“Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice features unique enemies, beautiful landscapes, and abundant jets of blood. Hopefully that blood is spurting from your enemies. But why does it fly so high, in such a powerful stream? In this video Patrick Gill examines the tradition of blood spray in the Japanese samurai films that heavily influenced Sekiro. But Sekiro’s use of copious blood fountains isn’t just aesthetic. As Pat points out, it’s a holistic part of the gameplay. Just as the fights in Kurosawa films escalate to an explosive, messy act of a violence, so too the boss fights in Sekiro revolve around breaking the enemy’s posture meter and unleashing a torrent of damage all at once.”

“To truly understand Killer Instinct, we need to go back to Mortal Kombat. Midway’s digitized arcade brawler was one of the most influential games of the 90s, taking the addictive head-to-head action of Street Fighter II and adding guts and gore to grab the attention of gleeful kids and horrified parents. But when the long-awaited home ports of the game came to 16-bit consoles, Nintendo dropped the ball hard. Wanting to maintain their status as the “family-friendly” home video game platform, Nintendo demanded Midway change all of the red blood in Mortal Kombat to white sweat and neuter a bunch of the fatalities. That left competitors Sega a huge opening, which they drove right through. The Genesis version had all of the arcade gore (if you put in a special code), and not only outsold the SNES version but also drove hardware sales. Nintendo knew that they needed to strike back, and they grabbed one of their most trustworthy third-party developers, as well as a huge name in the arcades to help.”

“There was a time, long before the gushes of crimson coloring contemporary offerings of extreme violence--Gears and God of War, Dead Rising and the more recent Resident Evils, Max Payne 3, the Dead Space series, Bulletstorm and BioShock (to name but a few)--where you had to lean on your imagination to bring scenes of disgusting dismemberment to life. Today's games are suitably rated, informing parents that something like Shadows of the Damned really isn't for their six-year-old. But there was a time when violence in games was barely regulated at all, when a kid much like myself could slip Barbarian into his ZX Spectrum's tape deck and settle down for an afternoon of decapitating. Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior , to give Palace Software's 1987 one-on-one fighter its full title, is today mostly remembered for two things. One, it featured Wolf from Gladiators on its packaging (alongside, when first published, Page 3 girl Maria Whittaker); and two, you could cut your opponent's head off and see his corpse dragged away by some goblin chap.”

“Think about age-old classics such as Mortal Kombat and GTA, as well as modern favorites like Bowmasters and Sniper 3D. Can you reimagine them without a single drop of blood, in any color? That’s what China’s game scene is about to look like. And those are just a few iconic examples of popular action games. Many other types of games use blood to add realism because that’s what players like: games that feel real. In the past, games that wanted to publish in China could get away with things like “colored” blood—as in any color but red. Now, the new rules are very clear and straightforward: no blood means no blood. That includes anything that can be imagined as blood. Before the new regulation, blood, bones, guts, human corpses, and dismembered body parts were already banned. Older regulations have already required many games to make alterations to their assets before they could be launched in China. However, when it came to in-game blood, developers devised all kinds of clever ways to get around the restrictions. This included changing the color of blood from red to blue, black, or white, and many games pulled off getting licensed in China with these techniques. Now that new regulations have been passed, blood—and anything players might perceive as blood—is definitively forbidden.”