There may have been a recent boom in horror properties being turned into popular video games, but we’ve been seeing interactive adaptations of films like Halloween and even The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as far back as the 1970s. In fact, the sheer amount of these licensed horror titles suggests that genre fans have always enjoyed seeing their horrific icons brought to life through pixels and polygons– it’s just a lot easier to market digital murder now that society has mostly accepted that video games aren’t just for children.
However, with everything from The Thing to The Evil Dead having received licensed games to varying degrees of success, there’s still one prolific horror franchise that never got the chance to scare players in a virtual setting despite literally releasing a sequel about a cursed videogame. Naturally, I’m referring to Hellraiser, a forty-year-old multi-media empire that is only now being adapted into a fully-fledged video game after decades of false starts and canceled projects.
And in honor of Saber Interactive’s upcoming single-player scare-fest, today I’d like to look back on one of the most infamous entries in the Hellraiser series’ long list of unreleased media: Color Dream’s first-person Hellraiser game for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
A California-based studio established by Dan Lawton in 1988, Color Dreams had a negative reputation due to their penchant for janky low-budget games (which included notorious titles like Baby Boomer and Robodemons). Not only did these games cut corners in order to speed up the development cycle, but they were also released on custom cartridges meant to bypass NES lockout chips – a clever way of getting around quality control and Nintendo’s official seal of approval.
Color Dreams’ work on Hellraiser was different, though. Lawton actually came across a VHS copy of the film sometime around 1989 and ended up falling in love with Clive Barker’s vision of a hell filled with chains and psychosexual monstrosities. Naturally, the studio founder thought that this unique aesthetic could also work in video game form, so he immediately set out to convince his colleagues that they should acquire the rights to the franchise and try their hand at developing something a little more ambitious.
After spending anywhere between $30,000 and $50,000 on the Hellraiser license (an absurd amount for such a small developer), the team began envisioning a first-person action title with emphasis on exploration and combat. Magazine ads from the time promised that the game would feature over a million “worlds” to explore and over a hundred demons to battle, features that suggested some kind of procedural generation going on behind the scenes.
From the limited information available in ads and interviews, it appears that Hellraiser on the NES would follow a gameplay loop inspired by the sequence at the end of the original film where Kirsty Cotton uses the puzzle box to banish the Cenobites as their realm folds into ours. And while the unreleased title is commonly cited as running on an improved version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine, Id Software’s seminal FPS would only be released in 1992, meaning that Color Dreams was essentially creating the 3D FPS genre from scratch.
Some of you are probably suspecting that these promises are way beyond the capabilities of the original NES, and you’d be correct in thinking so. However, Color Dreams had planned to get past the system’s hardware limitations by releasing the game on an unlicensed “Super Cartridge” that would come with its own additional processor.
There are conflicting reports about exactly how far the team got into development before the game was canceled, but the fact is that the Super Cartridge would have made the title prohibitively expensive. Of course, the final nail in Hellraiser’s coffin was the announcement of the Super Nintendo, with the new console almost completely eliminating interest in experimental NES games.
And so, an early build of Hellraiser was supposedly trashed as Color Dreams decided to move on to more profitable endeavors. The company even created new labels for their games, with “Bunch Games” meant to continue releasing low-effort cash-grabs without further damaging the parent-company’s reputation and “Wisdom Tree” attempting to tap into the Christian games market. Ironically, the Wisdom Tree team would re-use elements from Hellraiser when developing the infamous Noah’s Ark 3D – a title that actually was developed with an advanced version of the Wolfenstein 3D engine.
This would be the end of Hellraiser on the NES, were it not for the rise of the online Lost Media community and their endless search for forgotten artifacts. For the longest time, rumors of a playable build of Hellraiser circulated on forums and imageboards, though no one could ever come up with anything more convincing than easily modified screenshots and the occasional press blurb.
That is, until April of 2021, when retro gaming YouTuber Civvie 11 posted a video where he proceeded to review an unfinished build of the game while commenting on its turbulent production. Civvie made sure to include a disclaimer explaining that the video was an April Fool’s joke achieved through digital “smoke and mirrors,” but fans soon began reposting screenshots and clips from his review as proof that the unreleased game had been found.
To be fair, Civvie made it easy to be fooled by his hard work on what was essentially a Doom mod enhanced by clever editing. Not only did the YouTuber include factually correct information in his review, but what really sold the illusion was the fact that the game appeared to be poorly made, featuring awkward controls and crunchy visuals (though I adore the chip-tune rendition of Christopher Young’s Hellraiser theme).
Civvie never meant for his fun little video to be anything more than an entertaining “what if?” scenario, but can you really blame fans for wanting to believe that a playable (and possibly cursed) Hellraiser game exists somewhere in the far corners of the internet? The franchise itself hinges on obsessed protagonists solving intricate puzzles and falling down hellish rabbit holes, so it makes sense that the NES Hellraiser game continues to be one of the most infamous cases of Lost Media out there.
Thankfully, it seems that the Hellraiser video game curse is on the verge of being conquered thanks to the upcoming release of Saber Interactive’s Hellraiser: Revival. And if the trailer is any indication, the end product appears to be well worth the wait. That being said, there’s always a chance that the project is yet another clever ploy by Pinhead meant to attract new playthings for the Order of the Gash…
