KINGPIN ARTICLE - May 1999
| Seedy gangster thriller Kingpin starts, in an
attention-grabbing opening sequence, with some dodgy geezer down an alleyway asking the
hero if he's looking at the dodgy geezer's "fucking bitch".
Naturally, for his insolence, the hero clubs the guy and his "bitch" to death
with an iron bar and nicks their money. So far, so unremarkable - if you were
watching a movie, that is. After all, spend the day down your local multiplex and
you'd see a dozen worse things before teatime (or before lunch if you were watching
Natural Born Killers). But Kingpin isn't a movie, it's a video game (appearing
on PC shortly, or at least that's the plan), and so the world and his monkey are up
in arms big-style about it. Truth be told, this is a pretty nasty game, but the
real problem is that the cycle of censorship in popular culture is running at peak levels
right now, and even more so since the Columbine high school massacre left Americans (in
particular) looking for something to blame for the horrific slaughter - other than the
seemingly-obvious fact that a bunch of fairly averagely screwed-up schoolkids had easy
access to automatic weapons, of course. Doh! Kingpin is just the latest in a long line of games to suffer at the hands of the world's moral guardians in recent times - Sensible Software's self-explanatory Sex, Drugs And Rock'n'Roll (a PC adventure-style game which cast the player as a rock star called Nigel on a mission to drink, snort and shag his way to the top, and started off with a scene depicting our hero having a wank in a toilet) was recently canned after four years of work because no publisher was prepared to deal with the trouble its content would cause - though we haven't yet heard of anyone trying to ban, say, Robbie Williams albums, despite the cheeky-faced star doing all the above things in real life, never mind in a game. (Well, we don't know about the wanking-in-the-toilet bit, but the odds must be pretty fair.) And controversial Playstation beat-'em-up Thrill Kill (the most notorious bit of which saw one of the female characters orgasming after killing an opponent, although no-one seemed to mind when exactly the same thing happened in the James Bond flick Goldeneye - which didn't even get an 18 certificate) has effectively been given a life sentence in chokey by publishers Electronic Arts - not only have they refused to publish the game themselves after buying it from another company, but they find it so objectionable that they're also refusing to sell it on to anyone else to publish either. (Which kind of begs the question, why did the hypocritical idiots fork out a big wad of cash for it in the first place?) And of course, you've probably already read hysterical tabloid headlines about Carmageddon 2 (only recently granted an 18 certificate by the BBFC after six months of huffing and puffing, though the game was practically identical to the already-certified first Carmageddon) and Grand Theft Auto, which has recently burst back into the headlines thanks to a new updated version of the game which takes place in London rather than America, and has you mowing down innocent passers-by in open-topped double deckers, Mini Coopers and black cabs instead of Cadillacs and Dodge Vipers. So it looks like we're still going to have to wait for a while before we get to play games featuring anything more grown-up than fat Italians in dungarees jumping on turtles. It's enough to make you want to punch someone. |
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