This Week In Retro: Illbleed (Patreon)

March 29, 2001: Illbleed points at the survival horror genre and laughs

by Diamond Feit

How's this for a coincidence: Last week I had the pleasure of covering Resident Evil, one of my favorite video games and Patient Zero for the "survival horror" genre. It's a game with a massive legacy, millions of fans, and it can still be purchased and played on "modern" PlayStation hardware (for now).

This week's game is Illbleed, released five years after Resident Evil. Illbleed is another survival horror game but one cut from a very different cloth. It's just as clearly drawing inspiration from zombie movies and takes place in an "American" setting, but everything about the world of this game is warped. Illbleed wants to scare the player but it also wants them to laugh; this is a video game that knows it's a video game, and it wants you to know that it knows. It's a truly one-of-a-kind creation that we'll never see again for reasons we will get to later.

By 2001, Resident Evil had become a legitimate phenomenon with a trilogy of PlayStation games plus a spin-off shooter and a next-gen sequel. This successful merger of horror and action opened the door for other developers to try their hand at the formula. The resulting new wave of survival horror games varied in quality and themes; Silent Hill offered more psychological thrills than science-fiction, while Clock Tower felt more like a slasher movie. However, one thing all entries in this new genre had in common was a tendency to play things straight. These games all sought to shock and terrify players with "mature" storylines in nightmarish settings.

Illbleed, from its premise alone, takes a different tact. The game opens with high-school student Eriko Christy giving a speech about her troubled childhood. Her father ran a "horror caravan" and tested all the attractions on her younger self. Relentless in his thirst for other people's fear, her father eventually broke the family apart, and the experience hardened Eriko to everyday thrills. This makes her a natural choice to head the school's "horror research club" where she and her three friends...well, the game never tells us what they do, but if it's anything like my college's anime club, I'm sure those kids have a bright future as freelance podcasters.

It's a subtle storytelling decision, but from the very first scene Illbleed tells the audience that this game wears its influences on its sleeves. The protagonists are a bunch of kids who love horror movies, haunted houses, and getting spooked; the perfect avatars for fans of survival horror games who likely love all those things just as much. When Eriko's friends receive invitations to the local horror amusement park (also called Illbleed) they jump at the chance to visit—especially with a standing offer to win $100 million if they can survive. Eriko originally declines, but when her friends fail to return from their adventure, she ends up going to Illbleed to find them.

The entirety of Illbleed (the game) takes place inside Illbleed (the park). Each level is a self-contained story, presented as a horror movie for the guests in the Cinema Zone, each with its own poster and attention-grabbing title like "The Homerun of Death." Players win money for each level they complete which can be spent on upgrades or supplies from Illbleed's many vendors. Eriko's friends are each stuck somewhere in these levels and can be rescued, offering players more selectable characters to choose from.

Thus, in the reality of Illbleed, the game's six stages are nothing more than grisly carnival rides. Everything that happens is a deliberate gag, every story is fictional, and none of it requires any further explanation. The developers wrote themselves a blank check to deliver absurd or even surreal scenarios to the audience, with no need to provide any larger, coherent structure. Illbleed is the video game equivalent of the horror anthology film, a Creepshow or Tales From The Hood as opposed to Night of the Living Dead or Friday the 13th.

The vignette-style chapters and hyper-real setting empower Illbleed to dabble in meta-fiction. Multiple stories bend the fourth wall by implying some element of the park is malfunctioning, sending the player into the control booth to repair broken consoles or even confront park staff. One boss battle is resolved not by physically defeating the monster but by stealing the remote and forcing the creature to self-destruct. The fifth level goes completely off-rails with a murder mystery set behind the scenes at Illbleed, asking the player to guess who the killer is for bonus points.

The wildest wink-at-the-audience moment in Illbleed takes place in the sixth and final level, a morbid Toy Story parody where a lost toy must kill his owner in order to hitch a ride inside the dead kid's coffin to Hell. The boss of the underworld is Zodick, a large blue demon with big eyes and white hands. Zodick curls into a ball and spins his body to attack, and drops rings when injured. If that's too subtle a hint, everytime Zodick appears, the bootup sound for the Japanese Sega Saturn plays in the background. I can't imagine Capcom or Konami publishing a horror game where the official mascot of a video game console is the ruler of Hell, but Illbleed pulled it off.

Illbleed launched on March 29, 2001 amidst a legitimate horror boom. Unfortunately, the game had two strikes against it. First, unlike other survival horror games, it took a completely unconventional approach by embracing B-movie aesthetics and incorporating humor alongside monsters and gore. Second, it was created exclusively for the Sega Dreamcast, a console which officially ended production on March 31, 2001—a mere two days after Illbleed debuted in Japan. The game reviewed poorly and sold even worse; a later port to the original Xbox was nearly complete but never released.

Lots of games have failed financially only to find a cult following post-release. In the case of Illbleed, the game is perfect fodder for the YouTube generation; it looks and sounds unlike any other title of its era and the outrageous comic elements are easier to enjoy without a controller in your hands. I first discovered it via screenshots on Tumblr and then watched an entire playthrough by SuperGreatFriend (this was my introduction to his channel).

Sadly, Illbleed's chance at a second life arrived too late for all parties involved. Developer Crazy Games went out of business in 2002, and publisher AIA closed two years later. Crazy Games president Shinya Nishigaki, the sole credited producer and writer of Illbleed, passed away in 2004; he was only 42 years old. We can remember, and celebrate, Illbleed today, but 20 years later there is no other game like it, nor will such a thing ever come to exist.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.