Manhunt 2’s ‘Adult Only’ rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board in the United States has seen all three platform holders – Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft – stating that games with this certification will not be published on their hardware.

Does this mean that the game will never see the light of day?

What happens to an AO’d game in this case? SPOnG looked back into history all the way to 1998 and Virgin Interactive’s Thrill Kill.

As you can see from the packshot to the right of this story, Thrill Kill was given an AO rating. However, it never got close to release as Electronic Arts acquired the property as part of its purchase of Virgin – and pulled it from release on the PlayStation.

That appeared to be that. Yet somehow, Thrill Kill code made its way out on to the Internet where it has been picked up by a variety of sites including, for example, Thrill-Kill.com, from which the following description comes:



Maybe, you’re thinking, those were more innocent times, back in 1998. So did we until we looked at the message board and discovered the latest posting was June 5th this year.

Whether Take-Two and Rockstar will be able to re-engineer Manhunt 2 so that it passes certification is still to be seen – and there’s less than a month for them to achieve this.

What is apparent, however, is that despite being branded Adult Only, the world is yet to see any mindless beat-em-up rampages in the streets of the ‘right thinking’ world by teens (let alone adults) seeking Thrill Kills triggered by an AO-rated game.

Reality, eh? Much, much more scary than fiction.