Even before the release of Manhunt, Rockstar Games was no stranger to controversy. Grand Theft Auto III was a lightning rod for debate when it was released in 2001, being criticized for the freedom it gave the player to commit gleeful acts of violence. Everything in that game was so cartoonishly over the top in a way that made the violence fun, no matter how extreme it got. The same was true for their follow up Vice City, but with 2003’s release of Manhunt, it took a different approach to their presentation of violence.

Right off the bat, the premise of Manhunt is unpleasant. For those unfamiliar with the setup, you play as James Earl Cash, a death row prisoner who is mysteriously spared from execution by the perverted “Director.” From there, you are dropped off in an abandoned section of the city, surrounded by bloodthirsty gangs and commanded to kill them as part of The Director’s large scale snuff film that you are forced star in.

The contrast between the two games is immediately apparent. Even though both games cast you as criminals, Cash seems far less sympathetic than either GTA protagonist. The tone of the settings is also wildly different. Manhunt‘s Carcer City is perpetually night, broken down, and covered in a layer of filth. The starkest difference comes from its presentation of violence. In GTA, things can escalate to over the top rather quickly, starting with a simple car chase and ending with you shooting Army tanks with a rocket launcher, and it all stays rather playful.

When playing Manhunt, your options are always more realistic in nature. You start out armed with simple items like plastic bags and glass shards that often kill people in messy, visceral ways, and unlike GTA, killing is basically your sole objective in each level. The presentation of the kills is also purposefully grimy, shot through a CCTV-like filter, making it look like something out of Faces of Death. It’s disquieting to watch, but the player is required to perform more violent kills, each weapon has three increasingly brutal executions, in order to get a higher score in the level.

This is where the true magic of the game lies. These kills are violent. Uncomfortably violent. As you go up in level of execution, things escalate from quickly stabbing someone in the neck with a shard of glass to slashing them in the back and brutally stabbing them straight in the face twice. And just because you’ve done the kill before doesn’t mean you get the opportunity to skip the animation. Each time you have to watch it through all its brutal glory, and the CCTV presentation of each kill makes it feel even more like you are a voyeur to something horrible.

Mechanically the game rewards you for doing these higher level kills, but as a person having to watch the actions on screen, I would rather not have to watch these brutal killings over and over again. This tension between the game telling us to do it and the feeling of discomfort created when watching what you’ve done creates something incredibly unique in the medium.

Video games require the player to push on for the action to continue, unlike a movie which will continue playing independently of the viewer. No matter how much a game is trying to scare you, it is still trying to give you a hint of hope, because without that it’s easier to give up and not continue. Manhunt seems to actively try to push back against the player with its brutality, forcing you to stare into the abyss as you trek further into the hellish world of the game.

Instead of using violence for excitement like GTA, it instead presents you with such horrific images that it makes you question why you would enjoy participating in something like this? Is it worth the extra points at the end of the level to watch this execution again? We identify the director’s wishes as disgusting and vile, yet we are actively participating in making them come true.

This type of confrontation with the notion of violence wasn’t seen often in mainstream games of its time, and it’s entirely possible that the effect was lost on many who played. In their review of the game, the Chicago Tribune called Manhunt “the Clockwork Orange of video games, holding your eyes open so as to not miss a single splatter – asking you, is this really what you enjoy watching?”

When examining a piece of media, it’s important not only to interpret the message of a work encoded by the creator, but also to look at how the work is decoded by those consuming the work. Do fans of this game remember it as the Chicago Tribune described it, a challenging work that forces us to confront what we think about violence, or did it become more like GTA, a murder simulator where the acts of violence were performed with joy?