Manhunt is one of the worst games made during the last generation. It is also one of the best. It divided consumers and critics alike, garnering effusive praise from some and vituperative condemnation from others. While its dark, uncomfortable and morally dubious content was ripe for tabloid hysteria, less understandable was criticism that it was badly designed or intellectually retarded. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Think of other videogame nasties and the usual suspects shuffle under the spotlight: Carmageddon, Doom, Resident Evil. Each celebrated violence with gusto, but what made Manhunt particularly repellent to moral arbiters was its dark premise and its playful, knowing manipulation of genre tropes. No-brainer shooters like the gruesome Soldier Of Fortune can be easily dismissed as sick and shallow, but a game that constantly provokes questions about the nature of violence is a much more uncomfortable proposition.



Manhunt is magnetic in the rawest sense, repelling and fascinating in equal measure. Unlike other games where violence for violence’s sake soon turns to apathy, the true horror of Manhunt is that the violence never gets stale. Ostensibly, you’re performing the same grisly acts over and over again – but the squeamish thrill of slicing through a hunter’s head with a wire or listening to the distinctive sound of a skull being cracked open with a meat clever as the brain slops out on to the ground never abates. The repetition becomes the opposite of gratuitous, forcing you to face your enjoyment of the horror time and time again. Nor can you distance yourself from your actions by remaining aloof. One of Rockstar North’s greatest achievements is making the player empathise with the game’s anti-hero – and empathising with a character like Cash is, to say the least, problematic. The brilliant snuff premise is supported by a number of devices that make you identify with Cash’s plight. Most profound is the earpiece that director Starkweather forces Cash to use during the opening cutscene. Replicated by your own headset, the link between you and the hero becomes tangible and personal. When Starkweather encourages Cash to up the kill rate or reprimands him for stalling it brings the violence into the personal domain. Your ability to bait hunters by shouting curses into the microphone wedges you into Cash’s shoes even more firmly.

Where other games set up an interesting backstory, only to abandon it once the action cranks up, Manhunt exploits its snuff premise with a Kubrickian level of doggedness and detail, driving both you and Cash through a gauntlet of trials right up to the bloody denouement. Crackling CCTV footage, continual harassment from the movie’s director and cutscenes in which the hero is unceremoniously dumped from one location to the next by paid goons constantly emphasise the warped gameshow narrative.



Moreover, Manhunt is perhaps videogaming’s most sophisticated text about the nature of control, manipulation and power. You’re constantly made aware of Starkweather’s status as puppet-master, pulling the strings as part of some grand, gruesome design. Yet as players it’s a weak excuse to claim we’re merely caught up in the same power struggle – though we’re propelled by the overarching plot, choice is everywhere. Whether intentional or not, Manhunt problematises the nature of videogame interaction, inviting players to question why they find the violence so intoxicating – the blood is as much on our hands as it is on the protagonist’s. To say Cash is merely playing the part of a mindless brute won’t wash either. When the tables turn midway through the game and you’re asked to steal evidence from a journalist’s apartment it’s troubling to realise that only ordinary cops stand in your way. The switch between Cash as victim and spiteful revenger is stark, and few games highlight the player’s lack of moral control so profoundly.

This identification with Cash and Manhunt’s uncomfortable meta-narrative is surely the primary reason why many have come away from the game feeling discomfited and psychologically jarred, when other, more bloody games leave them untroubled. One of the hallmarks of art is that it lets the basest human acts be explored with no moral reprisals, and in recent years videogames have taken over from movies as society’s entertainment bogeyman. Can we really act out our darkest fantasies in games without facing inherent consequences or incurring long-term damage? Ironically, the hysteria that greeted the game’s release acted only to stifle this crucial debate.