Open Season

There's a lot of people in this world who possess the bittersweet quality of being desensitized to graphic imagery. For some people, it's the result of growing up in abusive households; for others, it's caused by excessive exposure to horror movies and shock sites. I've had my share of both of the latter, but I can attribute my ability to look at anything gruesome and obscene, completely unfazed, to a handful of computer games I played as a kid, with one game in particular scarring and traumatizing me in such a way that even today it gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Released in 1993 by Sierra Entertainment, who made lots of computer games I played and loved growing up, it was called "Police Quest: Open Season." Many people wouldn't consider it a game; it was a simulation, designed to realistically depict the work of a Los Angeles police detective. In the game, you played as LAPD detective John Carey, who must solve the case behind a string of murders, including the killing of your police partner and close friend. The game made no attempt to censor the graphic nature of police duties, and featured detailed imagery of a dead 8-year-old boy riddled with bullets in a dumpster, close-ups of a half-naked corpse, the crossdressing murderer fondling a bloody body, and a severed human head in a refrigerator.

The game required extensive patience, as it's meant to be played and beaten through the use of critical thinking and logical reasoning. This wasn't one of those "shoot 'em and arrest 'em" games by any means. Nevertheless, most people who played it most likely used a walkthrough - a detailed step-by-step set of instructions - to beat the game.

Its gritty, unabashed realism and gruesome nature was made possible through its use of digitized photographs, allowing for photo-realistic, albeit very pixelated, graphics, accompanied by a plethora of creepy, bone-chilling music. While probably regarded as mild by today's standards, no computer game had come close to the shock factor this game had 21 years ago. Had I discovered and first played this game later in life, I'd think nothing of its content, but my initial experiences playing it as a kid are almost surely responsible for desensitizing me to blood, gore, and violence, and no other game - or movie, for that matter - has ever given me the kind of dark, eerie aura that Police Quest: Open Season has.

This relatively pointless and stupid picture is based off of the first scene in the game, in which two bodies are discovered.