Chainsaws have a way of getting under your skin, particularly in that awful moment before they bite through to the bone. The lumberjack’s best friend is an enduring horror staple, and games offer no respite from its capacity to mangle flesh like a dog chewing up its owner’s unattended shoes, its juddering roar masking its victim’s futile screams.

A chainsaw’s thrashing engine and serrated teeth are an unstoppable tool in your hands—and your very worst nightmare in another’s. You may hear its signature sputtering motor coming, but that’s small comfort as its bearer turns doors and barricades to splinters.

With luck, you can read this brief, bloody history of videogame chainsaws unperturbed by its notorious snarl.
 

Doom’s Eager Beaver

Few games had a bigger impact than the original Doom, and its chainsaw’s appeal survived the decades intact—even if its countless victims didn’t. The model for Doom’s legendary melee weapon was id Software designer Tom Hall’s Eager Beaver chainsaw, and it deserves its place in gaming history given the debt subsequent chainsaws owe to it, from Resident Evil 4 to Lollipop Chainsaw and beyond.

Getting up close and personal in the OG FPS to rip and tear a pixelated Imp, Pinkie, or Zombieman into a cloud of rectangular blood particles has lost none of its exhilarating charm. Doomguy’s lightning-fast movement takes you into close quarters with ease. Your victims stagger helplessly with each blow until their inevitable demise.

Later games throttled your chainsaw engine with the introduction of gas canister ammo, but in Doom and Doom II it’s the best, brutal way to conserve ammo. Unshowy but effective with its economic animation, you don’t swing—you simply walk into demons and watch those rapidly cycling blades do the rest.

By Doom III (among many other changes to the evolving series) the chainsaw was now the game’s most powerful melee weapon. One problem: The Demons finally caught on. The relentless Sawyer zombies will rush you down in claustrophobic corridors carrying their own chainsaws—but they’re simply the harbinger of greater terrors to come.

Chainsaws and zombicide in Killing Floor 2

Something about zombies and chainsaws just works. Their desperate, mindless swarm towards the living makes slashing their rotting flesh apart as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

Tripwire Interactive’s Killing Floor 2 throws wave after wave of horror’s favorite punching bag at players to test their teamwork, firearm, and butchery skills to their very limit. These mutant Zeds take many distinct forms, yet few are as intimidating as the Scrake, a hulking monstrosity who turns the chainsaw against you, swinging its impeccable choice of weapon with inescapable swipes. Face one alone and you’ll be sorely pressed to survive. Things get even worse if you’re crowded by lesser Zeds and see a Scrake loom into view—it’s time to clear an escape route.

If you haven’t learned already, best not to anger anyone with a chainsaw, let alone a feral biomutant. Trigger a Scrake’s rage by taking it down to half HP without backup and you’ll receive a fatal lesson in patience as it rushes you down. If you decide to face one, make sure your firepower is up to the task—combined arms is key, or a single well-placed rocket. If you encounter multiple at once? Well, it was nice knowing you.

You might just stand a chance playing the Berserker class. These brave but foolhardy fighters go toe to toe with Scrakes, evading or parrying each mighty blow with their choice of melee weapon. Regretfully, you can’t clash blades in a chainsaw duel—maybe an idea for Killing Floor 3, Tripwire?—but the flexible Eviscerator buzzsaw gun is a capable substitute. For all the old-fashioned utility possessed by your standard chainsaw, the Eviscerator scores points for shooting jagged saw blades as bouncing projectiles that sever Zed torsos from their hips.
 

Leg it in Turbo Overkill

Apogee follows in Doom’s bloody footsteps with Turbo Overkill, a blistering boomer shooter set in a neon drenched cyberpunk world. The nonstop manic action of yesteryear’s FPS combines with a garish, maximalist ethos, resulting in a relentless good time.

There’s guns aplenty—the S in FPS stands for shooter and not shredder after all. But Turbo Overkill would fall apart without the chainsaw. Quite literally, as your character has a most peculiar cybernetic implant: a chainsaw leg.

It’s an overdue innovation in gaming. Why limit yourself to a weapon per arm when a foot can easily be swapped out for an additional armament? This inventive touch is deployed not with a kick but a full-body slide. Enemies vanish in a puff of gore and a satisfying squelch as you whir through their innards like an industrial meat processing factory.

The mechanic’s ripe for abuse, and Apogee gives players every encouragement to do so. Turbo Overkill's levels are littered with generously placed ramps, half-pipes, and ledges to help players slide to lethal velocity like Tony Hawk on a murder rampage. You blow through enemy after enemy like watermelons exploding into mush. Don’t worry about momentum, just hold down the slide button for a never-ending charge—at least until you slam into a wall.

Later in the game, you even acquire the Holy Trinity: Chainsaw arms help you ascend to a higher form, a triple-chainsaw-wielding delight. Heaven help anybody who dares get in the way of your whirling blades—or tries to squeeze past in a narrow corridor.
 

Meet a true Sadist in The Evil Within

The chainsaw is merely one of the many blades The Evil Within’s Sadist mastered—as players discover early on when they awake in his horrific lair, swinging from a butcher’s hook and staring at another body with a hunting knife lodged in its chest.

Unlike Shinji Mikami’s previous Chainsaw Man—Resident Evil 4’s deranged maniac in a burlap mask—The Evil Within’s memorable early-game boss prefers a methodical approach to butchering humans, arriving dressed in a butcher’s apron and with shoes carefully swaddled in waterproofs.

Many chainsaw wielders rely on their weapon to do the work for them, needing just one of their wildly arcing swings to connect. This artiste employs considered lunges instead, aimed to land exactly where it hurts most. Get caught early on and he’ll savor severing Sebastien’s head from his shoulders. In your wounded state, you don’t stand a chance—unless you’re particularly lucky (and skillful) with the puny knife left to you.

When you face the Sadist later on, mostly healed from his barbaric torture and far better armed, you stand a fighting chance. Just stay clear of those bear traps if you hope to survive to play The Evil Within 2, or that chainsaw will be the last thing you see as you struggle helplessly against the trap’s iron jaws.
 

Ash William’s trusty Homelite XL-12

When I—or pretty much any Sam Raimi fan—think chainsaws, I think of Ash Williams from the eternally groovy Evil Dead series. After Texas Chainsaw Massacre captured the sadistic horrors of the chainsaw with devastating effect in the ‘70s, the Evil Dead's comedy-horror delighted in the guiltless thrill of hacking through swathes of undead limbs and torsos.

In Evil Dead: The Game, you can recreate an ‘80s slasher bloodbath with Ash’s infamous Homelite XL-12. Bruce Campbell’s character memorably wielded this chainsaw—available from your local hardware store, at least in 1987—with wide-eyed manic glee. You can sport a grin just as manic as Bruce Campbell’s when you play as Ash in Saber Interactive’s asymmetric Deadite-slaying battle royale.

Evil Dead: The Game’s singleplayer opening chapter, “If You Love Someone, Set Them Free…With a Chainsaw',' gives fans and newcomers alike a crash course in murderous chainsaw-wielding techniques. You’ll slice-and-dice Deadites while climbing the ladder of progressively rarer (and more devastating) chainsaws, shredding undead insides into a puree beyond the faintest possibility of demonic resurrection.

With chainsaw in-hand (or grafted onto Ash’s arm after an unfortunate possession incident), you can tear through the Demon player’s Army of Darkness. The game even lets you play as an army of chainsaw-toting Bruce Campbells—just how Sam Raimi would have wanted it.

And so we come to the end of this brief, bloody history of the chainsaw and its diesel-fueled depravity. No matter who wields it, the chainsaw’s fearsome reign is set to continue for decades to come. Hail to the king, baby!