Last Updated on June 23, 2022 by James Dziezynski
Don’t let Nintendo’s censor-heavy standards fool you: the NES was home to some of the most violent deaths in video game history. Most characters shuffled off this mortal coil with a few respectful blinks before disappearing, sometimes leaving behind delicious apples or fanciful, bouncing coins. But there is a darker side to the NES, a place where living beings are eviscerated at the greasy hands of demonic fried eggs. Summon all your courage and read on gentle reader, though remember what has been seen cannot be unseen: The Top 10 Most Violent NES Deaths.
10. Burgertime
Mechanism of Death: Devoured by Living Food Products
Armed only with a few handfuls of debilitating pepper, Chef Peter Pepper has an arduous task before him: construct the perfect hamburger before being killed by a variety of living food items. His is a world of violent sausages and murderous fried eggs whose hardened souls are incapable of mercy.
When apprehended, Peter’s face is twisted into an expression of pure 8-bit horror in anticipation of the gore that is to follow. Before the scene cuts out, we see the savage sausage looming over Peter writhing in pain. Then the disembowelment begins and his very vital organs are ingested before his eyes. Or as Lieutenant Frank Drebin would say, “Now the hand is on the other foot.” This leads us to the ultimate question: wouldn’t Savage Sausage be a good name for a band?
9. Baseball Simulator 1.000
Mechanism of Death: Death by Beanball
Most of the comic mischief in Baseball Simulator 1.000 is pure whimsy. That is until a vicious beanball rips the upper torso off an unsuspecting batter, leaving a pair of still-standing legs at the plate. By clobbering a hitter with the Photon ultra-pitch, the hitter is literally torn asunder.
It all happens very fast and if you’re not paying attention, it may seem like the player is simply “Bom’d” (or “Mob’d”) from the impact. But slow-mo instant replay reveals the true mechanism of death at 141 MPH. Let the epitaph be heard, “He died with his cleats on.”
8. Battletoads
Mechanism of Death: Gas Asphyxiation
There are a lot of exotic ways to die in Battletoads but none more horrifying than the bursts of poisonous gas. These cytotoxic, vesicant puffs are impressively potent. One breath initiates a painful sequence of death, replete with bulging, panicked eyes and a flailing, extended tongue.
As the searing chemical blisters well up in their throats, the affected Battletoad clutches at his burning neck, and death cannot come quick enough. The vulnerability and sincere agony expressed by the gassed ‘Toad somehow lacks the comedic overtones of being sucked into a razor-sharp fan or being chomped in half by puny piranhas.
7. Shadowgate
Mechanism of Death: Broken Legs
Shadowgate could very well have its own top 10 list with all the horrific ways to die. Whether it’s setting yourself on fire, getting your throat ripped out by wolves, shredded by glass, or devoured by a shark, it’s all waiting in the deadly confines of Shadowgate’s castle. Thankfully all the deaths are conveyed only by text, though being forced to visualize the scene in your own mind can present its own unique brand of terror.
The worst of all these catastrophes are the broken legs scenarios. Broken legs combine the psychological torture of waiting for your own slow death coupled with the blinding pain of shattered femurs. From the game: “You jump down the hole and, after a couple of moments, hit the floor!! It seems that you have broken both of your legs!! It’s only a matter of time before you die!!” That “matter of time” could be hours or days. It makes one envious of the rather quick and efficient death by dissolving in caustic slime.
6. Rampage
Mechanism of Death: Eaten Alive
Picture it: it’s a beautiful day in San Jose. You have the day off. You decide to hop in your boat and go fishing in the heavily polluted river that runs through the heart of downtown. The last thing you expect (if you’re a reasonable person) is to be ingested by a giant, mutated monkey. And yet it happens on a regular basis in cities throughout America in Rampage.
People are snatched up and snacked upon like living Cheetos. A few frames of “chewing” animation show that our hapless victims are not mercifully swallowed but rather ground up by powerful mandibles of the super-sized simian. The lesson here is if you want to cast for diseased, urban fish do so on a day when horrible mutants are not destroying the city (I think I read that exact advice in a fortune cookie once).
5. River City Ransom
Mechanism of Death: Choking on One’s Own Vomit
The trail of blood left behind by heavy-fisted teenagers Ryan and Alex has painted River City red. Early in the game, we are treated to one of Nintendo’s more frightening deaths. After riddling their bodies with heavy blows, the enemies fall to the ground and vomit in their own shattered throats. *BARF!* they exclaim, no doubt choking on the bile that is seeping into a pair of freshly-collapsed lungs.
Before they blink into oblivion, we see the eye swollen with fear as the crippled and lifeless thug disappears into the void. Who knows what potential these “Generic Dudes” and “Squids” could have achieved in life? Maybe a free smile could have set them on a course of charity and kindness. But no, there they lay, gagging on puke on the indifferent pavement of River City.
4. City Connection
Mechanism of Death: Gravitational Reversal
Sometimes it is the implied horror that strikes at the deepest, most fearful part of our trembling hearts. Case in point: the wretched felines sent into the heavens in the very Europe-y game City Connection. There they stand, smiles on their faces, joyfully waving a checkered flag in support of our hatchback-driving hero.
One moment all is bliss. Then in an act of pure contempt, they are knocked skyward without remorse, reversing the very laws of gravity. The sheer terror is graphically captured on their kitty faces as they are blasted into the ozone, where they will be melted into oblivion by the stratosphere– but not until being subjected to painful, high-altitude pulmonary edema. Akin to the jarring dissonance of A Clockwork Orange a whimsical tune plays as our once-carefree cat is projected, slow-motion, into the cosmos, where he will dissolve into billions and billions of pieces.
3. Bionic Commando
Mechanism of Death: Disfiguring Head Explosion
It remains one of the most bizarre scenes in any NES game: at the end of Bionic Commando, we are treated to a legitimately disgusting animation of Hitler, I mean “Master D”, having his head explode in forceful detail. The entire animation is slowed down so you can appreciate the gruesome, dislodged eyeball and each 8-bit tooth being torn from the gums.
Granted, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow but in a world where NES censorship forbade anything hinting of blood (green fluid was the normal discharge of NES foes), this is a stunning event. My guess is that those in charge of censoring the game weren’t good enough to get to the end. The final frame where his head explodes like a watermelon dropped from a skyscraper is particularly disturbing, right on par with the liquidy, face-melting Nazi death in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
2. Nobunaga’s Ambition
Mechanism of Death: Samurai Sword to the Groin
Civil war is always a bloody affair, even in the 8-bit world. Nobunaga’s Ambition is chock full of sanguinary scenes, such as the line “Lord, rejoice! I bring you the enemy general’s head!” We don’t actually get to see the disembodied head but we do get to witness an even more revolting act.
When you hire a ninja to assassinate a rival, if all goes well, your hired killer comes upon the opposing daimyo deep in slumber. In a moment that screams “Oda Nobunaga sends his regards!” your ninja plunges his samurai sword deep into the “upper thigh” (as sportscasters would call it) of your enemy. Make no bones about it, you’ve just killed your opponent by impaling his junk. And it’s a cheap death as ninjas can sometimes be hired for less than a single gold coin. It’s the ultimate rude awakening.
1. Paperboy
Mechanism of Death: Complete Molecular Breakdown
With plenty of games featuring gun-wielding commandos and machete-carrying madmen, it may seem odd that Nintendo’s most violent death comes from a game based on the mundane happenings of a suburban paper route. If you can look past the fact there are plenty of ways to die in Paperboy, ranging from clownish, knife-thrusting murderers to a very poorly drawn Grim Reaper, it’s how you die that takes the gold medal for most violent death. And your paperboy dies the same way every time whether he has bumped into a gentle garden shrub or gotten run over by a Volkswagon Beetle.
First, there is the death sound, a blaring cacophony summoned from the throat of some hellish demon that is projected from your television 90 decibels louder than any other sound in the game. It is a fitting auditory sample of what has just happened to your paperboy: complete molecular breakdown. There is no bike. No jaunty baseball cap. All that remains is a pile of blue and yellow gore, bearing no semblance to the human being and bike it formerly possessed. Every accident in Paperboy triggers an act of atomic fission that unbinds the strongest elemental bonds, rendering both man and machine into an indistinguishable glob of crumpled pixels.
It’s amazing that NES programmers couldn’t program enemies from blindly running off cliffs to their deaths and yet the designers of Paperboy were able to incorporate the scaling theory of quantum breakdown in solids into their code. Alas poor Paperboy, we hardly knew ye.
