The Strange Urban Legend About Golden Axe and Death Row Inmates
At the top of this post, I should tell you that I was not able to find the source of the rumor I’m writing about today. Regardless, I think I can convince you that this one is quite likely not true. In fact, there’s a much more interesting true story happening here, urban legend gruesomeness notwithstanding, and it involves the action movie hits of the 1980s.
The previous post on this blog, about the Duck Hunt dog possibly being named Mr. Peepers, received some interesting comments, and while I intend to follow each of them up with their own post, I’m choosing to start with a very bonkers one about the 1989 Sega arcade hit Golden Axe. Apparently, there is a widely circulated rumor that the digitized voices of the three hero characters were apparently recorded by inmates on death row. That’s it. You may have just read that and instantly decided that it seems like it’s probably bullshit. If so, congrats! We are of similar minds on this one. However, if you read that and thought, “Wow! That’s an interesting video game fact! I’m going to share it immediately, without researching it at all,” then you’re a lot like the many, many people who did exactly this in the early 2010s.
It’s actually quite easy to find proof of this rumor online today, and a simple search will turn it up on this podcast and this Medium post and this Quora discussion and this high school newspaper article and this Tumblr and this Tweet and this Tweet and actually way too many Tweets that were posted recently and on this playthrough, where they at least acknowledge that the story in question is only alleged and not at all proven. It comes up on the discussion page for the entry for Golden Axe on Wikipedia, where someone is just utterly perplexed as to why this thing that is understood by all to be true is somehow not mentioned in the text at all. Clearly, the rumor had quite the life online. Looking around, it seems like it wasn’t something anyone was saying anything about before 2011, at which point it spread like a skin rash. (The earliest evidence I could find of it was a 2011 Facebook post by Norman Caruso, a.k.a. The Gaming Historian, who at least has the good sense to express doubt that it’s actually real.) Some versions of it state that all the voice acting in the game comes from prisoners. Others state that it’s only the heroes, sometimes with the oddly specific note that the voice of the axe-slinging dwarf, Gilius Thunderhead, specifically came from a criminal known as The Bloodaliser — and yes, spelled that way, British-style, even when it’s sometimes also stated that the alleged prisoners are supposed to be American.
While I don’t actually know who started this rumor, I suppose on a basic, lizard brain level, I can understand the urge to propagate this one. Most urban legends are lurid and horrifying in the way they reveal a hidden aspect about a thing that otherwise feels familiar. And Golden Axe already sported more blood and skeletons than we were used to seeing in a pizza parlor back in the 1990s, so the salaciousness of this alleged backstory — deviant criminals! capital punishment! non-union voice acting! — makes it seem like even more of a proverbial razor blade in a candy apple. That said, the story isn’t so good as to override my basic brain function, and I say anyone capable of a moderate level of critical thinking should be able to decide that this one seems pretty clearly made up in about two seconds.
But let’s humor the believers for a moment. To think that this one is true, you would have to accept all of the following:
Sega, a company based in Japan, decided the easiest way to get low-quality groans and grunts for characters in their video game would be to use recordings of condemned inmates from the U.S.
And also this happened when video game companies weren’t spending much money on voice acting, because the technology of the time meant that all digitized voice clips kind of sounded like dogshit anyway.
Also, either the prison recorded the inmates making sounds of pain — for profit? in case anyone wanted them? — or Sega sent a recording crew to a prison with a death row to obtain them.
Doing this would have necessitated a trip overseas, even though Japan has its own death row, and also the groans heard in the game don’t sound like any one language in particular — save for one, which I’ll talk about later.
This was unknown to the world of gaming or, I guess, prison labor until 2011 or so, for no apparent reason, until someone apparently leaked it without proof.
And the nickname of the guy who voiced Gilius Thunderhead was the Bloodaliser, even though an American would spell it Bloodalizer, and that’s a stupid name for a criminal anyway.
Also, it’s not stated specifically in any of the versions I heard, but it seems like it’s implied that the sounds heard in the game come from the ones the criminals make as they were executed. Why else make the specification that the sounds came from death row inmates? Unless this is a made-up story and the person making it up is just throwing in details for maximum shock value.
So yeah, I don’t think this one holds up. I can’t prove that it’s wrong, exactly, and I can’t pinpoint where it started. But I don’t think this is a story anyone should believe, despite the fact that a lot of people did and apparently still do.
Here’s the extra weird part: There is a much better and more believable story for how Sega got a lot of the audio samples used in Golden Axe. Much in the way that many, many, many fighting game characters were drawn from pop culture, sometimes in ways that cross the line from homage to blatant ripoff, some if not all of the voice samples in Golden Axe were just taken from Hollywood movies.
For example, two of them come from 1982’s Conan the Barbarian. The scream heard from the Bad Brothers, the big, bald, hammer-wielding twins, comes from Thorgrim, the villain played by Sven-Ole Thorsen, when he gets impaled by Conan’s trap. And the shriek heard when you kill the skeleton warriors comes from the priest character whom Conan knocks out in order to steal his vestments and infiltrate the cult.
And while the Conan connection makes sense, seeing as how the movie and the associated literature inspired the “sword and sandal” vibe of Golden Axe, at least two other screams come from a non-medieval movie from 1989: First Blood, which kicked off the Rambo franchise. The scream of the male villager as he’s harassed by the enemy soldiers comes from the scene in which Galt, the sniper deputy played by Jack Starrett, falls out of his helicopter. And the death cry of Heninger, the generic, mace-wielding enemy, comes from the “oh my god” screams of Rogers, the deputy played by David Caruso. And you have to wonder if David Caruso ever had the chance to hear himself coming from a Golden Axe cabinet back in the day and wonder “Is that me?” and also “Did I get paid for this?”
That’s only four of the game’s many sound effects, however. There’s a lot more grunts, groans and screams, as evidenced by the sound effects collection featured below.
Because Sega “borrowed” from movies for the four samples we’ve been able to source so far, it’s very possible the rest were also procured in this way. The woman screaming around the 31-second mark, for example, is ringing a bell with me but I can’t place it. I really think it was taken from something else, because listening to it in the video you can hear that there’s some sort of background chatter that was captured along with it.
Myself, I’m not the best at recognizing sounds out of context like this, but I think the next time I’m watching an action movie from around this time, I’m going to listen especially closely to any kind of Golden Axe-sounding noises that characters are making in scenes where there’s no musical score playing at the same time. That’s one of the rules, apparently, that the clip has to be more or less “clean” — or at least clean enough that you wouldn’t hear any background while the Golden Axe music is playing. For example, around the 44-second mark in the voice sample collection video, when it’s David Caruso’s “oh my god” cry, you can hear what sounds like helicopter noise in the background, but I’d suppose that would be drowned out in the actual gameplay by the stage music.
So… does anyone recognize any of these? It would be really cool to source the rest. On the other hand, if you’d rather try to find proof of the death row inmate story… well, I wish you good luck — not with this specific task but with life in general.
Miscellaneous Notes
The trend continues into the sequel, Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder, in which a clip of Grace Jones in Conan the Conqueror seems to have been associated with the giantess boss from the first level.
Weirdly enough, many of the other voice samples from Revenge of Death Adder seem to come from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, per this video.
For the record, the David Caruso clip is the only instance of a Golden Axe voice sample where it sounds like English, though I’m not sure I necessarily heard the voice sample as saying “oh my god” until now. But if the person who made up the death row story heard that clip as saying “oh my god,” then that might explain the detail about the inmates being American instead of coming from Japan, where Sega is based. (The United Kingdom, for what it’s worth, suspended capital punishment in 1965.) I really do think the person who came up with this story is not an American, however, because no American would spell the alleged serial killer name Bloodaliser. They’d spell it Bloodalizer. So yeah, based on that, I’m pretty sure the creator of this stupid story came from an English-speaking country that is not the United States.
Funnily enough, there is recurring enemy character named Longmoan (ロングモーン or Rongumōn), but the name has no relation to the death screams for which the series is famous. Instead, it would seem to be a corruption of the name of the Scottish whiskey distillery Longmorn. As I point out in the previous Golden Axe piece, which also about the weird equals signs you see in the character names in attract mode, most of the enemies in the game are named after alcohol.
The idea of the Golden Axe screams coming from death row prisoners, possibly as they’re being executed, is very reminiscent of a similar urban legend about the 1975 song “Love Rollercoaster” by The Ohio Players. It’s not true, per Snopes. Appropriately enough, I learned about this one by watching the movie Urban Legend.
I thought it would be worth mentioning that there is the odd occasion when something has the unmistakable stench of bullshit but nonetheless turns out to be true. While watching the 1982 movie Poltergeist in college, a friend told me that the skeletons appearing in the “swimming pool” scene were actually real human ones and not prop fakes. I immediately dismissed this as not seeming plausible at all, and still felt that way even when JoBeth Williams, who plays the mom in that movie and who is the featured (living) performer in that scene, shared in an interview that she presumed the skeletons were fake, only to be told after the fact that they were real. I guess I thought someone on the set was just pulling her leg or something, but it would seem to be the case that they really did use at least real human ones — again, per Snopes. It’s not stated in the linked article, but this write-up on Screen Rant explains that it was cheaper to use real human skeletons, like the ones you see in science classrooms, than it was to use plastic mock-ups. Only when people perfected the craft plastic ones that read as real-enough on camera did Hollywood opt for those instead of real, live dead people. This still blows my mind — and I suppose it’s a worthwhile lesson that sometimes something can seem incredible in the literal sense but still turn out to be true. That said, I will eat my hat if the Golden Axe death row story turns out to be anything other than a sloppy, juvenile invention.
Finally, I will leave you with this scene from Conan the Barbarian, which features Arnold Schwarzenegger wearing leather underwear and tussling homoerotically while he makes his signature weird noises. None of them ended up in Golden Axe, I don’t think, because the entire scene is scored, but it’s really a shame because any of them would have sounded great in that game.
I am a child of the 80s, it’s true, but I could listen to this man make his Teutonic-accented gibberish syllables all day.