Satanic Video Games

Let's just start from the top, shall we? In 1993, id Software released Doom onto an unsuspecting home computer market, and Satan would never be the same. The company's previous title, Wolfenstein 3D, was set in Nazi Germany and seemed fairly staid next to the over-the-top demonic mayhem of Doom. This game had pentagrams and goat heads everywhere, swarms of hell-spawned creatures and pumping heavy metal music (or at least MIDI equivalents of same). It was like a Judas Priest album given polygonal life.

Hell is a popular location for video games, but few captured the pit of human misery quite like Dante's Inferno. Loosely based on the epic poem by Dante Alighieri, the title cast players as a Templar knight venturing to the very bottom of Hell to recapture the soul of his beloved Beatrice. After smashing your way through legions of the damned and confronting Dante's most hidden sins, you face off against Lucifer himself in the very depths of Hell. You'll have a hard time finding a game as steeped in Satan as this one.

All of the Shin Megami Tensei games are heavily steeped in the occult, but PS2 classic Nocturne might be the most balls-out satanic of them all. The intensely-hard dungeon crawler not only gives you the ability to summon and command a vast array of demons and mythological figures (including satanic fiends Beelzebub, Abbadon and Mot), but it also features some of the most horrifically Hellish environments in RPG history, both aesthetically and gameplay-wise.

In most of these games, Satan is the bad guy, which makes sense, really. So, let's throw a curveball into the mix with Tecmo's Deception, released for the PlayStation in 1996. In this game, you play a dude who was executed for a crime he didn't commit. In your last moments of life, you cry out to Satan to save you, so he revives you and gives you a horrifying task: hang out in this weird castle and set gruesome traps to kill everybody that comes in. The best part? You do it!