As soon as characters like Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger joined the multiplayer horror game Dead by Daylight, speculation began—especially among the hardcore horror fans—as to whether or not we would ever see Pinhead do the same. That speculation has gone on for years and, finally, those fans have gotten their wish. Dead by Daylight has officially revealed their upcoming Hellraiser chapter as well as allowing fans to get their first taste of gameplay in a Player Test Build. This is huge news for fans who have wanted to see the character in the game, or just to get this kind of treatment in a major platform game in general. But in some ways, it’s an even bigger deal than I would wager most people realize, because the new Hellraiser chapter marks the first official video game appearance by Pinhead and the Cenobites, ever. And it’s definitely not for lack of trying.
Attempts at a Hellraiser video game date back over thirty years. This has been a long time coming and there have been a ton of close calls. To truly appreciate what we’ve been given in this latest Dead by Daylight DLC, I think it makes sense to take a look back at all the things we almost got.
The first attempt at a Hellraiser video game dates back to 1990 when the studio Color Dreams sought to produce the game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. That only makes sense, really, as this was coming off of the 1989 NES release of Friday the 13th, with A Nightmare on Elm Street following in 1990. Color Dreams co-founder Dan Lawson had seen Hellraiser and wanted to produce a video game based on it, so he contacted New World and wound up spending somewhere between $35,000 and $50,000 on the rights for a few years as they attempted to develop it. According to Lawson, the plan was to make a very ambitious game, one that even proved to be too ambitious for the NES at the time.
All that’s really known about the action and gameplay is that it would have been “a 45 degree down angle view, with a maze of stone and walls and pits.” The detailed background maps were also designed to move with the player, to get a sense of the scope. But the NES cartridge simply couldn’t handle what they had planned, which led to the development of a more expansive “Super Cartridge.” Yet despite the game being literally too advanced than what the NES was built to handle, that’s not the thing that did it in. Like many unmade horror projects, it came down to a problem with licensing, though probably not in the way you would typically suspect.
After all, as mentioned, the game itself was licensed. Color Dreams spent a good chunk of money on the rights to Hellraiser. But Color Dreams itself was an unlicensed company, meaning that it was not licensed through Nintendo. This was right at the boom of video game popularity. There was a huge demand and not a whole lot of games to meet that demand, so the market was exploding. Retailers making the decision to stock unlicensed studios like Color Dreams meant a huge risk if it meant losing their business with Nintendo in general, which could very easily have been the case.
That was what killed their Hellraiser game, more than anything. Stores simply didn’t find it worth the risk to carry Color Dreams games in general, when it meant that it could essentially stop them from being able to carry video games at all. That also left the developer in a huge predicament as they were suddenly a video game company without any retailers to sell their games. They found their new frontier soon enough, though, as shortly after Hellraiser fell through—and their major retail plans with it—Color Dreams began to sell their games directly to the Christian market. Getting their games into Christian book stores meant cornering a market that didn’t have any games of their own, and they soon found their games in even more stores than Toys R Us. All thanks to their near-miss with Hellraiser. According to Lawson, by the time the plug was pulled on the game, the hardware had been completed as had 20% of the artwork, but none of the programming. Even though a few print ads for the game remain as do some title screens, it was never completed enough for anything like a prototype.
Before that cord between Color Dreams and Hellraiser was severed entirely, though, there was one other attempt in the early ‘90s, even after they had made the transition to primarily producing Christian games. Utilizing the Wolfenstein 3D engine, Color Dreams sought to produce a Hellraiser game for PC. While less is known about this attempt, it seemed to get a lot closer to actually being released. This time the problem seemed to simply come down to a matter of terrible timing. This Hellraiser would have been a first-person shooter, navigating a three-dimensional labyrinth. This was just after Color Dreams had seen some success with Noah’s Ark 3D for the Super Nintendo. Throughout the maze, players would battle a variety of creatures from the Cenobites to the bum from the original film, to the Engineer to the skeletal demon that popped up at the movie’s end.
While certainly lo-fi, it seems like game fans would have been happy with it. But then a little game called Doom came out. Then, just like that, there was a game with not only a very close premise but what also sounds like nearly identical gameplay on the market. Once that happened, Color Dreams “really couldn’t justify releasing the PC game,” according to Lawson. That makes sense, of course. A Hellraiser game following on the heels of Doom and using an identical engine would have automatically been called a rip-off, no matter which one had come first. People would have, frankly, torn it apart. So the whole thing was shelved.
As video games seemed to become rapidly more advanced throughout the 1990s, another studio took a swing at Hellraiser for yet another platform. This time it was Konami and they were seeking to make a game for the original PlayStation. By all accounts—though not at all surprising for video game tie-ins of the time—this one would have been pretty loosely based on the film. While there are certain aesthetics for characters and creatures that come to mind when one thinks of Hellraiser, the developers were apparently given almost free reign. The only character that needed to look exactly as they looked in the film, according to GameSpot’s “Video Game Graveyard” was (naturally) Pinhead himself. Other named characters had to evoke the character they were representing, but they were apparently not at all beholden to having to make the rest of the game’s enemies remotely Cenobitical in nature.
The player, meanwhile, would have spent the bulk of the game collecting charms and tokens, which doesn’t exactly sound riveting, nor does it sound like a very specifically Hellraiser experience. This one came down to money, apparently, as the game was pitched to the Hellraiser rights holders (which likely would have been Miramax at the time) who either wanted too much money or just flat-out weren’t interested. There was a brief consideration to remove the recognizable, trademarked elements and release it as an original game, which would have made sense considering how little resemblance to the franchise this game would have apparently had. That was naturally deemed a little too risky, and the project was scrapped entirely.
The next attempt, as well as the closest to being completed and the one I am most familiar with, was the unfinished 1996 PC game Hellraiser: Virtual Hell. I remember browsing The Hellbound Web back in the day and seeing the screenshots and somehow convincing myself that maybe it would still come out someday. This game was being developed by Fox Interactive and Magnet Interactive Studios and would have used the 3DRealms engine that at the time was utilized by the highly popular Duke Nukem 3D. The game seemed to revolve around a VR company that tapped into Hell, leaving one worker to be sucked into Hell by Pinhead, while their partner (the player) takes it upon themselves to travel into Hell to get them back.
As was the case for many PC games at the time, the game would have seen a combination of live-action and 3D animation. In fact, Doug Bradley not only voiced the character of Pinhead, he actually shot footage for the game. This was during his downtime while filming Hellraiser: Bloodline. According to the actor in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he shot his sequences for the game in total isolation in front of a green screen. Bradley summed up Pinhead’s role in Virtual Hell in the interview as such: “I say things to the player like I’m delighted that they’ve fallen for a trap I’ve laid, or issue a warning not to get too carried away after they’re slightly successful.” He also added a delightful final note, considering the game was never finished: “I’d like to see the finished product so I could understand why I was doing a weird bit that at the time seemed so ridiculous.”
In addition to Pinhead, players would have encountered some Cenobites from the films, specifically the Chatterer. But there would have been new characters as well, namely a Cenobite with the very video game-appropriate name of Pinball. Essentially, this Cenobite would have used silver spheres as weapons, a gimmick that immediately sounds very similar to the Tall Man of the Phantasm films. One of the most fascinating ideas, according to the game’s treatment, is that if you made too many mistakes as you navigated your way through Hell, you could actually find yourself becoming a Cenobite.
This game had problems from the beginning, though, primarily with the engine, which was slow and unwieldy. Ultimately, it proved too ineffective for them to make a good (or even functional) game, and the project was abandoned despite the fact that levels were being built and 95% of the art had been completed. Even though the publisher seemed pleased, the engine didn’t work and the game wasn’t remotely playable, so it was canned. Unfortunate, too, because of all the close calls for Hellraiser video games, Virtual Hell sounds the most interesting, even if it could have been a disaster. Thankfully, some screenshots and audio files have gotten out there over the years so that we could at least get some glimpse as to what this game could have been.
After that, there was silence for a few years on the prospect of a Hellraiser game, which is not surprising as Bloodline famously did not do well in theaters, to the point that it received the dreaded “Alan Smithee” director credit and even turned out to be the franchise’s last theatrical entry. But there were still a few attempts. In 2000, the same year the first of the direct-to-video sequels (Hellraiser: Inferno) saw release, Threshold.com licensed an online game appropriately titled Hellraiser: Hell Online. The basic setup was for a puzzle that the player would have to solve every time they visited the website. Each time you made a move to open the box, you would reveal another piece of the larger story, via some kind of clue or document. Solving the box wouldn’t mean you’d won, but rather would mark the beginning of the game experience. The banner promised “The most terrifying game you will ever play…” and though that seems unlikely, we really can’t say for sure as the game never actually wound up being released. Well, for the most part, at least. Two of the mini-games, titled Morbid Match and Torment Trivia, actually did wind up making it onto the site, but were met with very little enthusiasm.
What’s truly incredible about both Virtual Hell and Hell Online is that they wound up being directly reflected in a later sequel. For a good many fans, the virtual reality angle of Hellraiser: Hellworld came out of nowhere. So many people have truly taken Hellworld to task for trying to be trendy and so blatantly catering to the up-and-coming online gamer demographic because it seemed so far removed from what Hellraiser was. As it turns out, it really wasn’t that far removed at all and attempts to merge those worlds dated back a full decade before Hellworld was even released, which is utterly surreal to think about. All of these attempts were made, some of them came close to being finished, but none of them ever came to be.
Now, all these years later, Pinhead will finally make his video game debut along with the likes of so many other infamous horror icons in Dead by Daylight. From what we’ve seen, he looks to be one of the best additions to the game, with stunningly fluid animation and abilities and mechanics that evoke core elements of the character and franchise. The best DLC characters in Dead by Daylight bring elements of their respective world into the concrete foundation of the game. When you’re running from Michael in Haddonfield, hearing the classic theme, it feels like a Halloween game. When the player has to solve boxes in addition to generators and there are chains flying out of nowhere and classic Pinhead lines echoing through the air, I suspect it’ll feel very much like a Hellraiser game when he’s the killer.
This is simultaneously a new frontier for the franchise, and yet also one thirty-plus years in the making. Pinhead has crossed the threshold into a new medium where he not only has a whole new set of sights to show us, but also one in which we can step into his robe and show those sights ourselves. It’s a long wait, to be sure, but if the incredibly exciting gameplay footage is anything to go on, it’s also one that should hopefully prove to be anything but painful.