little different between the two versions and the NES graphics take a hit but nothing is all that different from how it was before.  Graphics that originally scaled or had a transparent effect have been replaced with standard moving sprites.  Originally the woman in the center of the graveyard could have her clothes shot off, which was removed in the NES version, although she still gets shot to pieces just the same.  Also originally the graveyard scene had a monk pushing a cart full of body parts across the screen. On the NES this was changed to a nun pushing a baby carriage.  However the nun and carriage can still be shot and most would consider the NES sprite change to be even more offensive to the original monk and cart.  Torture victims are shot apart with less detail and the amount of body parts strewn throughout the later torture areas is also lessened on the NES but it's still just as disturbing and gory.  Audio is pretty poor on the NES while the arcade version had an appropriate mix of shrikes and screams that built up a solid feeling of atmosphere along with classic sounding horror music.  The biggest and most head scratching change however comes in the form of added back story to the NES version.  In an attempt to lessen the violent context of the game, the victims are now monsters who have come back from the dead and it's up to you to stop the growing forces of darkness.  The key objects used to access the bonus areas in the arcade version are now called talismans and your underlying objective is to find them all to stop the monsters from appearing.  I don't know about you but those "monsters" chained to torture racks look like terrified regular people to me.

While I understand that the arcade version has a cult following due to it simply being an Exidy shooter along with the other games they developed on the same hardware, personally I just can't stomach Chiller for long stretches.  If you've never played Chiller in the arcade it was probably due to another controversial game Exidy released years before in 1976, Death Race.  While doing research prior to writing this column I came across many sources that said due to the negative press Death Race got when it was released, many arcade operators refused to purchase Chiller for fear of public backlash.  Don't get me wrong, I love Exidy, even though my favorite Exidy game is trivia based (Fax) and only one cabinet of my second favorite Exidy game was ever produced as a prototype (Teeter Torture).  Exidy made some awesome games including the classics Venture and Mouse Trap, arcade classics that I'm sure every Colecovision owner is familiar with.  Chiller is just one of those games that dances a little too far over the line for most people which is why it's not often seen or remembered.  The NES version is a tough cartridge to find and the value is all over the map on this one.  While blasting away at ghouls and zombies is standard fare for action and horror games, executing innocent people via torture devices is something that thankfully didn't become a genre onto itself.  I'd say this one is a curiosity at best but if you're looking for something disturbingly over the top for your NES, you can't really get farther away from the norm than Chiller.
 

"InsaneDavid" also covers all types of video gaming at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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