A spiritual precursor to the Grand Theft Auto series, this fast-and-furious driver gives bonuses for brutalizing innocent pedestrians in the streets. To win a race, you either finish first, destroy your opponents' cars, or clear the course of people using your front bumper and four-wheel drive.

Fun Fact: Carmageddon was censored in a number of countries such as the UK and Germany and was banned in others, including Brazil. Instead of killing people, players hit zombies or robots that spewed green blood or oil.

Travis Touchdown's quest to get into girls' pants quickly becomes your quest to annihilate some of this world's most efficient assassins. Even while comical and cartoony a la Kill Bill, No More Heroes still boasts some of the best slashing and blood-soaked scenes we've seen.

Fun Fact: The teaser trailer for No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle revealed Travis to be wearing a "Travis Strikes Again" T-shirt rather than his signature PureWhiteLiverBizarreJelly shirt.

Where else can you choke the life our of someone with piano wire, stuff his body into a cupboard and don his clothes so you can do the same to others? It's not technically a serial-killer game (you can opt for less violent options), but it feels like one.

Fun Fact: You can access all the game's maps if you name your character "Kim Bo Kastekniv." And you can grow a long beard if you call yourself "Kim Bo Slice."

It's not just that this brawler lets you use pipes, 2x4s and anything else you find to brain people--it's the gruesome "crunch" and Se7ven-esque lighting that makes it vicious.

Fun Fact: The game is known as Condemned: Psycho Crime in Asia. You know just so you don't think the game is all unicorns and rainbows.

 

This movie-like game was described as an "effort to trap and kill women" in a 1993 joint Senate Judiciary and Government Affairs Committee heading. It's also notable for a post-Diff'rent Strokes Dana Plato.

Fun Fact: All the footage used in the game was originally shot for a different game, Scene of the Crime, which never came out.

Fun Fact: Selling more than two million copies its release weekend, GoW2singlehandedly proved how weak the music industry is. Thanks a lot, Napster!

Curb-stomping and chainsawing were mainstays of the first game, but 2 and 3 are a few degrees iller--you can use opponents and meat shields, or their decapitated heads for golf practice.

Both of these FPSes broke ground by adding copious amounts of blood and gore. Demons and Nazis are the bad guys, but protesters saw innocent citizens in the crosshairs.

Fun Fact: The grandaddy of FPSes was originally shareware, but the commercial release included a pack called "The Nocturnal Missions." Giggle giggle!

The title reveals the premise--a merciless killing spree. The governor of Arkansas and the U.S. Postal Service got their panties in a twist over it, but that didn't stop two sequels and a Uwe Boll film adaptation.

Fun Fact: Postal has no backstory or plot to speak of, just one dude snapping and wreaking havoc.

 

The third title in the franchise brought the original GTA's outlaw premise into 3D, along with cops getting shot in the face, hookers being beaten to death, and all sorts of criminal activity for local TV news anchors to rant against.

If you didn't come up on this, then you didn't come up. The O.G. GTA introduced sandbox-style gaming and the joy of car-jacking. The overhead view is old school, but the gameplay remains revolutionary.

Fun Fact: GTA III boasts one of the highest-profile voice casts in video game history, including Michael Rapaport, Robert Loggia, and Guru. Yes, Guru. He plays 8-Ball!

No, you aren't seeing double. Grand Theft Auto V had one sequence so violent we have to acknowledge it separately: a torture scene. It includes waterboarding, electricuting, knee breaking and more. A number of advocacy groups came out against the scene, and this was aside from all of the usual violence in a GTA game.

Fun Fact: Under the right circumstances in GTA V's multiplayer, you can make Red Dead Redemption's John Marston your grandfather.

An otherwise rote FPS stands out for the ability to blow off limbs, leaving bloody torsos behind. It did for war video games what Saving Private Ryan did for war movies--showed the most grotesque parts of war with no holds barred.

Fun Fact: Soldier of Fortune's damage model engine, GHOUL, was the first to enable players to dismember enemies instead of just killing them. And thus a nation of Ritalin-addled sadists was born.

 

King's Quest game designer Roberta Williams created this FMV horror game that has graphic gore and a rape scene. Despite--or maybe because of--the controversy, the title was a top seller on PCs that year.

Fun Fact: With 550 script pages and more than 800 scenes, the game took four months to film-including a week for the final chase scene. This is why we use computer people, people!

 

If guns and environmental kills weren't enough for you, The Darkness' tendrils offer some brutal executions throughout the course of the game. Want to restore your health? Devour someone's heart.

Fun Fact: The Darkness II used a cel-shaded art style to emulate its comic book origins.

 

Inventive? Demented? Either way, Ledone's freeware game was as un-P.C. as they come, inspiring V-Tech Rampage and other bad-karma homemade shockfests.

Fun Fact: The game's developer paid exquisite attention to detail in crafting a 16-bit version of the Columbine tragedy, including rendering MIDI versions of Nirvana songs.

The top-down action in Hotline Miami is absolutely brutal - a sort of satire of modern games. It also includes stealth and a killer soundtrack. The game uses the unreliable narrator trope, so you can't even trust your character.

Fun Fact: Developer Jonatan Söderström has been known to assist those pirating Hotline Miami from the Pirate Bay, as he would rather people not play a broken version of the game, even if they stole it.

Dismemberment doesn't necessarily mean death in this visceral game; you can cut off your enemies' arms and legs, forcing them to fight you Monty Python style. Then you slice them up into bite-sized chunks. Gross.

Fun Fact: Microsoft oh-so-cleverly hid a giant "X" logo in a museum scene in Ninja Gaiden 2. 
 

When monsters kidnap Rick Taylor's woman, he goes Jason Voorhees x Hacksaw Jim Duggan on 'em in this side-scroller, which earned one of the first video game parental advisories.

Fun Fact: Namco Bandai cut BottleRocket from continuing the series, effectively shutting down their development studio. Fortunately they hired a few of the devs on to the internal team to help finish the 2010 iteration of the game.

Even by today's standards, this torture-themed light-gun game is gruesome and nasty. It reportedly tanked in the U.S. but sold well in developing countries. Shudder.

Fun Fact: Why would you think that Chiller was inspired by "Thriller?" Maybe because the theme music on the MSX console version sounded a lot like the Michael Jackson song.

With its creepy S&M themes, the planned PlayStation fighter made Mortal Kombat look soft. EA absorbed the title after acquiring its original publisher, then shelved it and refused to sell it to another company.

Fun Fact: Wu-Tang Clan used the Thrill Kill engine to create their own game, Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style. Uh, good move, guys.

 

The raging and menacing Kratos provides loads of action-filled fighting filled with awesome moves conducted via gadgets and magical powers.

Fun Fact: There is no CGI in God of War III. All cutscenes are made using the in-game engine, models, and assets. 

 

The godfather of the horror genre has spawned shelf-loads of sequels on every console, all based on the same premise: Blasting a zombie's head off with a shotgun is bloody fun.

Fun Fact: The Japanese version of Resident Evil 2 (Biohazard 2) not only made it easier for players with increased firepower and different item placement, but you couldn't even be devoured by zombies! What is this, Cabbage Patch Kids Adventure on Colecovision?

The premise is sick: Trapped in a snuff-film-style reality show, you kill enemies in increasingly gruesome ways, using everything from plastic bags to crowbars to pickaxes. Humorlessly disturbing.

Fun Fact: Germany freaked out and confiscated all copies of the game. 

In EA's sci-fi survival horror game, your enemies are the ones who get creative ways to kill. Stay alert, lest you find your head bitten off or your torso ripped asunder.

Fun Fact: Thanks to the storyline and a fictional religion featured in the game, some believe Dead Space to be a critique of the Church of Scientology.

A coin-op classic, MK upped the bloody ante by adding realistic finishing-move fatalities, including the ripping out of hearts, heads, and spines. Unless you played the pansy, censored Super Nintendo version, that is.

Fun Fact: The original Mortal Kombat features Reptile as a secret-but unusable-character. You only play him in the subsequent MK games. Gee, thanks for that.

No joke, but the family-friendly Wii brought us the bloodiest game ever.

Fun Fact: The look of the game is, not too surprisingly, inspired in part by Frank Miller's Sin City. Does that even count as trivia?