Sorry, 4chan, Rockstar Games was already "woke", except that one time...
- francisjames27
- Jan 30, 2024
- 19 min read
While Hollywood plummets, interactive entertainment has taken over and the boxy cartoonish figures have long been replaced by lifelike graphics and detail, and stories that can now elicit the most extreme of emotions. Video games have been a storytelling medium since the cinematic Metal Gear Solid, but ignorance still prevails among my missus and conservative morons about how such entertainment can never be considered within the same wavelengths as film and literature.
It also has to be said, alongside my missus and those morons, that ignorance is a two-way street (in my missus’ case, it’s a way to annoy me after I dismissed Love Island as trash). Gaming communities themselves generate increasing mistrust while wondering how their favourite titles aren't accepted on the same wavelength as film and literature. Case in point, The Last of Us Part II, a game that revealed considerable illiteracy within those communities which I’m not here to talk about today. But it offended a minority enough to issue death threats, spout extreme anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny, and misrepresent facts and events, and that started months before the game even released. And it merely became another footnote in why the general public still refuses to accept video games as another art form.
Since I grew up in a household lacking sentiments towards entertainment, I often found it was a certain brand of games where satire and pop cultural references dripped from the screen that pushed my teenage self to explore the world of popular culture. And what other publisher could inspire such interest other than Rockstar Games?
With Grand Theft Auto VI now on the horizon for 2025, the usual misfits are invading all discussion threads online to spew “anti-woke” sentiments, ironically appearing more like the very thing they stand against. The first trailer brought them out in full force against a female protagonist and Florida’s non-white citizens, relaying baseless theories about Rockstar's main writers leaving due to "diversity". But never do the online gangsters ever remember Grand Theft Auto III's changes back in 2001 following 9/11 or the changes to Vice City's Haitians vs Cubans subplot. While I disagree with the latter decision (and thankfully I own an original copy with that subplot untouched) I have to stress the ironic fact that Rockstar has been releasing socially conscious titles for nearly twenty years.
I recall when I was ten, the day a friend called me over to his house to show me San Andreas, and within minutes, I was hooked. Everything screamed at me, the violence, profanity, and the soundtrack. It was the first time I realised licensed music could be used in games, and it was the first time I had played what I still consider one of the greatest pieces of interactive media ever.
What then followed was an obsession with Rockstar, and I sought out their fifteen/sixteen-rated titles since I wasn’t officially allowed to get San Andreas until I was twelve. Amidst my gradual collection, another Rockstar title entered my radar that same year, 2007, Manhunt 2, one of the only games I’ve ever actually seen banned in my lifetime.
Its predecessor, I had been aware of for years; it was nearly impossible not to, for the cover was almost ingrained in my head since I was seven. Imagine the surprise at hearing the radio announcement of its sequel's banning one morning when I was on my way to school.
Described by Ireland’s main propaganda machine as the story of a nutter who escapes an asylum and must kill the people who put him there, Manhunt 2 was so grotesque, that the BBFC refused a rating after demanding several cuts. And Ireland – despite our incessant claims to be different to the UK – also banned the game. Our IFCO: Irish Fascist Censorship Office, who banned Natural Born Killers for its violence despite it being an attack on the media (and it's also pretty ironic that everything Oliver Stone said in that film has come to fruition), also claimed to have undertaken a poll of 1000 people, and mysteriously, 80% of respondents agreed with the Manhunt 2 ban. Who were the participants of that poll?
The UK eventually allowed Manhunt 2 to be resubmitted for distribution, but with heavily censored murders, innocent civilians removed, and no scoring system. Meanwhile, IFCO never reconsidered their decision, and that sent me and my friend onto the piracy sites to download Manhunt 2 onto my PSP. Now, at that time, I knew nothing about storytelling and wouldn’t become properly immersed in storytelling until my mid-teens, but back when I was only twelve, I had Manhunt 2, a banned video game.
A little before that, during our GTA-is-forbidden period, that friend and I had downloaded Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories onto our PSPs. The game was downloaded into a hidden file within the memory stick, and the game would only work if a random disc was in the disc compact, essentially tricking your PSP. So, I would be playing LCS, and my mother would walk by, thinking I was playing Splinter Cell, rated 16. We were eleven when we figured this out.
However, because my gigabytes were too small, he had to reduce the game file, costing me the in-game radios, leading to no soundtrack, other than VCS’s In the Air Tonight scene.
Later, with Manhunt 2, to reduce the file size, the cutscenes were gone, so now I wouldn’t know the story (not that I cared at the time). Then came the first murder, where both of us witnessed protagonist Daniel Lamb murder an asylum orderly with a syringe…
…meaning the censor filter had accidentally been removed.
Many weeks passed of me parading my PSP around, showing off the numerous uncensored scenes of every kind of death imaginable. Then a year later, I would purchase the first game on eBay, and many moons later, it would alter my perception of 2.
Occasional flashes of black comedy aside, the first Manhunt was an intense, third-person survival horror, stealth game, and back in 2003, it was Rockstar jumping into something more tonally serious in comparison to their previous outputs. As a result of 9/11 and the Iraq war, the world began looking more critically towards America’s now increasingly obvious faults. Rockstar was no exception. The focus of Manhunt was aimed at America's fascination with violence in entertainment.
While GTA III (2001) and Vice City (2002) were unashamedly aimed squarely at entertaining, Manhunt was Rockstar’s first real attempt at social commentary, as it deconstructed and satirised the relationship between player and player character, and was Rockstar’s beginning stage of deconstructing America. And slowly, more elements of this would creep into their games until the release of GTA IV, The Lost and Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony, and V, all of which would deconstruct modern American mythology, the same way The Wire and Season 6 of The Sopranos did.
A video game that absolutely stank of the term “cult classic”, Manhunt bore a dirty visual aesthetic that would have blended right in with the video nasty craze of the 1980s. We are now in a time where cult video games are delegated to indie developers who struggle to find a small market while the latest Call of Duty is everywhere on social media with ads ramming it down your throat. Slender is a classic example of such titles and one that would go on to inspire a whole range of horror-themed indie games, and eventually something more mainstream like Alien: Isolation and even a two-decade franchise like Resident Evil. But back when games were somewhat "cheapish" to produce, we often got numerous, somewhat crappy cult classics, one shining example being the unreleased, supernatural, BDSM-themed fighter Thrill Kill, in which eleven sexually demented nutters are pitted against one another in the depths of Hell for a chance at reincarnation.
Thrill Kill was cancelled due to its violent, sexual imagery, but the game still found its way into the hands of bootleggers and is probably still available somewhere on the dark corners of Google (ironically, Manhunt feels like a game that literally could have easily wound up this way if Rockstar had been in any way careless handling the vile subject matter, though the original cut of Manhunt 2 did end up this way and it’s exactly how it found its way onto my PSP). Another example was Postal 2, a game that tasked you with performing mundane chores such as getting milk, and you can do just that as peacefully as possible or else you can break into somebody’s house, incapacitate them with a cattle prod and then urinate on them before killing them, or else kill them and then urinate on them.
These were the kinds of titles that generated enough of a small following to render them underground classics, but they were also badly made (or in Thrill Kill’s case, were cut short from becoming a quality product) and so they never reached beyond their small fanbases. Whereas Manhunt, for all its brutal scenes of wholly uncensored cruelty, was exquisitely produced and, I would argue to the point of exhaustion, still holds up as a quality product today.
For a start, Manhunt's story has very little exposition, but tells everything visually, which is no easy feat. You, James Earl Cash, are a former death row inmate, whose execution is faked, and when he awakes, he has a new friend, a failed film director called Starkweather, telling him how to earn his freedom: participate in a snuff film.
Following the snuff film style, levels are referred to as scenes, and each scene requires you as Cash to sneak around environments, murdering gang members in horrifically violent ways while Starkweather directs him through an earpiece and films him. Once Cash finishes an area, the Cerberus, a private security team, drag him to another location. That’s the story’s first half, which yes, is light on plot, but that’s the point. Starkweather is your unwanted best friend who celebrates your actions and can even be heard masturbating to you suffocating a screaming man with a plastic bag before snapping his neck. This is dark, twisted shit, and if it wasn’t so aesthetically brilliant, it would be seen as cheap shlock.
But in fact, it’s designed to look like cheap shlock, between its grainy, static camera effects, dirty, grimy environments, extreme violence, and overall unpleasant atmosphere. The environments are dark, dingy and menacing, and the enemies range from white supremacists, rednecks, Satanists, Paedophiles, corrupt cops, and a security force.
The sound design is impeccable, between the music, voice acting – in which most of what Starkweather and the hunters say is terrifying, and other times, laugh-out-loud hilarious – and overall environmental noises. Craig Conner’s synth score takes cues from Carpenter and bears an intensity that is exemplified by the hunters’ threats and screams.
There’s honestly nothing scarier than a moment where Cash hides in the shadows somewhere, phasing the music out and all one can hear is Cash’s beating heart and somebody else’s footsteps. Oh, no, Manhunt is art, and art with a purpose, for it’s also obvious who Starkweather, a creep sitting in a dark room in front of a computer screen and brilliantly voiced by Brian Cox, represents.
Meanwhile, Cash very rarely speaks, and the moments where he does can be counted on one hand. We also never get even a single hint about his being on death row, but in terms of visual storytelling, we can only speculate based on what we see him do with basic household items. And that begs a particular question: “How did Rockstar brave the risk of creating something where the protagonist is so unlikable?”
It’s very simple, for we do see Cash reveal human qualities in the scene, Strapped for Cash, where he rescues his kidnapped family members. This is also the first time we hear Cash speak, but his first line isn’t anything beyond a gruff “Get out of here.” Bearing some of the more intense moments in the game, Strapped for Cash is coldly unforgiving due to the trigger-happy nature of the captors. And regardless of which family member survives or how many, Cash is later shown a video of them being butchered anyway, and his reaction is to smash the television set in a rage.
What follows is Starkweather’s eventual betrayal and Cash seeking revenge against him, leading to a clash with corrupt police while protecting a helpless female journalist – another small positive trait in Cash – an underrated, terrifying one-on-one with Starkweather’s second star, Piggsy, a naked lunatic wearing a pig’s head and carrying a chainsaw, and finally coming face-to-face with Starkweather, a fat, sleazy-looking scumbag, and Cash makes no qualms about slicing his stomach open and then his face.
What makes this game such a solid work of art is its ability to relay its story and themes without beating players over the head – something I’m highly receptive towards. Social commentary in video games wasn’t new, since that went as far back as Abe’s Oddysee, but as stated, Manhunt was Rockstar’s first title to feature social commentary and would see Rockstar pursue more daring issues in later titles, between the 90s racial tension in San Andreas; the school system of Canis Canem Edit; the Patriot Act in IV and Episodes from Liberty City; industrialisation of the Red Dead series; and nearly everything in V. IV, EFLC and V are easily Rockstar’s angriest games.
Adding to the snuff aspect of Manhunt is a scoreboard kept at the end of each scene rating how violent you played, and this too was a deconstruction of entertainment glorifying violence, something Rockstar had frequently been accused of. The GTA series allowed players to kill innocents, but in terms of each overall story, they’re collateral. Whereas in Manhunt, you’re forced to murder your enemies to progress and survive, without any glory. The three execution methods Hasty, Violent and Gruesome push its themes further. This was the game addressing the player personally, asking you how far you’ll go for entertainment, for getting a Gruesome kill is no easy feat, due to holding down Square longer posing a greater risk to Cash, when ambush is possible. And while enemies in most games die quickly with a grunt or short scream, killing somebody in Manhunt, whether it's with glass, knives, plastic bags, machetes, meat cleavers, etc, debauches your ears with desperate gags, screams, pleading asphyxiation, and blood gurgling as you hear every last struggle for air. Rockstar was showing how realistic violence is uglier compared to what happens in any other video game.
That said, however, while the barbarity of what we witness Cash inflict on his victims can be absolutely nauseating, some of that brutality does come with an ironic snicker. Nobody can deny the absolute hilarity of a Skinz member having his racist tirade cut short by Cash smashing his brains to a bloody pulp with an iron baseball bat, or else a Baby-mask-wearing paedophile having his testicles ripped off with a sickle.
The setting is a key element in its presentation. Carcer City is inspired by very real abandoned rust-belt towns in Midwestern cities.
Once thriving economic strongholds lie barren due to outsourcing or pollution, leaving its inhabitants in poverty.
Manhunt’s first half takes place in forgotten areas but when Cash survives his final scene, he breaks out into the urban streets, and that’s where the police get involved. All the gangs are suddenly in the rearview, and one would think that's when the game lowers its intensity when it does the total opposite and ratchets the tension to unreal levels.
So everything in Manhunt summed up a solid horror experience, and it ended with the same terrifying sense of mystery that it began with. We knew nothing about Valiant Video Enterprises, the front used to cover the snuff film ring, and Cash’s ultimate fate is left ambiguous.
But did it need a sequel?
When Manhunt 2 emerged four years later, it confirmed that a sequel was never needed. Though its predecessor was absurdly grim, the sequel, containing a level named Sexual Deviants, dared players to underestimate Rockstar’s capabilities. And it would take me years of maturation to properly dissect Manhunt 2, and realise it contained neither the subtlety, storytelling ability nor the natural grit of the first. While I enjoy nihilistic art, Manhunt 2 felt oddly gimmicky and dull.
As we know, there wasn’t a groin Cash wasn’t willing to rip out with a sickle for a chance at freedom, and the reason Manhunt got past the BBFC was due to its sharp satirical take on violence and entertainment as a whole. It wasn’t a game that merely contained extreme violence, it was about extreme violence that was constantly contextualised, with no innocents killed (even going so far as to protect lives) and in the end, Cash’s victims were obviously worse than he.
Manhunt 2 contained nothing of its previous entry, beyond similar gameplay, and that was a problem. Manhunt was a middle finger to the media that condemned GTA; Manhunt 2 feels like it began life as a well-earned middle finger to the overall establishment, but the development fell apart when Rockstar prioritised its moneymakers.
The sequel failed to scare and worse, failed to justify its violence, which is a problem when grisly violence was the series’ selling point. The environments also lacked believability. Manhunt’s hiding-in-the-shadows was believable because of how dark the environments were. And if you’re like me, who plays Manhunt on the lowest brightness possible, even spotting your enemies becomes a difficult task, adding to the terror. Manhunt 2 also contains solid-looking environments; however, most are far too well-lit to be believable. The immersion is stolen during moments when Danny hides in a shadowy corner of a well-lit room and somehow a surveying hunter cannot see him.
The satirical element in Manhunt 2 is present, but tough to locate, and it tells a very different tale of two men (initially) on the run from a shadowy government organisation called The Project. With that in mind, as opposed to Manhunt’s ‘show-don’t-tell’ storytelling, Manhunt 2 bit off something it failed to chew, MKUltra.
For anyone who doesn’t know, MKUltra was a very real illegal CIA program centred on human experimentation involving LSD, intended to see if mind control was possible. Some argue that it caused the Cielo Drive murders, and there was a book written on that. Manhunt 2 is littered with obvious MKUltra references throughout, one being a television channel called TV-MK the protagonist watches.
Rockstar’s releases post-2008 took vicious aim at the powers that be, between the aforementioned Patriot Act, social media, the CIA’s war on drugs, and The War on Terror. The satire surrounding each issue was direct and had teeth, and it makes Manhunt 2 a severely missed opportunity, as an MKUltra-inspired story would have been a perfect commentary on government overreach and also far scarier than a grimy tale about snuff films. There was every opportunity for Manhunt 2 to wear its paranoid, conspiracy-laden, deep-state themes on its sleeve, and it ultimately failed.
As I said, Manhunt was a game that told its story almost entirely visually and what the player saw spoke for itself. Hand holding wasn’t required to know what the Skinz or Smileys were about, nor the environments, nor even Cash himself. Even the Director’s property and security told you everything there was to know about him. Then 2 tried to tell a more complex tale of a disasterous government experiment in a shorter space of time, and it fell on its face. MKUltra is terrifying, but the game made it less so, and the supposed twist is given away seconds into gameplay when deuteragonist Leo Kasper scouts ahead into the asylum and you can somehow still hear him talking to you.
Once Danny (and Leo) escapes the asylum, he is chased by bounty hunters and men in black, who wind up being clumsily easy to overcome. The third level, Sexual Deviants, plays host to the beginning of 2’s story issues as Danny breaks into a sex club in search of a mysterious Judy character, and becomes overcome by multiple flashbacks the deeper in he goes. Why? We’re never told. He either frequented the club or was a Project recruiter; either paints him in a worse light than his victims, because once Danny accesses the club dungeon, he uncovers a Hostel-type chamber where gimps are torturing people to death, and there are some brutal, eye-watering death scenes here.
This is where he meets Judy, a scientist he once worked with. But we never get any explanation as to why a scientist works in what is easily an imagining of ultimate evil, so a scene in which the violence is totally justified ends up being a shallow exercise in how it can gross out the player.
Then more story issues come about when Danny seeks Judy again in a brothel, but again, it never explains why she’s there. Hilariously, this is the second level where many onscreen castrations are justified, as Danny gradually finds murdered and dismembered prostitutes. Visually, this is one of Rockstar’s artistically brilliant set-pieces; this was the developer, long accused of promoting violent misogyny in games about utter scumbags, showing their awareness of the horror of misogyny.
But like everything in Manhunt 2, for every one thing it gets right, a giant wrong looms over it. Casual, violent misogyny unfortunately just happens in these seedy places, and its horror is captured exquisitely for a sixth-generation title. And while there is great satisfaction when Danny murders the first pimp with a telephone wire, the problem lies in context as we bear no reason as to why this place is being used by the Project.
The story, despite thinking it's telling you something with shoddy exposition, never actually reveals anything beyond – spoiler alert – Leo Kasper being merely an implanted personality into Danny. It’s not that far-fetched in terms of what MKUltra was about. And it’s easy to spot the bare satirisation of splice advertising, where TV-MK is a dangerous initiative to activate sleeper agents. Upon the revelation, the story clumsily reveals that all flashbacks where Leo is a playable character were him getting revenge on the Project for what they did to him – but we don’t actually know what. Effectively, Danny’s present-day scenes are simply Leo finishing the job. Cool? Very, but done terribly, for we don’t even know who the real Leo was.
We spend four levels as Leo, and to Rockstar’s credit, there is something brilliant about the eventual realisation that Leo’s levels are actually us playing out the disastrous experiment. But again, it’s clumsily revealed in one expositional scene that leaves us with more questions, and by revealing tidbits through marketing which – surprisingly for Rockstar – is God-awful storytelling, and brings to mind JJ Abrams pointing to Star Wars novels to explain what he hadn’t bothered explaining on screen.
Manhunt 2’s marketing was top-notch but was also used to fill the gaps the story didn’t fill. The instruction manual even, genius as it was in line with older Rockstar titles, also had a hand in telling the story that the game itself didn’t. One level in which Leo escapes the aftermath of a successful assassination never actually tells you who he assassinated or why. The manual reveals that the deceased was some high-profile Project executive responsible for funding, and yes, that resolves it, but that should be explained on screen too, because again, justification is needed when delving into themes like this. The manual also drops hints as to why Leo hates the Project with such vitriol, but the game never does.
Its predecessor, on the other hand, promoted its dingy urban horror by creating a fake Valiant Video Enterprises website that “sold” hardcore snuff videos and only teased the names of characters like Ramirez, the White Rabbit and Piggsy. The manual was a black market catalogue, advertising snuff videos (the main levels), fictional merchandise and hitmen offering their services, all of whom were involved with the gangs you encounter. The story wasn’t told through the booklet; it was an addition to the hype.
2007/08 was around the time Rockstar began a major overhaul. Up to 2012, GTA allowed them the budgets to pursue other projects like Manhunt, Midnight Club, The Warriors, Canis Canem Edit, Max Payne 3, and LA Noire, and the eventual behemoth that is Red Dead Redemption, and while Max Payne 3 was a send off to the character, nothing more came other than Red Dead 2 and Manhunt 2 came from those other once-offs. But all their features wound up in some shape or form in GTA V and Red Dead, and will likely be improved upon in VI.
That overhaul is how Manhunt 2’s development was botched when Rockstar Vienna was closed down, likely due to Manhunt being Rockstar’s most notorious game, and not their most profitable. Vienna’s employees were shipped to Rockstar North and San Diego to work on Grand Theft Auto IV, Episodes from Liberty City, LA Noire, Max Payne 3 and Red Dead Redemption.
But that is what leads to Manhunt 2’s morals being all over the place. Sure, grey characters aren’t anything new. Manhunt made no excuses for Cash; he was scum and his protectiveness in those scenes was just a sign of some humanity within. Manhunt 2, meanwhile, tries to portray Danny as some unfortunate soul caught up in horror when really, he’s as bad, if not worse, than most of the people he and Leo murder.
Danny’s introduction alone has him slit throats and rip out eyes with pens and glass, some of those victims of which are also patients of the experiment that put Danny in the asylum, to begin with.
This is why Manhunt 2 lost battles with multiple ratings boards. Do I agree with the decisions made? Never. Art is art. The game is for adults. Creators cannot be blamed for youths purchasing something adult-rated. The blame lies in the parents – since the media their children consume is easily researchable – and whatever retailer sells the title to a minor. This same problem prevails today with violent porn overtaking violent video games, and parents still choose to blame the creators instead of taking accountability for not supervising their childrens’ online activity.
That leads to Manhunt 2’s near unjustifiable violence. Most of the hunters, bar the pervs and pimps, are hunting a deranged killer to prevent further harm. On top of that, Danny and Leo slaughter police who aren’t even corrupt this time, homeless people, mentally challenged inmates, security guards, and regular Joes. The story isn’t about one man overcoming Hell, but rather a man choosing to seek answers and killing multiple in the process.
A moment where Leo breaks into a government archive facility contains some of the most horrific murders in the game and starts with one innocent civilian for his petrol can and low-wage security guards. Another part sees Danny fleeing across a neighbourhood and stumbling across a man protecting his home. And the writers still try to paint Danny as a victim when he’s suffocating this man with a plastic bag while his kid screams after him. The story also tries to hold the Dr Whyte character as some morally upstanding, therapeutic individual, despite her employing obvious Klansmen to catch you.
By the time Manhunt 2 was finally allowed for release, the damage had been done. The controversy couldn’t boost its sales due to the wide-open and ignorant belief that Rockstar had caved to the powers that be. But what people failed to realise was that Rockstar had always toed the line of good taste; it was just hidden on the brink of a boundary. As stated, Manhunt only managed to get passed rating boards because the violence was constantly contextualised. It was a very smug middle finger at the people who they knew were going to have a field day with the outrage. And they did; concerned parents and journalists decried it for its violence, screeching from the rooftops to “Ban This Sick Filth”, once again forgetting to do actual parenting. That said, Australia banned it, but they ban everything and abuse their citizens anyway so what else is there to say there?
Manhunt was also denounced falsely by a US senator, and used as a low-hanging fruit by infamous conservative lawyer Jack Thompson, Rockstar’s arch-nemesis, in the murder of fourteen-year-old Stefan Pakeerah. As the investigation proceeded, however, it was revealed that Pakeerah was the one who owned the game, and not his murderer, and the senseless death itself was over a drug-related robbery. But that didn’t stop the Pakeerah family from using their dead son to dishonestly gain notoriety, with an attempt to sue SONY and Rockstar for £50 million, and condemnation of Rockstar’s announcement of Manhunt 2, despite the first game already being proven to have had no affiliation with their son’s death.
What little buzz that was left for Manhunt 2’s release, had fizzled out as the seventh-generation consoles took over, and the gradual release of Grand Theft Auto IV loomed. But that leads to the question: could Manhunt be made today?
Absolutely. The “modern audience” excuse doesn’t exist half as much as hardcore right-leaners tend to think. It’s what I call the Blazing Saddles Paradox, where morons think such media could never be made today, when in fact, it could. But who could ever even try replicating Mel Brooks’ genius? The big irony of the ones complaining is that they don't realise that the film is using slurs to make fun of the racists and not the unfortunate recipients of those slurs.
The reality of why Manhunt cannot be easily replicated is due to its status as a true vintage cult classic. The sequel is so unconnected to the original that one can pretend it simply does not exist, therefore, it doesn’t devalue the original. Manhunt 2 had two endings, and neither were in any way satisfying and questions that should have been answered were left unanswered. Manhunt ended with the same sense of horrifying mystery it began with; one dirty clog in a drain had been scuppered, but there was no need to pry any further and see what else was lurking.
The only other defense one can have for Manhunt 2 is that despite the shoddy writing and pointless censorship, it wasn’t unplayable, especially in comparison to some of the Corporate duds churned out today. It was just underdeveloped, and ultimately lacked what its predecessor had despite the depravity, a soul, and that's why Manhunt should have stayed back in 2003 where it belonged.
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