Death Race

The objective of Death Race is to run over as many “gremlins” as possible while avoiding the tombstones that appear when you hit them. The game caused controversy because the gremlins were indistinguishable from humans, and it seemed to be encouraging violence. But the real outrage should have been the gameplay.

Even by the standards of its time, this is tedious. Admittedly, there’s something darkly satisfying about the scream of the gremlins when you cream them, but that’s not enough to salvage this dreck.

This is perhaps the first ever videogame to cause controversy about the violence it depicted. You play as a car and you have to run over as many people as you can within a time limit for the high score. Obviously with the black and white visuals and extremely simple textures, its hard to determine if these are people or zombies you are running over. That out of the way, its perhaps the first example of the player being allowed to kill something that is harmless to you in a videogame. Obviously nothing about it is shocking nowadays, except perhaps the knowledge that it was shocking at the time. There is really no reason to play this other than the historical significance though, as the control and animation of the game is severely limited, not to mention the dull sounds. Still, its interesting in how little years it took to get from abstract all family games to this one which is decidedly more dark and perhaps the first one designed for more mature audiences.