10 Goriest Video Game Weapons - Ranked
It's not the size, but how you use it.
Video games allow us to pursue the dreams that are impossible for us to achieve in real life, dreams that feel closer to reality the more technology progresses. And because humans are a cruelly flawed animal, the dream we choose to pursue most often is that of murdering other humans.
Whether it's a healthy outlet for aggression or the sign of the world slipping into desensitised psychopathy, there's nothing gamers like more than inflicting appalling mutilations on virtual representations of people just like them.
Fortunately for our failings, game creators have made an art and a science out of giving us new and exciting ways to simulate the mutilation and killing of our brethren. They seem intent on encouraging and facilitating out bloodthirsty urges, to the extent that the ability to depict more realistic violence in games is one of the driving forces behind improving computer technology.
Sometimes what they give us isn't just a mundane gun or a sword, but a work of art - a weapon that inspires and horrifies even as we gleefully employ it in sundering the flesh of those the game puts in our way.
10. Doom’s Shotgun
Arguably the first time video game violence felt real was in the original 1993 Doom. While an ageing curiosity now, Doom was a revelation in its day, not least because of the shotgun.
Whatever situation the game might throw at you, as long as you had a handful of shotgun shells, you had a chance. The punch of Doom’s shotgun and especially the visceral, satisfying racking of the slide to chamber a new shell was what kept the children of the early ‘90s slaughtering the denizens of Hell.
Video games today owe an enormous debt to Doom. Perhaps first-person murder was an inevitability in gaming, but it was still Doom that blazed that trail and brought simulated massacre into our living rooms. Many a young gamer cut his teeth watching their screen fill with wodges of pixellated blood, and most of the time it was thanks to the shotgun.
Every time you chuckle inwardly as a shell erupts inside a zombie’s skull, whenever the impact of a spread of pellets rips a ribcage open, it’s Doom you have to thank, and the new horizons its shotgun blasted into our world.