Hellraiser Devs Tried their Best to Get the Game Banned Somewhere

Most developers would probably consider getting their game banned from sales or an audience a pretty big problem. However, the team behind Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival considered it more of a performance review.

Narrative director Antony De Fault revealed that Saber Interactive had an unofficial goal during development to push Hellraiser far enough that at least one ratings board somewhere refused to play along.

“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,”

And honestly, if you’re adapting Hellraiser, that makes a lot of sense. This is the sort of thing fans of Clive Baker’s work have come to expect and is mandatory if you want to be faithful to the universe. If they did too little, they would have fans mad about the watered-down presentation.

The franchise has never exactly been about tasteful restraint. Revival includes extreme violence, full-frontal nudity, sexual content, torture, consensual mutilation, drug use and enough graphic blood to make most horror games look mild-mannered and polite by comparison. It’s a whole laundry list of red flags that most developers would prefer to avoid if they want any degree of commercial success.

But, the developers did not back down in the face of these risks. In fact, De Fault wasn’t satisfied with players simply watching uncomfortable things happen on screen.

“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.”

That meant taking standard survival-horror mechanics and making them more intimate, sexual, disturbing or outright disgusting. One section sends players through a Cenobite ‘pleasure’ club, while other sequences directly involve them in graphically intimate(and disturbing) sequences and extreme violence.

There was still a line Saber wasn’t willing to cross.

One scene features a character getting too touchy with themselves while looking at pictures of protagonist Aidan’s girlfriend. De Fault said showing everything during the act would “almost certainly” have been the straw that broke the camel’s back and removed the game from sale across numerous markets. Instead, the room was simply redesigned so players couldn’t walk around and see everything. The implication is still very much there, so they let you use your imagination.

So apparently even Hellraiser has a finance department somewhere begging them to leave some genitals unrendered.

The finished game still earned an ESRB Mature 17+ rating for Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Strong Sexual Content, Drug Use and several other descriptors, while Australia handed it an R18+ classification for “high impact” violence, sex, themes and gore.

De Fault has also said the game failed to receive ratings in some territories during development, affecting how and where it could be sold.

For most studios, everything about this game might be a headache and a line they cannot cross. For the legends making Hellraiser, it was more like badge of honor.