The Hellraiser: Revival devs set out to have the game banned in one or more countries
, by Thibaut
It hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice, but Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival is an extremely violent game. Saber Interactive embraced this approach to stay true to the franchise. The development team even had a hidden ambition for the game...
During an interview with IGN, Antony De Fault, creative director on Hellraiser Revival, revealed that his goal was to see the game banned in certain territories.
"It was an unofficial goal of the team to be banned, unrated, or restricted at least somewhere in the world as one barometer of whether we’d done our jobs right. But in a video game, it shouldn’t be enough to have the player simply see taboo things; it’s necessary to get them to perform taboo acts too. So we require the player to engage in extreme violence, to engage in sexual play, and just generally to stick their hands in a bunch of very questionable places.
This didn’t mean bucking traditional survival-horror mechanics necessarily, but it did mean making them more sensual, or disgusting, or making firm choices like the more intimate first-person perspective."
However, one sequence still had to be removed from the final game. It was supposed to show a character masturbating while looking at photos of his girlfriend, with his genitals fully visible. This scene would undoubtedly have changed the game’s rating, effectively banning it in many countries. The commercial risk was therefore too great.
Source: ign.com