That Time They Put the Wu-Tang Clan Into a Forbidden PS1 Game

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Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style alternately and rather fittingly known by the rad as fuck alternate moniker of Wu-Tang: Taste the Pain, is an obscure PlayStation fighting game in which you kick the fuck out of ninjas as various members of the eponymous Wu-Tang Clan. A game that, believe it or not, started life as a basketball game featuring gods which then morphed into a game where serial killers stabbed each other in the dick for a second chance at life.

To explain, Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style originally began life as a game called Thrill Kill, a largely forgotten PS1 title infamous for being so violent it was outright banned from the entire console. Something that would have resulted in the game being wholly forgotten if not for the fact it was pretty much finished when it was shit-canned, allowing pirated copies to proliferate and the game to succeed on pretty much pure infamy alone.

Set in hell, the game is actually a fairly competent 3D brawler that sees various condemned souls kicking the fuck out of one another with their prize for winning being a second chance at life. Featuring an eclectic cast of characters including a contortionist who snaps necks with her vagina, a cannibal who delivers the smack-down with a severed limb he can gnaw on between rounds and a 500 pound gorilla man who used to work for the Post Office.

What makes the game so, weird though is not any of that but that it actually started life as a sports game where gods would stunt on each other in an ancient sport not dissimilar from basketball before they inexplicably decided to complete upend everything and make it all about doing skeleton combos to a man with a bear-trap for a face. Which, well, we can’t argue doesn’t sound cooler.

Anyway, after the game was banned the studio behind it, Paradox Development, slapped a new or should we say, Wu skin on it and transformed it into a game where the Wu-Tang Clan can frontflip kick each other’s dicks off. A lateral move sure, but one we kind of respect for the balls it took.