The first time I witnessed proper blood splatter across my Mega Drive, I genuinely thought something had gone wrong with the PAL conversion. There I was, probably twelve years old, sitting on our grotty brown carpet that always left those weird fibrous bits on your school trousers, when Rick absolutely leathered some demonic creature and its head exploded like a watermelon dropped from a motorway bridge. Mum was clattering about in the kitchen making her Sunday roast, completely oblivious that her darling son was watching pixelated carnage that would’ve made the video nasties crowd proud.
That was Splatterhouse 3, and it properly messed with my head for months afterward.
I’d nabbed it from Microplay—you know, that chain of game shops where the bloke behind the counter looked like he’d rather be anywhere else and knew exactly which games your parents definitely wouldn’t approve of. The box art was mental enough to put me off, really. Rick standing there in his hockey mask looking like Jason Voorhees had discovered protein shakes, surrounded by what appeared to be the aftermath of someone’s very worst day. The 18 certificate was right there, big and obvious, but somehow I’d convinced Dad it was “probably just cartoon violence like Streets of Rage 2.”
Bloody hell, was I wrong about that one.
See, most of us in Manchester hadn’t even seen the original Splatterhouse because it was stuck on that TurboGrafx console that about three people in the entire UK actually owned. We’d read about it in Mean Machines, stared at those fuzzy screenshots that made everything look like a bad acid trip, but it might as well have been on the moon for all the good it did us. Splatterhouse 3, though—that was different. This was running on proper hardware we actually had, coming through our telly speakers with that distinctive Mega Drive sound that could make a doorbell sound threatening.
The story kicks off with Rick living this weirdly normal domestic life with his girlfriend Jennifer and their kid David. It’s almost aggressively ordinary—proper suburban bliss, the kind of setup that immediately makes you think something terrible’s about to happen. And sure enough, some ancient evil decides to gate-crash their quiet evening, possessing their house and turning it into what can only be described as a haunted abattoir. Jennifer and David get dragged off somewhere nasty, the house transforms into something that would give H.R. Giger nightmares, and Rick has to put that cursed mask back on to save his family.
What followed was about two hours of the most spectacularly over-the-top violence I’d ever witnessed on a 16-bit console. And I mean spectacularly—Rick could literally tear monsters’ arms off and use them as clubs. He could punch through creatures so hard their internal organs became external decorations. The gore effects were absolutely mental for 1993, especially considering this was the same system that Nintendo kept insisting was primarily for family entertainment.
The technical achievement was genuinely impressive, mind you. Namco had clearly figured out how to squeeze every last drop of performance from the Mega Drive’s hardware. Rick himself was this massive, imposing sprite that dominated the screen—proper chunky pixel art with animations that had real weight behind them. When he threw a punch, you could feel it through the controller vibration… well, if controllers had vibration back then. The enemies were these hideous, shambling abominations that looked like they’d been designed by someone who’d marathoned every Dario Argento film while high on cold medicine.
But the audio was what really sealed the deal. That Yamaha sound chip could produce some genuinely unsettling noises when programmers knew what they were doing. The soundtrack had this industrial, metallic edge—like someone had given Skinny Puppy a bunch of FM synthesizers and told them to score a slasher film. The sound effects were even better… or worse, depending on your perspective. Every squelch, every crunch, every wet slapping noise when something particularly unpleasant happened to a demon’s anatomy. It was like someone had recorded a butcher’s shop during a particularly busy day and fed it through a digital blender.
What set Splatterhouse 3 apart from the earlier games was the house exploration element. Instead of just walking left to right punching things—though there was plenty of that—you had multiple rooms to investigate, different routes to take, proper time pressure. The whole experience felt more like what Resident Evil might’ve been if Capcom had decided subtlety was for weaklings. You’d walk into a room, the door would slam behind you with this ominous thud, and then everything in there would try to murder you in increasingly creative ways.
The branching paths were brilliant, actually. Depending on which rooms you cleared and how efficiently you moved through the house, you could save Jennifer and David, or just one of them, or neither if you were having a particularly off day. This was proper consequence-driven gameplay before every marketing department started banging on about “meaningful choices.” Your decisions mattered, but not in some pretentious narrative way—they mattered because your virtual family was getting systematically destroyed by hell-spawn while you tried to decide whether that suspicious basement was worth investigating.
I remember showing it to my mate Gary, whose parents were way more relaxed about violent games than mine ever were. He came round one Saturday, watched Rick literally disembowel something that looked like it had escaped from a medical textbook’s worst-case-scenario section, and just muttered “Fucking hell, that’s mental.” High praise from someone whose idea of extreme gaming was usually Mortal Kombat with the blood cheat enabled.
The combat system had proper heft to it—Rick moved like a bulldozer but hit like a wrecking ball, which made perfect sense for the character. You weren’t some nimble ninja flipping about; you were a bloke in a possessed mask methodically working his way through a house full of monsters. The level design kept things interesting between the splatter sequences, with environmental puzzles that usually involved figuring out which wall needed punching through or which grotesque switch required activating.
Looking back now, with forty-odd years of gaming behind me and probably more sense than I had as a twelve-year-old, Splatterhouse 3 feels like a perfect snapshot of that era when developers were still testing boundaries. It was gratuitous, absolutely, but it was gratuitous with intent. This wasn’t mindless violence—well, not entirely mindless—it was violence as storytelling, as character expression, as pure stress relief.
The game arrived during that weird transitional period when console gaming was growing up but hadn’t quite figured out what maturity actually meant. We had age certificates appearing on game boxes for the first time, parents getting worked up about “video game violence” on the evening news, and us kids just wanting to see how far these machines could push the boundaries of acceptable entertainment.
Splatterhouse 3 pushed those boundaries pretty bloody far, and I loved every gruesome minute of it. Still do, if I’m being honest, though these days I make sure the curtains are closed when I fire up the old Mega Drive.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
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