This Week In Retro: Blood (Patreon)

March 7, 1997: Windows PCs run red with Blood

by Diamond Feit

Horror in the 1990s found itself occupying a strange place. The genre had exploded in the 1970s and 1980s as exploitation and slasher films migrated from the grindhouse to America's living rooms thanks to the rise of VHS. Yet the mainstream success of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street (amongst others) led to sequel after sequel with diminishing returns. This glut of same-y material, along with a slew of imitators, diluted the genre as the years passed to the point that there was little "horror" to be found in these films. When the audience is showing up to see an invincible killer off hapless teenagers in increasingly unexpected or ironic ways, fear is the last thing on their mind.

As horror films fell out of fashion, the genre made inroads into the growing medium of video games. Primitive graphics and strict content guidelines prevented early games from delving into the macabre, but by the late 80s more graphic, shocking material made its way to arcades and home consoles. As is the case for horror films, there is no direct relationship in games between the amount of onscreen violence and sensations of terror, but the sight of seeing my ninja threatened with execution if I didn't put another coin into Ninja Gaiden scarred me for life.

Enter Doom: id Software's groundbreaking 1993 first-person shooter blended horror and science-fiction into an experience unlike anything seen before. Players take command of a space marine sent to investigate a moonbase orbiting Mars and end up fighting their way through Hell itself, slaying legions of monsters in the process with both conventional and high-tech weaponry. Doom's blood-pumping soundtrack and blazing speed disqualify it as a horror game, in my opinion, but its graphic violence and Satanic imagery certainly reminded me of the many VHS cassettes I never had the guts to rent as a teenager.

An unquantifiable number of first-person shooters followed in Doom's sanguine-soaked wake, though many dabbled in different themes as a means to distinguish themselves from id Software's take on the genre, such as fantasy, ancient Egypt, and even tales from the Bible. id's own follow-up to Doom, Quake, incorporates gothic and industrial elements, giving it a darker and more sinister vibe than its predecessor. These imitators vary wildly in quality, with many being quickly forgotten, but the sheer amount of these titles blew up so fast that the first-person shooting genre garnered a foothold and remains popular today.

This week I'd like to honor the 25th anniversary of one of the lesser-known Doom-clones, a game I remember not for its quality but for its quirks. Both gory and silly, both innovative and derivative, Monolith Software's Blood leaned harder into horror than any of its contemporaries, carving a niche for itself in the genre and finding a cult of dedicated fans as well. Is it scary? I wouldn't say that, no, but Blood knows and respects all the creepy movies adored by its target audience, and that adoration is palpable in-game.

Blood stars Caleb, a quintessential 90s horror anti-hero who wears a large-brimmed hat, a long overcoat, and sees the world through bright-red pupil-less eyes. We don't know precisely what his life was like before the game began, but we do know he hung out in a cult worshiping a massive demon. Blood opens with Caleb, his lover Ophelia, and his crew being summarily excommunicated and killed by their master, only for Caleb to awaken in his tomb with vengeance and rage in his heart.

Caleb embodies horror in the 90s through his use of sarcasm and quips borrowed from pop culture; his very first and very last lines in the game are direct quotes from Army of Darkness. These "jokes" give him an air of Duke Nukem (especially with his gruff voice), but Caleb is not a macho stereotype and will mutter or even sing to himself if left idle. As a young person who played both games when they were new, I felt the always-confident Duke came off as a Schwarzenegger-type, while unhinged Caleb was more of a Nicolas Cage. Had Blood come out after the summer of 1997, I suspect many lines from Face/Off and Con Air would have gone straight into the script.

Like Duke Nukem 3D (released one year earlier), Blood runs on the Build engine, bringing its internal geometry closer to a three-dimensional world than Doom could ever manage. Blood's levels are thus quite complex, sending players through multi-level structures with hidden passageways aplenty. However, Blood's monsters remain two-dimensional, just as Doom's were, so by the end of each stage the floor is littered with flat corpses that always face the player, rotating with the camera as needed.

Like its hero, the levels of Blood are also chock full of pop culture references. The very first stage includes a headstone for Eric Draven, the undead protagonist of The Crow, and the mortuary bears the name "Morningside Cemetery" from Phantasm. Some of these sight gags prompt a comment from Caleb (when he sees the Draven headstone, he says "Nevermore"), while others remain unaddressed for the player to enjoy silently. One of the more infamous Easter eggs is a dismembered corpse hanging upside-down from a rope dressed exactly like Duke Nukem; should the player interact with the body, it sways back and forth and Caleb gleefully remarks "Shake it, baby!"

Blood's reference-laden script and level design may come off as hackneyed, but Caleb's arsenal of weapons remains fiercely original even 25 years later. In lieu of a pistol, he finds a flare gun that can burn enemies to a crisp. His first rapid-fire weapon is a Tommy gun with a gangland-style drum of bullets attached. Caleb's collection of dynamite is especially versatile, as he can light a bundle and throw it for a timed explosion, arm it with a remote-controlled detonator, or add a proximity sensor to ensure it always blows up near a target. Blood also includes magical means to murder the opposition; Caleb can pick up a voodoo doll and stab it to hurt enemies from afar, or use the Life Leech (a staff with a human skull attached) to drain their health.

In a feature that was ahead of the curve in 1997, every weapon in Blood also includes an "alternate" fire mode, typically expending extra ammunition to deal more damage faster. Relatedly, picking up a "guns akimbo" power-up gives Caleb a timed ability to dual-wield his firearms. All these options, coupled with the vast assortment of weapons available, make the combat in Blood highly flexible. It's just as easy to run through a level torching everything in sight as it is to play things slow and deliberate; both methods are equally effective, and entertaining.

There's nothing top-tier about Blood. It debuted in a busy year for first-person shooters, and its generic name did little to make it stand out. While it certainly is a violent game, it is not uniquely gory or graphic for the era. Blood also never made its way to any consoles like Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem, or many of its peers did, inhibiting its reach beyond PC owners. A round of corporate buying and selling in the years after its release left the ownership of Blood and the publishing rights to Blood in the hands of different companies which did the game no favors. Despite getting a sequel in 1998, Blood could have easily trickled down into the cracks and disappeared like so many old computer games have done before or since.

Fortunately for Caleb and fans of dark humor, Blood has endured. Amateur supporters kept it pumping over the years via mods and unofficial remakes in different engines. The original game eventually made its way to digital storefronts repackaged as One Whole Unit Blood; don't bother googling that though, because that listing has since been removed in favor of a 2019 remaster called Blood: Fresh Supply. I own the former on Steam and its default control scheme is tough to parse. We didn't always expect every first-person shooter to include mouse functionality and One Whole Unit Blood upholds that tradition, with commands like "fire" and "look up" bound to the keyboard.

Truth be told, I don't need to replay Blood to retain my fondness for it. It was a hoot back in 1997 with its reverence for horror films that I, as a fresh-faced youth, was only beginning to discover. Many of the famous lines Caleb delivers word-for-word were ones I had already saved onto my PC as WAV files; at the time, I found his fondness for Army of Darkness relatable, like it was a secret only the two of us shared. Blood even included a song from the gothic metal band Type O Negative on the data disc, precisely the kind of music my friends and I were into in the 1990s.

So maybe Blood doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Maybe its best ideas have long since been borrowed and improved upon in other, better games. There's certainly no shortage of media in 2022 that features violence, sarcasm, and winking references to old movies. Blood matters to me because it felt fresh at the time to have a video game so in-tune with my sense of humor. Writing this column hasn't convinced me that Blood is a hidden gem or an underrated classic, but it brought back a lot of memories, and that's good enough for me.

Blood is Blood, take it or leave it.

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