The Punisher - On this day

17 years ago, video games were still being made to accompany movie hits, and one such game was The Punisher. Marvel's antihero Frank Castle called The Punisher got his film in 2004, and a year later, the accompanying game arrived, although the plot of the game was closer to a comic book template than a movie.

The Punisher was an action-adventure in which there was shooting and hiding to attack an opponent from an ambush. It was a rather brutal game, as befits a Punisher, and especially violent was the mechanics of questioning opponents, which was related to interaction with the environment, so opponents could be tortured to extract the necessary information from them.

Because of this, the game caused controversy, and according to the initial assessment of the American board, which gives the age rating of the games, it was planned that The Punisher would receive the label AO or Adults Only / only for adults. As games with such a label may not be sold on consoles, developers had to resort to various techniques to reduce violence (e.g. the image becomes black and white during torture) for the game to go on sale. Nevertheless, in some countries, such as Germany, the game has been placed on the list of harmful media for young people.

Initially, the game was developed by the Mucky Foot Productions team, but in the end, Punisher fell into the hands of the far better known Volitiona team - the same ones that made the Saints Row series. It can therefore be said that Punisher was in part a forerunner of Saints Row.