Some games thrive on controversy. After all, why else would they allow you to do everything from running over a prostitute with your car to ripping a man's head clean off his body? These acts seldom have much to do with the stories of the games in question, and are more about proving that the player has complete agency, feeding into a wider cultural and moral debate about video game content and how to frame it responsibly. Sometimes controversy takes other forms, too, like broken promises from developers...
Here's a look at the 10 most controversial games we can remember.
10. Mass Effect 3
The third Mass Effect game should have been the crowning achievement for a development studio seemingly at the peak of its powers, but despite positive early reviews and general love for what you do throughout the game, it soon became clear once people finished Mass Effect 3 that BioWare had a revolt on its hands.
After years of hyping this series as one where every decision would matter to your final outcome, players discovered this wasn't really the case. Sure, a lot of the loose ends you tied up over the course of the game were influenced by your decisions in Mass Effect 1 and 2, but the ultimate outcome of this battle between the forces of good and evil was pretty much a choice between two similar endings with different-colored backgrounds.
An early example of internet rage escalating to crazy levels, the subsequent brouhaha engulfed the game's official forums and media outlets for weeks after the March 2012 release, eventually prompting BioWare to relent and admit it could do better. A few months later fans were given an extended coda as free downloadable content, which largely seemed to settle the issue.
9. No Man's Sky
Had No Man's Sky been released with little fanfare, it would have blown people's minds. This is a game where you can jump into a spaceship inside a space station, fly it out into space, point it at a distant planet, then descend through a kaleidoscope of refracted atmospheric light to make planetfall, before hopping out to pet local animals and search for resources. It's a game with a particular rhythm, rewarding people who take their time and enjoy mood and place rather than mechanical depth, and it's been supported by a raft of interesting content updates that have transformed it further. By any objective measure, No Man's Sky is a phenomenal achievement for a small team.
Except, No Man's Sky wasn't released with little fanfare. It was released with more fanfare than perhaps any other indie game in history, and its principal custodian, British developer Sean Murray of Hello Games, did little to dampen expectations about the apparently endless possibilities within its procedurally generated universe until it was much, much too late. Ahead of release, people on the game's official subreddit were so bought into its mystique that they were actually interpreting some of Murray's more ambiguous comments as confirmation of ambitious features like PvP multiplayer. In the end, there was no way the game could satisfy expectations, and whether or not you agree it deserved it, No Man's Sky was ripped to shreds by former fans and an ensuing media feeding frenzy.
8. Postal 2
Games in the 90s were often accused of inspiring real-life violence, particularly in the USA, but Postal did things the other way round, drawing on the tragic story of a postal worker who massacred his colleagues as the basis for its over-the-top violence and controversial themes. Developer Running With Scissors stuck with the concept for Postal 2, expanding the range of horrible things you could do as a dude raising hell in Paradise, Arizona. The above video clip says it all, showing how you can literally set people on fire and then put them out by urinating on them. At a time when games were struggling to gain the benefit of the doubt, Postal 2 did its best to suggest they didn't deserve it, and gloried in it. It was a stupid game and the people who made it were idiots.
7. Call of Duty
The Call of Duty series began as a relatively somber first-person shooter set in World War II, sharing stories of heroism and sacrifice in extraordinary circumstances. When it morphed into Modern Warfare, however, Infinity Ward started taking bigger creative risks with it. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare saw a nuclear explosion level an entire city, which felt pretty risque at the time, but Modern Warfare 2 took things to a whole new level with its infamous "No Russian" level where players take part in a terrorist attack on a civilian airport orchestrated to spark a new World War.
The series kept up this tactic, and given the often confused narratives of these games, it raised the question of whether COD was the right game to be exploring such weighty themes, or whether the developers were just seeking notoriety. Curiously, more recent installments have arguably gone in the opposite direction, with this year's Call of Duty: WW2 drawing criticism for its refusal to explore the horrors of the conflict in its cinematic campaign.
6. Hatred
Postal was originally placed higher on this list, but the sheer terror that Hatred offers moved it up a couple of spots. This game foregoes a lighthearted tone in favor of something much darker. In Hatred, you play a psychotic killer who wants nothing more than to wipe people out for the hell of it, which you achieve by blasting them at close range with an AK-47, or perhaps using a knife in a very visceral manner. The game is not for the squeamish, and has received countless negative reviews from critics. In fact, we're not sure who Hatred is for, even though it holds a bafflingly positive rating on Steam.
5. Bully
Bully is actually one of the least controversial games Rockstar has ever made in terms of its content. You control high-school student Jimmy as he tries to settle in at Bulworth Academy. He forms alliances with some groups, getting into fisticuffs with others. The story is quite interesting and the environment evokes a very particular and telling vision of the education system, while most of the things you can do are extremely benign. So, uh, what happened?
The problem was that the game was called "Bully". Bullying is a huge problem and the provocative title gave opportunistic controversy-chasers like US lawyer Jack Thompson and reactionary print media another opportunity to rip into Rockstar, who were already in their bad books for games like Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar walked into this one, really.
4. Doom
It's a sign of how far we've come - not necessarily in a good way - that it feels quaint to think of the original Doom as somehow controversial, but by the standards of the early 1990s, this cartoonish first-person shooter where you slay demons was pretty extreme. You can blast a demon's head off with a shotgun or use chainsaws to carve people up, and as a result the game drew unwanted attention from concerned parents and legislators.
However, the controversy around Doom reached new heights in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people before taking their own lives. The two killers were fans of Doom, as well as id Software's previous game Wolfenstein 3D and rival series Duke Nukem, and Harris had created his own custom levels for Doom. As people looked for answers to their actions in the aftermath, id Software and its games came under the microscope in a way that few other games ever have.
3. Manhunt
Another controversial series from Rockstar Games. Manhunt received a decent amount of attention, both good and bad, by delivering plenty of cringe-inducing carnage and mayhem. In the game you portray James Earl Cash, a death row prisoner offered a grim choice – clean house on a deadly gang, or return to prison. Cash chooses the former, and finds himself dealing with an unseen figure named The Director, who orders the deaths of gang members in the bloodiest ways possible - sneaking up behind someone and suffocating them with a plastic bag being a relatively mild example.
Manhunt was banned in several countries, and its sequel drew similar controversy, but the series was fairly successful regardless, and considered a bit smarter in hindsight than its gratuitous framing suggested at the time.
2. Mortal Kombat
When Street Fighter stormed the arcades and popularized the 2D fighting game, it inspired a raft of pretenders, most of which are long (and best) forgotten, but Midway's Mortal Kombat not only avoided that fate - it thrived. Partly this was thanks to a range of memorable characters, like the hooded ninjas Scorpion and Sub Zero, but a lot of the game's early notoriety was down to something else: blood and guts.
Every time you whacked an opponent, they threw out globules of the red stuff, somewhat improbably, and the game took this to another level with its party piece: fatalities. After beating an opponent to within an inch of their life, you could take that final inch with gratuitous aplomb by pulling off a particular button combo while "FINISH HIM" splashed up on the screen. Whether you diced them up or ripped out their spine, it was certainly a bit different to Street Fighter.
The series has sometimes been accused of being more concerned with its grisly finishing moves than good fighting game mechanics, but it seems to have found a better balance over the years, and seems likely to continue for some time to come.
1. Grand Theft Auto
The world heavyweight champion of controversial video games, the Grand Theft Auto series has so many individual controversies that we could write about them all day. The original top-down PC and console game was slammed for - among other things - rewarding you with a special "GOURANGA!" notification for running over a line of Hare Krishnas, as well as more mundane things like car theft, vehicular murder and sex and drug references.
The move to 3D saw DMA Design - as they were known in the days before Rockstar Games was a thing - up the ante by infamously creating systems that allowed you, should you wish, to sleep with a prostitute in your car before running her over and retrieving your money afterwards. Then we had Hot Coffee, a scandal that saw a deleted sex mini-game unearthed on game discs by hackers, prompting huge legal issues and a reclassification of GTA: San Andreas by ratings boards. More recently, GTA V had a torture mini-game where you could choose from a range of brutal implements to extract information from a largely innocent witness, as well as a scene in which one of your three playable characters was introduced by brutally and graphically murdering a previous playable character for no reason.
GTA reveled in its reputation as a posterchild for cultural rebellion and transgression, and while it's arguably lost some of its edge in recent years, it's still capable of stopping you in your tracks with random barbarity and absurd criminality. For people who can tell the difference between right and wrong, it remains a defiantly guilty pleasure.