This bizarre lightgun shooter from Exidy was first released in 1986, and it caused some controversy – in North America, at least. Many arcade owners refused to buy Chiller – because of the subject matter – so Exidy instead marketed it to countries that didn’t mind the satirical violence.

The basic premise of Chiller is: you play an unseen torturer who must shoot on-screen objects in order to cause the death of a number of torture victims… A timer, shown at the bottom of the screen, ticks down as you fire away, and if you fail to reduce the “Monster Meter” to zero before the timer runs out, the game ends.

While it is possible to just shoot the victims with the large cabinet-mounted gun, that won’t reduce the Monster Meter within the allotted time, so the challenge comes from finding ways to activate the torture devices as quickly as possible, by shooting certain parts of the screen, and also by shooting hidden objects (clues to which are shown before each stage begins).

Chiller has four main stages (in order: The Torture Chamber, The Rack Room, The Haunted House Hallway, and The Graveyard). The first two stages feature the gruesome torture scenes (and a surprising amount of blood and gore), while the latter two stages are more traditional Halloween-style shooting games where you target ghosts, zombies and mummies.

You might have thought that Exidy would have switched them around, to start off with the more innocuous stages – leaving the more outrageous torture levels until later – but no.

There’s a bonus slot machine game to play if you manage to shoot all the hidden items in a level, and a second (extremely difficult) bonus stage is unlocked if you manage to shoot every hidden item in all the main stages.

The attract mode, and the game itself, is punctuated with attention-grabbing digitised screams. The kind of thing you hear in ghost train rides – nothing too frightening. The graphics are… well, a bit crappy to be honest. Certainly not very realistic, and more on the cartoony side, thankfully.

Gameplay-wise, Chiller is frustrating, until you work out what to do, but you can hold down the gun trigger to continuously shoot and no re-loading is required, which is good.

The game is also quite novel, in a dark and macabre way. The torture scenes are just “Grand Guignol“, really, and although Chiller is still capable of attracting criticism today, the people pointing fingers and being outraged by it should really calm down, stop over-reacting and get a grip on reality. It’s just a silly game, and playing it will not harm anyone. If anything, it just makes players laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Which was clearly Exidy‘s intention from the outset.

Happy Halloween!

More: Chiller on Wikipedia
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