Bloody video games.
They've caused their fair share of drama over the years, with violent action and gory killing attributed to all kinds of societal harm.
These days, a certain amount of bloodshed is tolerated - but not so long ago a splash of red pixels was all it took to start a fuss.
Join me as I prepare to dive knee deep into blood, guts, and video games.
Covered are classic horror titles such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the Atari 2600 and torture-themed light gun game Chiller: action shooters such as the digital rendition of Charles Bronson in Death Wish 3, Ikari Warriors; Decapitation in Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior, demon slaying in Splatterhouse and exploding drug barons in the 32-bit Narc.
Tecmo Knight was a decapitation-laden beat-em up, Space Gun and Beast Busters rail shooters with liberal dismemberment and copious blood.
The dawn of Full Motion Video spawned games like Night Trap, and the realistic digitised sprites of Mortal Kombat: with the violent fatalities courting controversy - and leading to the formation of the ESRB.
MK also spawned a number of clones, including Blood Warrior, Time Killers and Eternal Champions on the Mega Drive and Mega CD.
The rise of the FPS genre in the 90s followed in the footsteps of the violent shooters of the late 80s - such titles would cement the word 'gib' into the gaming lexicon.
Doom saw enemies explode into a red paste, Rise of The Triad flung eyeballs at the screen with its ludicrous gibs - and Quake features the first seen polygonal gibs.
Gibbing became the hallmark of the genre, with most later examples permitting the reduction of your opponents into fleshy chunks - at least until ragdoll physics took hold.
Meanwhile horror adventure games such as Phantasmagoria and Harvester took advantage of CD-ROM's storage to use realistic death scenes - and survival horror games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill saw bloody scenes to ramp up tension.
Both Carmageddon and Thrill K
