Hatred: gaming's most contrived controversy

Soon-to-be-released Hatred has already garnered column inches and been banned from streaming service Twitch. Not bad for a schlock-horror cliche

You have to hand it to Polish studio, Destructive Creations - it set out to build a narrative of controversy and rebellion from the start, and it succeeded. In October 2014, the team released a ludicrous trailer for its isometric third-person shooter, Hatred. A gravel-voiced killer is pictured gathering an arsenal of weapons with which to embark on a murder spree, his motive a hate-filled contempt for society. "This is the time of vengeance and no life is worth saving," he intones with an aggrandised misanthropy that doesn't just sidle up to self-parody, but vaults the fence and charges in all guns blazing. And then we see in-game footage, and it's basically Postal, a 1997 PC game in which the player controls an anonymous character on, yes, a psychopathic murder spree. That's it. That's what Hatred offers.

From there, the studio garnered a series of PR coups. Game sites rushed to reflect on the "controversy" of the trailer's content; then the title was briefly removed from Steam Greenlight, essentially the peer review section of the world's dominant PC games retail platform. Accusations of corporate censorship abounded, and later, Gabe Newell, chief executive of Steam developer Valve, publicly reinstated the title and apologised for its removal.

These days, when a lot of games are heading to be polite, colorful, politically correct and trying to be some kind of higher art, rather than just an entertainment - we wanted to create something against trends. Something different, something that could give the player a pure, gaming pleasure.