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Getting the game banned somewhere was on the wish list. Antony De Fault, narrative director on Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, told IGN that the team treated a ban, a refused rating or a sales restriction as a way of grading its own work.
“It was an unofficial goal of the team to be banned, unrated, or restricted at least somewhere in the world,” De Fault said, “as one barometer of whether we’d done our jobs right.”
His reasoning rests on participation rather than spectacle. “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,” De Fault said. “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.” Survival horror mechanics stayed in place, he said, but were made “more sensual, or disgusting,” alongside firmer calls such as the intimate first-person view. Handing the player the hook instead of a seat in front of it is the right read of Barker, whose fiction has never allowed a polite distance from what it describes.
The Ratings Boards Mostly Said Yes
Australia classified Revival R18+, with consumer advice of high impact violence on its National Classification Database listing, according to PopTopic. In the same interview, De Fault said some territories declined to rate the game during development, which narrowed where it could be sold. The German outlet PC Games reported on October 9, a day after launch, that the game was on sale there while a second USK review was still outstanding, with no official word from the ratings body or from publisher Saber Interactive.
Barker Signed Off on This One
Barker was consulted on the story from the project’s conception and is credited as a creative consultant, according to the PlayStation Blog. “Working on the first true Hellraiser game has been a venture deep into the recesses of my darkest imaginings,” he said when the game was announced. On the film side he has more Hellraiser ideas waiting in the wings.
Doug Bradley came back to voice Pinhead, and since nobody wrote down how the effect was built in the 1980s, the team asked him to describe it from memory and started there.
Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival has been on sale since October 8. By De Fault’s own barometer, the territories that would not rate it already returned a verdict.