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Kill the pastLiberation maiden anddestructive nostalgiaBenjamin Gabrieluninterpretative.blogspot.comBenjamin Gabriel writes about games, music and science fiction.Aside from blogging at Uninterpretative, he has also written forthe New Enquiry and writes book reviews for Strange Horizons.In the mid-2000s,a new Japanese game designer began makingwaves in America. His public-facing persona waslinked to one phrase: Punk’s Not Dead. His weirdgame became a flashpoint. Despite being for aNintendo console, it was as alienating, hyperviolent,and hypersexualized as anything from theItalian exploitation films of the 1970s. It had allthe technical abstraction and mythological sensibilitiesof early survival horror. And it was an onrailsshooter.Suda51’s Killer7 dreamt big. It framed its conflictsin no uncertain terms; the shooting gallery was
a game of chess at the end of time with gods asplayers, the targets (and, ultimately, the shooter)nothing less than global conspirators and avatarsof Death. But it still had time for charming characterslike a severed head and a grenadier luchador.The size of those dreams was seen, by the fandom,through a glass darkly; the developers’ ambitionwas not a feature or a narrative choice, but the architectureof the whole project. Killer7, a game obsessedwith conspiracy theories, became a thingto be decoded, a text in a Dan Brown novel. Fueledin part by the language barrier between Americanfans and the Japanese developer, auxiliary materialquickly became fetish objects for the dedicatedfandom. Of these, a supplement to Killer7 quicklygained prominence. The first half of its subtitlematched a phrase from machine-translated interviewswith the developer, and a new three wordphrase was born: Kill the Past.Nearly a decade on, piecing togetherthe information availablein English on the Kill the Pastslogan is still not easy.It seems to have been a sort of thematic trilogyfrom Suda51’s time as an employee of HumanEntertainment. The games he directed there hadsomething vaguely like a shared world, but weremostly linked by way of a motif; the playable character,at some point, would have to kill somethingor someone from their past, in order to be able tomove on or—according to some fan translationsof an interview about the last game in the trilogy—more<strong>spec</strong>ifically, to fight the future.Killer7 was looped into this trilogy, despite it consistingof Moonlight Syndrome, The Silver Case, andFlower, Sun, and Rain, because the supplement,Hand in Killer 7: Kill the Past, Jump Over the Age appearedon the radar of a new American fandom.And because—more than Suda51’s more popular
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