Oaktaro

Chris Redfield has the same basic silhouette in RE5 as he does in RE1. His default RE5 outfit is nearly a recolor of his default Director’s Cut Arrange gear. Even the pose on the cover of RE5 is his manual pose from the original game, showing off his muscular arms. His facial features then come from his 2002 remake redesign, like his mysterious forehead scar or his outward ears, essentially unifying the two designs. Many didn’t like Redfield returning to being beefy. This was probably a combination of the camera being too close in the original versions of RE5 (making him take up too much of the screen) and people just being used to the 2002 redesign, especially if they spend more time with that remake than the original game. I liked Chris returning to his original body shape because it not only created contrast between him and Leon, but Chris Redfield’s thick silhouette was always his most defining physical characteristic to me in RE1, and I don’t seem to be alone.

1990s Chris Designs

That body shape was not in his concept or manual art. It wasn’t there when you bought an action figure of Chris because the toy manufacturer were likely sent the same art from the manual as the blueprint of what the character looked like, and yet when he returned in the Dualshock Version of RE2, where characters were substantially more detailed than RE1, they took that blueprint of his manual art, sporting saturated hair, a crusoe green flak jacket as opposed to the more El Paso green it was in-game. They also added the bulk of his RE1 model. They made a new unified design that was both more faithful to the manual art’s color scheme, while adding the defining trait of seeing Chris in-game. He also seemed to have this bulk and arms in the scrapped scenes of them returning from RE1 in Nemesis, so it seems like the concept art was no longer the sole blueprint of what Chris Redfield looked like. In the 90s games, it was also the muscular body his in-game model ended up having in the final product.

Early 2000’s Chris Designs

Chris has always had a bulky body, except for his Code Veronica and 2002 redesigns. Now, why did only those 2 incarnations of him lack the big body? Were they not privy to RE2 and Nemesis’s decision and went back to the manual art as the sole blueprint? Was it a compromise to how they approached motion capture and animation, limited to a lean actor’s data to work off of? Either way, it recreated the division of the 1996 game.

Working With Inconsistent Source Material

If you were to ask someone what Chris Redfield looked like in the original 1996 RE1, they might give you 4 different answers. His in-game model, the US cover, his manual art, or the live-action actor that was apparently chosen after the in-game model was already finalized, because the actor had the closest hair to the character in his headshot. You also see a body shot of Chris in a pre-rendered CG cutscene, where he seems to have a unique, yet still segmented model, but nobody ever gets attached to that.

This brings up a question I find myself asking across different games. Which of these varying designs is what the character looks like when you have to put them back in a sequel? Does Misty from GTA3 have a beauty mark? Not when depicted in GTA Online. Does Laila from War of the Dead have green hair or brown? In the sequel and remake, it remains green in-game and brown on the covers. Do you picture Regina to be Asian, as she was in Dino Crisis 1, or the more Caucasian look she sported in Dino Crisis 2, which ironically resembled a different Asian look she had in Japanese magazines leading up to the first game? That is a conundrum for whoever depicts her next.

Which variation of a character saves in my head as their appearance varies by game. When it comes to Regina, to me it’s her Asian appearance in the pre-rendered cutscenes of DC1/its US cover. For Chris, it’s his in-game model, and most of the cutscenes in RE1 are in-game, using that model. That being said, Final Fantasy 1 doesn’t look like anything in-game in my head. It looks like Amano’s art of the game. The protagonist’s defining horned helmet, which denotes him to this day, was only in that art and not in the actual in-game graphics. The importance of packaging art was to teach you what to fill in on ambiguous graphics, but the standard of in-game graphics has risen to the point that they’re quite defined visuals. 1996 RE1 characters aren’t ambiguous 1970s sprites. They have details down to the limbal rings around their irises within their eyes! Individual hair strands dropped over Rebecca’s forehead; Chris’s modeled fingers change based on what he has in his hands at all times. As you can imagine, this calls into question the packaging art’s authority over the in-game graphics and was already a discrepancy by the 1980s, like Mega Man’s US box art.

Photorealistic Characters That Lack Hard Rules

People have always ignored cabinet art to paint their own stories onto in-game graphics, but I’ve always wondered what is the character sheet to what some of these characters look like when you have to bring them back for sequels. It often seems like there is none. It always stuck in my head that someone said the painted movie poster for Indiana Jones looks more like the characters than the actors themselves. In their mind, the character of Indiana Jones was a concept of a man whose spirit they felt that painting better depicted than the live-action footage.

I can see the same with video game characters where they are trying to capture the spirit of a character, and I hate that idea. I hate that photorealistic characters in video games aren’t more often held to strict rules of canon facial structure like cartoon mascots are. That they’re not taking advantage of the ability to mold polygonal faces into a unique one. Imagine building care for the cast of a TV show when every character is recast each season. A great example is people’s reaction to Peter Parker and Mary Jane’s faces changing in Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2. Suddenly having new faces was like being introduced to new characters instead of feeling like returning characters, players had the previous adventure with. Recasting in live action is a direct hindrance to audiences building a relationship with a character, and there’s no reason for polygonal models to suffer from that. Even with modern techniques of photogrammetry.

Take, for example, when Resident Evil tried to make Geordie Dandy the new face of Chris, despite him looking less like Chris than perhaps any live-action actor to ever portray the character before. It didn’t even last 2 games because the feedback was that of so much confusion and negativity that for RE8, they put in the work to make a model, still using Geordie Dandy’s photogrammetry, look more like Chris Redfield than it does Geordie Dandy. In retrospect, I’m surprised Chris is when Resident Evil pushed it too far, while I remember no sizable backlash when Amra Silajdzic replaced Julia Voth as Jill Valentine’s model.

Locations Are Returning Characters

If I had the opportunity to take you back to your childhood home but redesigned it with new wallpapers, furniture, and details that I think make it look cooler, it would take away from the impact of getting to see a familiar location again. In video games, it also takes away the cool comparison point of seeing the same location depicted across different technological leaps. Unique to horror, however, you might want a dash of off. You might want to keep an edge of unfamiliarity without pushing it so far that it doesn’t feel like a returning location in the same way that redesigning a returning human character too much will make them feel like a different character. To me, the 2 Resident Evil Outbreaks for the PS2 are perfect examples of good redesigns to familiar locations like the RPD precinct, while Operation Raccoon City is an example of redesigning most locations so much that they don’t feel like the same locations anymore.

The Benefit of Consistency

The problem with designing a character by the vague idea of capturing the character’s spirit is that everyone will subjectively have different interpretations of a character’s energy…and how is that also affected across character developments and localization changes, like the infamous case of how Claire’s different lines between the English and Japanese versions of Revelations 2 can give the same viewer a different interpretation of who she’s become? Maybe Chris just tried colored contacts for a while, but I didn’t even like RE5 changing his eye color to brown. The reason his eyes being blue in the original trilogy was relevant was because it represented his familial connection to Claire.

I get that Claire not being part of RE5’s story made Chris’s eye color an unimportant detail when designing him, but I wish that eye color was as consistent as the arguably less important forehead scar because that familial connection to Claire is silent worldbuilding in the same way that Leon kept the scar Krauser gave him in RE4. Even in games where Krauser is never mentioned, that scar is a monument, memorial, and remembrance of the adventure of RE4. In the same way, the Redfields’ blue eyes are not just reminders of how they were used in relation to the Ashfords in Code Veronica but are also reminders of each other’s existences and their shared backstory in games where each other is absent.

This also helps new writing. Out of context, people can draw all kinds of assumptions about Chris describing that he wouldn’t necessarily rather be back in America than Africa because not everyone is built for the pressure of America’s capitalism, but within the context that he’s repeatedly lived as a drifter, the promotional material for RE1 introducing him as an orphan before RE2 added the detail of him also having a little sister to raise, his ID cards being more scuffed in the character select because his whole life, as Leon correctly speculates in RE2, Chris is a disorganized mess… with serving in law enforcement being what gives him an escape to structure and community, it ALL frames anything you write for the character. (Also, Sheva kinda put him on the spot, asking that question in front of everyone. Like, what is he supposed to say?)

In the spring of 2017, I discovered a horror game that left a big enough impression that it's lived in my thoughts ever since:

白と黒の伝説: 百鬼編 (Legend of White and Black: Hundred Demon Edition) – 1985 - MSX This game opens with foreboding music whose instrument I can never quite nail. The tone keeps rising like you're staring down a dark tunnel, feeling the vibration of an oncoming train, but it also sounds human, like religious humming in a grand hall. Then you hear a distinctly human wail that’s replayed in my head for many years. After a shot of the Earth where something lands, turning the atmosphere a blood red, you're shown a monologue of how as humans grew in quality of life, they had less need to interface with the spiritual, causing spirituality to slowly be forgotten, posing the question of what if we left behind some things that had merit as we instead grew distracted by what some might call equally nonsensical material focuses. As human desires grew, they eventually grew to godhood, which was not taken well by gods who considered erasing humans. It states that what you're about to experience is an excerpt from a book too vast to fit in your computer, The Legend of White and Black.

Sound Design After a room at a hospital catches fire, you're here to investigate the aftermath. The score for the hospital is a great example of subconsciously building anxiety for unsuspecting players, on what might come, with its quick low-tone notes evoking different things in people, from a clock tick to increased heart beat or even approaching footsteps, all accompanied by stretched-out soft tones in the background with no distinct start and end points between notes. To me this is like how the sounds in crowded surroundings can blend together into indiscernible white noise. This can subtly evoke a sense of feeling overwhelmed as a player tries to focus on the more immediate and powerful low notes in the foreground. The game released on two tapes with a third music cassette to play to set a mood of higher sound quality, which resulted in an experience I found quite impactful and surprisingly doesn't feel derailing either. Since the game itself is slow-paced and menu-based, the music tape didn't feel too disconnected from the game, giving me a feeling of a reporter managing their own tape recorder. There was a game called Deus Ex Machina for the ZX Spectrum the previous year that also did this, and I was not into that game's use of it, which I felt overused voice acting and generally lacked restraint in its audio design, so I praise Legend of White and Black not being overzealous in that regard. Because of this, though, whether you’re going physical or digital, you must pay attention to whether a seller is including the music or not, as it was not baked into the game.

Loading The other thing you may not be accustomed to is that everywhere you look has a mix of loading out what you were currently looking at and loading in what you are now looking at in the typical style of watching a speed drawing. Every single direction you look takes quite a bit of loading. It's this loading that really made me appreciate and think about the details of all these shots, but since everywhere you look has quite the amount of long loading, you can see it getting annoying, and there is something to say about having to notice details from the finished image instead of the drawing process bringing those details to your eye.

Story Either way, this investigation's writing is what sparked intrigue in me, as the patient of the room that was ablaze is not there but is spotted afoot. The city feels vast and lived in yet focused on the parts your life takes place in. Work, home, routine hangout spot, but this doesn’t remain the explorable world. Eventually, you're told to meet at the train station, where things really start going haywire as the sky grows red and you realize the train is far from the route you expected. The lighting in this scene is so well done, simulating that effect of your brain creating scary images of people's faces when trying to decipher them in low lighting. Here, you're informed by the crew you met with why the cover of the game has, in parentheses, "hundred demon edition." In real-life folklore, a hundred demon night line (as in conga line), often localized in English as a spirit parade, is a trope where a massive horde of demons all enter people at once in a coordinated attack that I've seen used to explain why riots happen, and you guys are going to have to prevent what could be one so massive it brings destruction you don't want to imagine. This is a cool concept, but what follows is actually where the game begins to lose me, as wandering around the demon world with a party, learning the lore and confused about progression showed me the true face of this game being an environmental puzzle game in a typical fantasy dungeon. I was honestly more invested in the more grounded hospital mystery that ended up just being there to introduce you to the patient. Speaking of which, this patient is actually an ancient being so powerful that he rips the cave apart, leaving you in a vast sand pit! Watch out for stalactites. Here there are pillars with doors on them, allowing you to finally taste the relief of escape, though you see a woman, bathed in light, essentially telling you to put some pep in your step when it comes to stopping the night line. Finally out, the natural outdoor color palette is quite a visual treat and calming tonal reset to hit you with the contrast of what is after… as this is where you can start seeing the real impact on our world. The idea of returning to your apartment and trying to finally get some sleep while mass fires and riots are happening outside really hammers a sense of this not being something you can wash your hands of before it's taken care of, so you try your best to make it through the final demon-filled trek to perform the ritual at the temple to repel the night parade! I can see the potential in this for the following and sequels it spawned. While I'm not a big fan of environmental puzzle games, the visuals, audio, and story made me invested in a type of game whose gameplay fails to amuse me. This is also helped by the story feeling free of unnecessary filler in a game that’s roughly an hour long with 3 levels. A kind of short, sweet game that would honestly be foolish to make in a marketplace with Steam’s refund policy.

Now get ready because we're going back to Bermuda!

白と黒の伝説: 輪廻転生編(Legend of White and Black: Reincarnation Edition) – 1986 - MSX The sequel opens up with a detailed timeline of events from the perspectives of multiple nations, which for me sets the tone of this game not just being about globetrotting but a somewhat omnipresent element to it as you travel back and forth through time around the globe, starting with Bermuda, which serves as a calm but unnerving introduction to get your bearings. With everyone disappearing in the area, you’re no exception as you find yourself in Atlantis, but perhaps for a reason, as the story revolves around you trying to interface with a chamber via using your power to animus back and forth between Atlantis, the 1429 Siege of Orléans, and the 1615 Siege of Osaka. Despite you primarily focusing on a new area when finding it, you end up having to jump back and forth to finish them all, which made the game feel like one massive puzzle dungeon, which is how the game was advertised, and to me it does make a satisfying grand finale of everything you've done finally all falling into place at once in a game that can take slightly longer than the first. I saw a review mark this game down for being too short with too much loading, which is very easy to see, but I would give it a 3 out of 5 for different reasons. While the first game's visuals and music kept me interested in gameplay that was not for me, the sequel's main offering is progressing that gameplay while being not nearly as visually appealing to me. Though on paper these settings are interesting, and I find mucking around in historical events amusing, I just don’t find they were as well executed in art direction outside of the cool overhead shot when indoors in Osaka. The soundtrack, on the other hand, is as top-notch, if not even better than, the first game's overall soundtrack, including the environmental ambiance feeling more in the foreground to me. The ambiance in the third game’s soundtrack might hit you even harder.

白と黒の伝説: アスカ編(Legend of White and Black: ASKA Edition) - 1987 - MSX By 199X, the earth has been ravaged. The governments have failed. The food is scarce, and the temperature is more than halfway to boiling point during the day before almost that many degrees below freezing point by night. You might be humanity's last hope, as you're going to attempt to journey to the temple in desperation of being able to do anything. This is the Legend of White and Black: ASKA. The first time I went through the second game, I was worried that nothing in the series would live up to the awe of the first game's introduction, but I honestly think this game does it from its visuals to writing to music. This one delves far further into the dire situation you only got a taste of at the end of the first game. Things have been pushed to such a tipping point and yet do so with such a style that make it feel like quite the fun horror adventure, as this time you get to go back millions of years ago, getting to know people, traveling to a variety of locations, and facing twists and turns of a world that is essentially what you were trying to avoid ever happening in the first game, and by the way, the loading is much faster. The Legend of White and Black: ASKA is true to closing the trilogy with a new adventure evocative of all that made the horror and intrigue of that trilogy while stressing a beauty to the humanity that's worth saving from deletion

but you can’t have a good closed trilogy without trying to revive it.

白と黒の伝説シリーズ: 超強力なアドベンチャーゲーム(上巻 ): DESTRUCTION (Legend of White and Black Series: Super Powered Adventure Game (Volume 1): DESTRUCTION – 1989 - PC88 You’d think this is what I wanted from the first game. It’s mostly investigating in a visually mundane city that has a few interesting shots, but it is nothing on the level I found the original trilogy to be. The story feels like it’s trying to serve the purpose of the first level of the first game, where you investigate around a city, being introduced to the lore, and setting you and your party up to enter the first-person dungeon world in Volume 2 that is essentially the second level and ending encounter of the first game. I want to stress that I love grounded, city-set stories, but most of the visuals in this game are honestly boring to me with what I found to be unnecessarily drawn-out writing, so while I don't turn a blind eye to the moments the game shines, it’s definitely not what made the original trilogy stand out instead of blend in. Blending, however, might be what makes people love this game so much. They could be fans of this specific style and having no association with the original MSX trilogy and their audio experience; this was just more of the kind of PC-88 games they love. For me, though, each of these volumes being so much longer than the entirety of the first game made the points they shine feel too spread out.

白と黒の伝説シリーズ: 超強力なアドベンチャーゲーム(下巻 ): DESTRUCTION (Legend of White and Black Series: Super Powered Adventure Game (Volume 2): DESTRUCTION – 1990 - PC88 Volume 2 kind of surprised me, and not just because it’s the same box as the first volume with “volume 2” taped over the “volume 1” on the cover and spine but also because it felt oddly refreshing to be in such an abstract location. While gripes about volume 1 all apply to this game as well, I do like your party, and being in this dangerous location talking among each other is what I felt the first game should have played more into. This is purely that level, then briefly going back to the regular world to have a version of the final confrontation from the original game; it’s not illustrated. It’s just a shot of rubble that changes filters as text describes the final fight, which makes the whole experience feel cheap in a non-charming way to me. There's often a greater frustration to seeing squandered potential than there is to seeing a game you saw no potential in at all. I know when it comes to video games, sometimes, I'd rather have nothing than something disappointing. Don’t want to get your hopes up, ya know?

The APF MP1000 is not a second-gen console that’s often remembered. Alongside its predecessor, they can come off as uninnovative attempts to cash in on the video game market without particularly unique experiences to offer. I always had an affinity for the serial numbers of their games starting with MG. Makes ‘em sound like weapons. The 1978 MG-1010 is a multicart but more an example of reskins. Do you want a sea monster version of this game or a sci-fi version? At least it functions well enough.

Nightmare Park – 1980 - PET

I’ve a preference for real-time gameplay, and games with that test cursor style movement, like Nightmare Park, can paint a picture that pacing and frame consistency are more important to me than frame rate, though of course this also works with the visuals to create a feel. For example, in this game, you take on a sadistic amusement park whose rides consist of things like surviving a rhinoceros stampede or…trying to get to a flag in a live minefield or with dogs sicked on you in the C64 remake, and you want to know something? The essentially 1-frame-per-second movement isn’t a problem in these real-time movement-based games when it’s so consistent and with visuals that work well with the easy-to-learn pace of these games.

John and Patty Bell’s Games

Nightmare Park is comparatively lightening fast compare to what John and Patty Bell were doing the same year with games like House of Usher and Beneath the Pyramids. I think this couple’s games are great on paper but lack the speed that would make them palatable enough for my taste and going into their odd turn based action when finally faced with a grunt enemy doesn’t jive with the pacing for me. It just feels restrictive of my reflexes. Perhaps ironically this causes the more vast open environment games like Bermuda Experience or Crypt of the Undead to end up using simplicity to their advantage since their main meat was less the intimate encounters you find in an individual room and more exploring the world itself but I do love the complex when you achieve ease of use. Now onto the main event!

The Haunted Palace – 1982 – Apple II, Atari 800

This game is thought to be inspired by the song that Rodrick Usher sings in the original House of Usher story. This game also seems to be set in mid-to-late December, so by Die Hard rules, you might call it a holiday horror game. A first-person horror game that has an interesting movement scheme where up, down, right, and left only face you north, south, east, and west, respectively. You then press a separate button to move forward.

Story

Lord Edward Stuart is a multilingual Oxford graduate in his 50s with an intermittent heart condition. After his first wife’s suicide, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized for a year, but upon his recovery, he remarried and has been living in a palace for 10 years when he sent his wife away to Boston and wrote her a particularly alarming letter detailing how the housekeeping staff is down to a bare minimum as the rest have deserted. He doesn’t know how long his elderly butler of 40 years can handle the increased work. The maid has organized herself a schedule of endless cleaning, and their cat is missing. At night, the house seems alive. He hears the sounds of hurrying footsteps and whispering voices, but when he runs out into the hall, it's empty. Alongside a gardener and the head steward’s wife, the people he mentions in this letter alongside himself are the 6 playable characters of this game. Each with their own stats and even story advantages, like the elderly butler innately having access to more rooms than the endurance-filled teenage maid who starts with a knife, but what exactly has brought everything to this state? Well, months after sending his wife away, a charred body was found in the furnace, so burned it couldn’t be identified. 2 weeks later, Lord Edward discovers an old house plan in the library revealing rooms that were sealed up when reconstructing the mansion after a fire before he was born. Wondering if it was in one of these parts of the house, his miser grandfather’s unrecovered gold was, he tries to chip away at the mortar that night and writes:

Interestingly, no matter who you choose to play as, you begin the game outside, even needing a spare key from under a rock in the Apple II version, implying to me you vacated the palace and are now returning to face the horror!

Gameplay

The movement is quite sluggish and can quickly fall behind the speed of your inputs, causing you to wait for it to catch up to your keystrokes. There’s set points where you’ll encounter seconds-long loading, which I’m forgiving of, but I’m curious of the positions they’re set to, like in the middle of hallways instead of at particular doors. This door-dense palace can feel quite unnatural to navigate since the game sometimes teleports you around the room when you change which direction you’re facing, walking down a hallway in one direction will work, while walking down the same hallway in the other direction will teleport you to an entirely different part of the palace, and there’s no consistency to how close you should be to interact with anything. Of all the years of first-person games that came before this, I can’t think of any of them that had these shortcomings. There are dark areas where the Apple II version shows flashes as you move. It can be like lightning coming through the window if it were more random and not player controlled. The Atari version doesn’t show anything and doesn’t even seem to tell you when you’ve walked into a wall, making it much harder to find your way around, but there do seem to be less dark areas in the Atari version. The Atari version also requires the joystick, while the Apple II version seems to neglect joystick support. Despite the Atari version having a command list, both still have hotkeys like D to open a door and a text parser, which you use to pick up things in the Apple version, and it is quite picky about what you type. If you see a bloodstained scarf and type “get scarf,” it won’t work. You need to fully type out “get bloodstained scarf.” The Apple II version has enemies like ghouls and vampires to take on in turn-based combat that funnily measures your attack and armor based on everything in your inventory instead of having to equip things. If you have a spear and pick up a sword, it adds the damage output of both weapons together to make up your attack rating. There’s also what I’d call swarm-type enemies like rats, maggots, and spiders, where you just want to look for an opening to escape, as they can be overwhelmingly numerous, though it can feel a little silly to be locked in place by them crawling all over you instead of also having the player agency to try to charge out of a swarm of them when they’re already crawling all over your face. This is also where the Atari version is particularly curious because the weapons are in the game, but the palace is empty of enemies…outside of that secret room Lord Edward detailed in his diary. There you find the beast…and it’s uninteractable. The room is unfinished on both platforms. You can get the gold out of the “treasure Tupperware,” which results in nothing but a glitched textbox, and if you examine the Tupperware in the Atari version, it crashes the game. It is presumed this would have been the end of the game if they didn’t instead decide to sell it so unfinished for FIFTY 1982 US dollars! There is still a challenge to overcome, however. Can you solve the mystery of the story, which does not require you to beat the game to do? They offered the stereotypical Crystalware cash prize for that.

Graphics

When it comes to this game’s visuals, it’s nice to navigate the environment and see around, but I’m not sure how I feel about the enemies’ presentation. If this is the artist’s capability you’re working with, I’m not sure how I feel about what’s chosen to be shown versus told in this case. Graphical text games would draw the room or sometimes things you’re looking at without exactly drawing everything, allowing your mind to fill in quite a bit, and in this sense, ambiguity doesn’t necessarily mean undetailed. Even a game of actual photographs or videos can make excellent use of visual ambiguity by striking the right balance of how to present things. You, of course, also have games like Shark Attack directly depicting something people worry of clearly using its excellent cabinet art to exude that horror and teach what to fill in on its shark sprite, but it also doesn’t take much complexity to call upon some’s memory to fill in the blanks of horror from those memories. You might see how the insectophobic would feel about a game like Centipede. For me it’s the webs in Spiders reminding me more of rapidly growing infection, fungus, mold, rot, or even popping veins. Something you don’t want to feel on you. It goes for a skin-crawling effect, and even if you can’t pin down what you’re associating it with, it acts as a canvas for horror, calling upon building blocks from your memory. It can be used by evoking imagery as common as a cross or ask questions of doubt like mental sanity, but it ain’t easy to pump out good things, I’ll tell you that.

The Legacy of Crystalware

20th-century Scooby-Doo cartoons are an interesting example of how many different uses one can creatively have for horror. They’re not as lighthearted as The Munsters but don’t take themselves as seriously as The Ring. They’re a middle ground that gradually raise tension as high as they can before presenting action, with the kind of humor you’d find in a Friday the 13th movie sprinkled throughout. Now that I think about it, they have an oddly similar formula. In a way, it makes all the spooky setup done in the first half of a Scooby-Doo cartoon work against how they want the children to walk away feeling calm after the finale. Imagine how tricky it can be to avoid ruining all the horror you set up. You simultaneously don’t want children to complain about being too scared afterward while not making them think all the tension built up to something disappointing or was ruined by the jokes, so how did they approach this formula in video games?

Scooby Doo's Maze Chase – 1983 – Intellevision Keyboard Component Let’s go back to what might be the most infamous time in video game history when, shortly after video games surpassed Hollywood and pop music combined in the early 1980s, players found themselves drowning under a pile of low-effort shovelware from people trying to make a quick buck off of how low the bar for entry on the most popular game platforms were. It’s said that during this time, programmer Mark Kennedy was working on a maze game called Three Blond Mice that may have been mistakenly corrected to Three Blind Mice before Mattel got a license and said it's a Scooby-Doo game now. Scooby Doo's Maze Chase has you chasing ghosts while a skull your size pursues you. What adds to the complexity is obtaining bones that can be laid down like traps, as they stall the skull when it presumably bites down on them. There's 10 stages and a level editor to make mazes of your own, but what surprised me the most is how well a horror soundtrack is executed during gameplay. There's a low droning tone that becomes rising horror strings to subconsciously pull your stress with them, similar to how Space Invader's score's increasing pace is reminiscent of a raising heartbeat. Ultimately being about your triumph during this, the game interestingly goes for you to have the same progression of feelings that a Scooby-Doo cartoon would try to get out of a viewer. I might describe the scope of this game, during its actual gameplay, as that of a golden age arcade cabinet, which is below the level of complexity I prefer in even a second-generation home console game.

The game that followed would have the opposite problem. Going so ambitious that it seemed to bite off more than they could chew.

Scooby-Doo – 1986 – C16, C64, Spectrum, CPC It would appear they wanted to make a full FMV game for home desktops like Dragon's Lair in arcades, but I’m not sure even Dragon's Lair's desktop ports of the time pulled that feat off, and the Scooby game’s publisher elite would give up. They instead rushed to release this far less ambitious game before the license expired. You explore a castle, punching ghosts in the face on your fast-paced journey to rescue your captured friends. The pacing in this game is an odd choice to me, but I assume they were just too scared to do anything beyond the simplest of video games they could picture. For a game with constant combat, it doesn't feel very great, as there's seemingly no wind-down to your short jab, leaving you just spamming it as you wait for endless enemies to walk into it. I like the designs and attempt to add diversity to the layout of the castle, but this all goes to waste in a game that ultimately doesn't hold my interest or use the IP well at all. Maze Chase was about as far as I can imagine pushing the courage of Scooby-Doo in a fight or flight scenario before putting him in an out-of-character Rambo Rage for his friends. Perhaps this gameplay idea more fits Scrappy-Doo, and that's what we got next.

Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo – 1991 - C64, Spectrum, CPC, Amiga, Atari ST A Home desktop game where you play as Scooby's scrappy nephew taking on a castle of horror tropes to rescue Scooby and Shaggy. While not exactly head and shoulders above its contemporaries, I find this rendition of the last game’s concept to be much more fully fledged with a variety of locations, obstacles, and a greater focus on platforming and collecting to break up the combat. The visual direction is also no slouch, but it’s still as basic a concept as you can come up with for a video game at the time and, to me, mostly squanders the potential of the IP it’s licensing. What made me interested in the original 60s cartoon was the awe my child-self had for the horror atmosphere, and I don’t think you need Dragon’s Lair quality animation to recreate that. You may not even need to abandon this gameplay style…

Scooby-Doo: Mystery – 1995 - SNES This game has you play through multiple well-animated mysteries, recreating the music and look of the original series. Despite being a sidescroller with real-time combat and platforming, it feels at home with episodes of the show, from the slower pacing to what voice acting there is, though it is very uncanny how characters just stare directly at the player when idle. In fact, it’d be nice if they had more investigation-focused animation loops to be in when the player runs into them. This game does a decent job at gamifying the show. You have a traditional health bar and lives, with Daphne being the healer of the party, but it’s contextualized by the bar representing your health starting empty and increasing as you take damage because it’s actually a fear meter before you get scared to death, with Daphne giving you snacks to cool your nerves.

Scooby-Doo: Mystery – 1995 - Genesis You might imagine you could make an even closer adaptation with a point-and-click game, and that is what would be attempted on Sega’s fourth-gen console, though you might find its execution a little head-scratching. This time it’s a single double feature, though you’ll quickly find this is to achieve quality over quantity. The visuals, gameplay variety, ideas for what you’re actually doing are both incredibly executed and as accurate to the show as the SNES game, but unlike that SNES game, it doesn’t strike me as trying to recreate the tone, atmosphere, and pacing of Scooby-Doo. In fact, it comes off as generic to the point-and-click genre of the time. The visuals look like the show, but the environmental art is a little overly wacky, like you’d commonly see in point-and-click games at the time. It uses music from the show, but the tone just strikes me as perhaps more focused on making a by-the-numbers point and click than really trying to recreate the show’s mood. Every shot is so visually crowded and well-lit with complex animations to show off, which is the opposite of the original show’s visual design and mood setting. The soundtrack then matches this visually noisy presentation. Perhaps it feels more like Scooby and Shaggy crossing over with the typical world of point-and-click games at the time, which many must enjoy, but I can’t help but feel that the SNES’s side-scrolling platformer managed to better capture the slow-paced, dimly lit atmospheric horror of the original cartoons, and this does present itself as an adaptation of Where Are You, not what came after.

Scooby-Doo!: Show Down in Ghost Town – 2000 – Windows 95 Now around this time, there were popular point-and-clicks for very young audiences like the Putt-Putt series that focused on entrancing kids by presenting a highly interactable world of over-the-top animations, and it strikes me that that kind of game is what the Learning Company’s games like Showdown in Ghost Town wanted to be. This game gives you a spooky, activity-filled investigation for children featuring the Scooby-Doo cast, including what might be my favorite twist on the trope of the gang being chased through doors: gamifying it to you standing in front of the scene and trying to throw pies at the monster while not hitting your comrades. It’s also a nice touch that of all the old west songs they could have used, they implemented Clementine into the game’s soundtrack, the staple of the older Hanna-Barbera mascot Huckleberry Hound. This game simultaneously feels like it’s trying to be more accurate to the show’s tone than the more remembered 1995 point-and-click while also feeling like it’s taking more liberties to have its own style that it thinks fits the show. The warm sunset color scheme throughout is not the dead of night that most people probably see as the show's color scheme but presents a visually appealing ghost town atmosphere that matches the western vibe and tries to be its own unique atmosphere, which is also something I’m saying about the cartoons that followed Where Are You. You want to do new and fresh while still keeping what made the IP appealing, but I can’t help but feel this style of point and click would have been more appropriate for A Pup Named Scooby-Doo’s more over-the-top animation compared to the standard Doo’s more grounded animation style.

The show’s style and the style of game that this seems to go for, feel like they work against each other in a way that holds each other back. This game repeats the fourth-wall break of everyone’s idle pose, having them stare directly at the player like children’s games where the player is treated like a character in the story directing the characters, compared to this game where it just comes off as an out-of-place trope since no one directly addresses the player. Also, while there are many shots in this game where there is a higher level of visual clarity than even the original show, it puts a magnifying glass on the low animation quality. I remember someone who worked on the 1990s Superman cartoon say an art artstyle put forward early on was more reminiscent of the 1940s cartoon, and he basically said, “You know we don’t have the budget to animate in that art style.” and that’s a problem I feel was widespread in video games trying to do cartoon art styles by the time you get to the 90s. They reached a level of complexity to their visuals that they’d need animation on the level of the shows to look natural, but instead they still often had the animation quality of 16-bit sprites. I might even say closer to 8-bit sprites at times. I’ve always wondered how much easier it is to animate in polygons. It’s a discipline I may never take the time to learn but can’t help but notice how many moved to it, achieving smoother animation even without motion capture. It even often had the opposite problem, where it could look uncanny because the animation quality was much higher than the model quality, that often looked below cell animation when it came to textures, shading, and smooth lines. You can see it in the cutscenes of Scooby-Doo!: Mystery of the Fun Park Phantom.

Scooby-Doo!: Mystery of the Fun Park Phantom – 1999 – Windows 95 This nails the animation, pacing, and setup, but they seemed to greatly struggle with the texture and shading of the show’s look. If you take a picture of the 60’s show and use the paint bucket tool, it won’t fill in anything because nothing was truly a solid color as a result of the natural texture created by the 60s technology for cartoons. Now you need to manually recreate that texture, or things look overly simplistic by being too clean. This is a top-down, turn-based game where you and 3 friends or bots can select one of the four human characters and essentially work together, or I guess even compete with each other, to solve the mystery. You’re all free to explore separately from each other, and while there is an action points system, you can also set a time limit for turns. Most call it a Scooby-Doo version of Clue, which is a board game that I’ve only seen the movie adaptation of, but it sounds like an appropriate source of inspiration.

Scooby-Doo!: Classic Creep Capers – 2000 Nov 29 - N64 For Nintendo’s fifth-generation console, Classic Creep Capers seems to attempt to be an evolution of the SNES game but strikes me more as a cautionary tale of bad design. As its name implies, you play through a trilogy of classic Scooby-Doo cartoons with additions that tie them into an original fourth story. A good idea that appropriately starts with the debut cartoon What A Night For A Knight but acquaints you with its… less than satisfying execution. While the original cartoon did a great job of introducing everyone, its atmosphere and was full of story beats that would make natural gameplay adaptations, I feel Classic Creep Capers makes poor use of its source material from a narrative, gameplay variety, and general presentation standpoint. It rewrites these stories to be straightforward and formulaic to the point that they’re boring. Take, for example, my favorite scene in What A Night For A Knight, where they initially try to break into the museum via Fred shoulder-tackling the rear door open before having the idea to have Shaggy, who is the best gymnast at their school, get in through a small upper window that only his lean frame could fit through, and when the ladder they brought can’t reach, he also has the idea to use the jack to raise the ladder high enough for Shaggy to make the rest of the distance with his athletic skill. This introduces them as 2 high school jocks of opposite strengths that cover each other’s blind spots, making a great team. In the game, Fred just goes, “Hey look, an open window!” and the player grabs the ladder, which reaches such a large window that it makes no sense why Shaggy and now Scooby (who has the largest frame of the group) are going in to do basic stealth gameplay to pass a guard and unlock the front door. Maybe they rewrote these stories to have Scooby with you playing as Shaggy more often so you can do the recreation of the SNES minigame in kitchens where you try to stack high towers of food to eat for a generous heal since Daphne no longer serves as a healer. In fact, there’s healing snacks all over the floor throughout the game. You are dealing with the fear meter again, but really this contextualization just creates the unsatisfying hit animation of Shaggy shaking when hit. Unlike the SNES game, where you can open your map to see where each member of your party is, as they each serve a different purpose and would move around, in the N64 game, they often feel like a stationary object in a safe room. Clicking on the trio from any angle results in you talking to Fred in order to give him clues and items for traps that you find, which is how you complete each level. The game not only diminishes Fred, Daphne, and Velma’s roles narratively, but keeping them so often as this static room object makes them and the game world feel less alive. The graphics in this game are top-notch and probably the strongest part of this game, but the poor directing undermines that, creating poor presentation, and the original but too unrestrained music sure doesn’t help.

The origins of the slasher film genre often seem to be attributed to plays performed at the Grand Guignol in the 1890s, sparking a trend of using violence as a selling point that crept into the film industry by the 1910s. For example, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho getting a few people into clear shower curtains is sometimes seen as a face of the genre.

Psycho - 1988 - DOS 2.0, C64 The 1960 movie introduced many to the Bates Motel that you investigate in the 1988 game where, despite movement being a bit slow in some versions, it is easy to navigate, having real-time gameplay in a full-on investigation. I’m not normally into higher-level environmental puzzle games, but this is a quick one with real-time combat, so my interest was more piqued. I just wish there was more music to set the mood while investigating.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - 1983 - VCS This must be one of the most iconic slasher movies. Seeing a group of people on a road trip approach a house with gas-powered generators to attempt to barter for gas, only to find it’s occupied by a grave-robbing family who attack them, with one brother being someone who wears a mask of skin. In the 1983 game, you play as this brother, chasing down the tourists on your property before running out of gas, and revving that chainsaw causes gas to really drain, so there’s a bit of resource management with 1,000 points awarded for everyone you kill and more fuel awarded for every 5 people. It gets old immediately for me. I can tell it’s going for simple amusement, but it’s not something that I find amusing for long. People often attribute the game’s lack of impact to the controversial nature of the game’s content, but I’m unconvinced of that. I just see another movie tie-in game at a time people felt burned by them. Usually something being controversial leads to it becoming forbidden fruit that sells more, which is why companies will sometimes try to create negative attention to take advantage of the rebellious nature of humans in making their game seem more like forbidden fruit. This makes it unreliable to believe someone saying backlash happened without seeing the actual backlash for yourself, and it seems suspiciously hard to find that for 1983’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre compared to other games. If you ask me, it comes off as a scapegoat for the game not catching on.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - 2006 - J2ME This game would expand the gameplay loop by having multiple platforming levels to get through with power-ups to obtain and enemies that are armed to fight back.

Hold on a second…. If the switch 2 is considered 10th gen then…. checks retro shop sorted by new releases oh… XboxOne/PS4 games in the retro sections now…

You know, for me, a game released today for the Atari 2600 isn’t a retro game. It’s just for a retro console, but I have seen to many; a retro game just means it’s for a retro system. Well, if you go by that rule…

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - 2023, Aug 18 - PS4/5, XboxOne/Series, Windows 10 A prequel to the 1974 movie, this is a competitive team vs. team multiplayer game where one team is the combat-focused family and the other, their stealth-focused captors.

Alright. I’m yanking your chain.

The year after this game, a Halloween game would be announced, and it wouldn’t be the first time a Texas Chainsaw game was followed by a Halloween game.

Halloween - October 1983 - VCS

“A homicidal maniac has escaped from a mental institution. On Halloween night, the killer returns to his hometown to wreak havoc! You are babysitting for a family in a large, two-story house. Somehow the vengeful murderer has gotten inside! Can you protect the children and yourself from the fury of his knife?”

Now this game holds my interest much longer. It’s not the kind of game I’d play regularly, but with its more complex loop and factors, I find it intriguing to pick up every once in a while. You’re to lock as many children as possible in safe rooms, with every 5 children increasing the difficulty…and the children can meet a gruesome end, alongside yourself, who has 3 lives. You can find a knife to go on the offense, forcing the unwanted guest to retreat. It seems to lodge into him each time as it leaves your hands, and you can find it tossed somewhere else as after he retreats with it in him. I will also say, though, the music blasting whenever he’s on screen gets old quickly. Perhaps for pure balancing, you can’t hold a knife while leading a child. On top of all this, as the manual says, “Beware of electrical blackouts on the upper level, for the house is old and the wiring is faulty. At any moment, you may find yourself plunged into dankness with the killer in pursuit!” Halloween is often lumped in with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the finger for it not catching on, being blamed on controversy, which similarly strikes me as a scapegoat given the reputation of VCS movie games a month after Atari’s trip to the landfill.

Michael Myers Rampage - 2007 - Flash 9 Michael Myers Rampage really nails simplicity. You simply try to successfully stab different people trying to dodge your attacks without being able to run away, as they are in various cornered situations, like waking up in bed to you standing over them. What ties it all together is the stopwatch, making the goal of the game to set the shortest time, turning what could have been a less satisfying version of Desktop Destroyer into a rapid, competitive challenge that doesn’t give you time to take in more than the visceral action you’re trying to commit.

Investigating Domark’s Claim In 1985, Jeremy Spencer of Crash Magazine reported that Friday the 13th: The Computer Game would be based on the second movie but also said the first movie took place in the 1950s. Perhaps he was told this by Mark Strachan of Domark, who walked him through the game, as the manual also implies this:

Now this diverges from the movie, where there is around a 20-year gap between Jason drowning in the 1950s and his mother finally meeting her end to one of her victims finally getting the better of her. This survivor is rescued from a boat floating across the lake, where it is implied she dreamed of a decayed child-Jason, pulling her under. This is even reiterated in the second movie before she meets her end to a mysterious adult home invader, and it cuts to 5 years after the first movie, where the camp has since been condemned, marked off limits by law, becoming the horror story of “Camp Blood.” But when another camp is opened connecting to the same lake, some couldn’t help their curiosity and, in visiting the abandoned location, seem to disturb an adult male who has been squatting there that begins picking them off. Having spent the movie spooking each other with campfire stories, they assume this to be Jason, who survived and somehow managed to avoid being found by his obsessed mother for 20 years. This is an important divergence because those 20 years of Pamela living obsessed with her late son don’t occur in the game’s timeline, and the game implies the child Jason rising was no dream but an actual zombie who can age!

Before the later movies retroactively added that Jason was always undead, the original trilogy portrayed him as just a deformed man who took campy amounts of punishment before finally meeting his end to close off the trilogy, but despite not saying zombie, they did briefly explore the supernatural resurrection idea to bring him back one more time in the fourth movie before passing the torch, so the game doesn’t beat the movies to the idea but fleshes out its own version, and I assume did so retroactively from the game itself being finished to match the movies backtracking their moving on from Jason as well. The sixth movie had a bolt of lightning strike his grave to bring him back as the decayed powerhouse zombie who can no longer run that he’s known for and came out the same summer as the game, who would’ve known the discourse around the fifth and maybe even early rumblings about the sixth movie’s intentions. I think Jeremy was lied to. The hockey mask wasn’t even in the second movie, and I don’t think Jason is in this game at all. I suspect they changed the text in the manual without changing the game itself, as it seems to be based on the fifth movie about how the impact Jason left was inspiring copycats, visually distinct from him by having blue chevrons instead of red; what the game seems to actually be.

Friday the 13th: The Computer Game – Summer 1986 – C64, CPC, ZX Spectrum You’re a group of 10, visiting the infamous Camp Crystal Lake; when unpacking, you find a bloodstained hockey mask among YOUR group’s luggage. One of you is a Jason copycat…but who? A murder mystery where you explore the area that notably has no lake, trying to find out who of your group is the killer and getting them before all of you are got. Technically you can be a Jason copycat yourself if you decide to just get all your own friends and you are the one with the mask… a blue chevroned mask of a copycat representing your sanity that seems to result in a jumpscare hallucination if too low on top of drawing attention to you as the person playing Jason will target whoever is the most panicked. Each round is won by getting the Jason Copycat or, I guess, even rival Jason Copycat. There’s a gathering mechanic where you can tell people not to split up and instead bunker down in the church while you look for others. They’ll get bored or antsy and eventually venture out. If you accidentally tell whoever in your group is a Jason copycat, he or she will arrive and strike there, causing everyone to notice the body and likely scatter. It appears you are the one in 9 with the courage to fight back in the heat of the moment if you choose to. There are 5 levels with you assuming the role of different members of the friend circle, but most seem to remember this game for either having blood capsules that I’m not sure would still be good to put in your mouth or for having the most generic royalty-free music, from Old McDonald to the most stereotypical song in all of horror, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

Nintendo of America's 6-Year Policy Whenever I see the title screen of Friday the 13th for the NES, I think of the fear and awe I always heard people describing they had as kids about it. It was this forbidden adult horror game even though it came at a time when, in the absence of the ESRB to shield them from the backlash of offended passersby, Nintendo of America was far more censorship-heavy in being overly cautious of their legislatively vulnerable position compared to their post-ESRB selves. This 6-year policy, from 1988 until 1994, affected Nintendo of America’s reputation so severely that people who were born after these rules were reversed would mistakenly think them still in effect over 30 YEARS after they were repealed despite not only decades of Nintendo approving content that couldn’t exist on their platforms under that old rule set but also releasing their own ESRB M-rated games ever since as well. Before those rules were even started, the NES had already built a horror library, and even during those 6 years, those rules did not stop new horror games from coming to their platforms. Limitation just had to breed creativity.

Friday the 13th - Feb 1989 - NES Now this is a game that has a great original score people praise as adding to the fear they had of it. In this horror game you play as a group of 6 camp counselors responsible for children when Jason begins striking. He won’t just get the kids but also you and your friends split up around the camp, which is the purpose of small cabins to store and swap which counselor you’re playing as. There’s nowhere safe from Jason to put the counselors or kids, so you’ll have to fight him off for 3 days with beautiful and eerie scenery across different times of day. When it comes to difficulty…compare it to the previous game and the original movie trilogy, where the killer is just some girl or guy, a zombie powerhouse. Jason of the later movies is a durable force in this game that has commanded both respect and frustration from players, leading to many instances of what may be my favorite fail screen in horror game history: “You and your friends are dead. Game Over.” Due to the rental laws of the United States, publishers don’t have a say on if their games can be made available for rent or not, resulting in a trend of making the US version of video games much harder to win at in order to stop most people from being able to beat a game on rental. The normal difficulty of video games in the US is sometimes even offered in other countries as a bonus extra-hard challenge mode. I say this was a trend, but it would last from the third, fourth, fifth, and at least to the end of the sixth generation. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s even seventh-gen examples, and a tester for Friday the 13th has implied publisher LJN imposing this on Friday the 13th is responsible for this double-edged sword of the game being a harsh challenge some respect and others find too frustrating to work at.

You all start off with no weapons, only being able to throw rocks, and apart from wolves, bats, and killer crows, Jason isn’t the only zombie around… as all his victims seem to be rising from the dead too! There’s a full zombie apocalypse happening that the manual recommends using to farm for weapons and items, giving the game a grunt enemy to keep satisfaction up with combat. They can also drop a lighter that can be used to light fireplaces for PRETTY GOOD drops, like a flashlight to reveal a particular passage in the platforming-heavy cave system, or one of the rare weapons to really breeze through the combat. Since the opening recommends you try to light them all, it creates the rookie mistake of actually attempting this. Personally, I find it harder than beating the game, so I’d just recommend lighting a few on your way to get some drops and not stressing the challenge of trying to light them all. There’s locked doors, files to read, and many approaches to take. You can row across the lake, you can find Jason’s shack that is locked (implying Jason carries house keys). Inside is Pamela’s severed head as it was in the second movie, and in what is perhaps my favorite liberty taken by a Friday the 13th game, it flies at you and attacks you! It also has various drops, from her iconic machete from the first movie to her sweater, which is thick and dampens damage from enemies. Of course, supposedly putting it on is said to cause Jason to mistake you for Pamela (perhaps at a distance?), but he seems to catch on if he gets close enough and attacks anyway. There you can get a good look at Atlus’s Jason design sporting purple and blue.

By the 90s, calibration screens weren’t an uncommon way to find the right look for everyone’s varying displays, while the 80s NES game way tended to be to make things pop enough to be a one-size-fits-all image. Some customers were on the darkened picture of weathered family CRTs with NES launch cables, for the red eye of the crow was vital to its black sprite not sneaking up on those players. Still, some people wonder why not use that color palette for Jason, with the white of his mask serving the role of the red on the crow, in order to go for more photorealistic colors. Perhaps to see pleasant detail or just easily see what you’re doing, the game has the rather colorful cartoon look common of 8-bit games, so Jason’s colorful sprites actually look natural in darkness to me, which is what I assume they were designed around. The kids have unique palettes for light and dark, but you and Jason don’t, with palettes that have to universally pop in every environment at every time of day.

There’s a common theory that the choice of purple and blue in particular came from the 3D drawing on the back of the theater program for Friday the 13th Part 3D, but I’ve always thought this sounded a little far-fetched for how much traction it has. It becomes even harder to believe when it morphs into the devs not knowing what Jason looked like outside of this booklet when it includes a splash of color stills, including the actual shot of Jason coming through the window from the movie or the cover of the shot of the mask with a knife through the eye from the fourth movie being recreated in the game. The previous Domark game went with the same blue mask color when recreating this same shot in the CPC version, and I believe both of these games' developments would have been a bit early for it to be likely they took inspiration from the skyline poster for Jason Takes Manhattan, which is another theory. That poster was a last-minute replacement for the movie’s July 1989 release in the US, while the NES game was released in February, according to Nintendo Power. Maybe the seventh movie’s poster using a Part 5 mask in this same color is responsible for the game’s sprite lacking a brow chevron… or maybe they just didn’t want it to turn into a unibrow when viewed through a CRT. As for the color theories, I lean more toward these being coincidence because I’m not sure you need inspiration to think of representing darkness with blue in a cartoon or even saturating black to purple, especially in a spooky context, but the true answer may be forever lost to the memories of Hideyuki Yokoyama… before he disappeared to the fishing realm…

Outside, however, can trip people up when navigating due to the roads on the map being circular despite the view of navigating them in gameplay being side-scrolling. At the bottom of a circular road on the map, moving right on screen takes you right on the map, but say you keep going clockwise and you’ll eventually loop up to the top of a circle on the map, resulting in moving right causing you to move left on the map since the camera is always on the outside of a circle looking in, keeping the center of each circle in the background when side-scrolling. The actual goal of this game is simple despite being challenging. Fight off Jason for 3 days with at least 1 playable character and 1 child surviving by the end, but you have so many ways to strategize and plan to do this. Different people prefer to take on Jason in the side-scrolling nature versus the behind-the-back interiors.

Friday the 13th: Road to Hell - 2006 - J2ME The 1980s was a time of so many strong horror games, including Namco’s slasher movie-inspired beat-em-up series Splatterhouse, that out-Jason’d the official games for many! In 2006, Friday the 13th would officially try this gameplay style with the J2ME game Road to Hell, where Jason is traveling down to the depths in search of a boiling cauldron to enjoy the agony of sinners down there. I can dig the more Splatterhouse-esque visuals, but it just falls short in the gameplay department for me. Its pacing is a bit too slow. Releasing in 2006, I can see it trying to capture that menacing Ken Kirzinger Jason movement, but I just don’t think being faithful to that works for a side-scrolling beat-em-up with these visuals, and Kirzinger Jason did run in one scene. If it weren’t for the variety of weapons, I’d call this the slasher equivalent of Godzilla: The Series: Monster Wars, but I still think that’s the closest comparison I’d make to this game, and I think the thorn in this game’s side might be the platform choice. Are you going to develop a full-on Splatterhouse game for $3, and how can you compete in the 2006 phone market for more than $3? Well, Road to Hell would rebrand to Thursday the 12th upon its license expiring, and another would throw their hat at making a Friday the 13th game.

Friday the 13th - 2006 - J2ME Xenedex’s game is an adaptation of the first movie, including the degree of violence from the first movie. The minimalism of the sound and music can come off as retro in a bad way though… But this is surprisingly a good genre fit for what the first Friday the 13th is: a gruesome murder mystery!

Now around this time, the seventh generation, is when that multiplayer style of a group of players on one team versus one super-powerful player was becoming a common occurrence in horror games, and this continued through the eighth generation with one game in development being Slasher Vol. 1: Summer Camp. I assume the idea being that each volume could parody a different slasher film, with the first being Friday the 13th. RetroRealms Arcade would eventually be a Splatterhouse version of this concept but offer officially licensed expansion packs instead of selling them separately as sequels. Slasher Vol. 1 would attract the attention of the Friday the 13th license holder and become officially licensed itself, but they would go for that group of players vs. one powerful player style of multiplayer as their main meat.

Friday the 13th: The Game - 2017, May 26 - PS4, Xbox One, Windows 7 As the game updated, they’d technically have Jason’s from Parts 1-10 but only Parts 2-9 Jasons. Roy is the Jason for Part 5, while Jarvis is playable as a survivor, which also features characters from the movies. They’d eventually use all this to create a single-player campaign that let you swap between playing as the Jasons of your choice between chapters. There’s even a Part 5 chapter, but I do wish they’d had some kid dub over Pamela’s lines when playing as Roy. You normally hear her voice in your head, and people often point out how odd it is when you’re playing as Roy. They’d also add a skin for LJN Jason, though I don’t know why they made it a skin for part 3 Jason. Neca does the same thing when making merchandise, and I can only speculate it was either because of the 3D advertisement theory or the press kits for the LJN game seeming to use Part 3 Jason instead of Part 7, zombie Jason, being on the cover, and I imagine what most people presumed this to be in the game. Am I crazy? That game is literally all zombies. Even Pamela’s head comes undead! The difference in the PS4 game being that pre-lightning bolt Jasons can run, while post-lightning bolt Jasons can’t, though both can turn into the Evil Dead flying camera effect to move faster than any other player in the game. I don’t think I ever liked this solution to humans being able to outrun the Jasons that can’t run. It is an interesting conundrum of gameplay, though.

I never understood why people call the body language Kane Hodder gives Jason subtle, but it’s definitely distinct. Since he mocaps Jason in this game, it makes the 3 Jasons he played in the movies feel more like themselves but can have the reverse effect for the 5 Jasons he didn’t play in the movies that are playable in this game. I always saw the body language he gave Jason as exaggerated in a way that matches the less serious tones of the movies he played Jason in, which is not a direction for the series I’m as into when looking back. Some people really like slashers to be campy with cartoon logic, but it’s never been for me. Outside of that, the game overall always came off as clunky-feeling to me. Moving around and doing things always felt as rough as the character models looked. If it weren’t for the license, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed anything about this game… outside of recreating the Jason X liquid-nitrogen kill with a toilet. That’s a good one! Matchmaking troubles I’m forgiving of. The game just felt so bare-bones in content and execution. You know, watching that same rough-looking one too many times since it starts every match, making it get old fast. Its initial release felt more like a rough beta that took a year to feel like the amount of content I’d expect of a 1.0, but, to be fair, I’m the only person I know who felt this way. Everyone seemed to be having the time of their lives during this game’s heyday.

Parts 1 and 10 Jasons would be added as NPCs in the game’s updating first-person single-player DLC, Virtual Cabin, that I’d compare to Resident Evil 7’s updating Beginning Hour demo. Of course, getting to see Part 10 Jason and briefly explore the spaceship in this was to tease Part 10 Jason and the ship being added in multiplayer, but to many’s surprise, there was that copyright act that allows a movie’s writer to demand a transfer of the rights to them after 35 years. With the 2010s being 35 years after 1980, the original movie’s writer did this, with the court ruling in his favor meaning he now owned the rights to what he wrote for that movie, seemingly including Camp Crystal Lake and Pamela. Future content for the PS4 game would be canceled, but it would still get a Nintendo Switch port. There was Friday the 13th Puzzle Killer that got to Jason X before this must’ve shut them down, and something about the way they worded not being able to renew the license gives me the impression that because rights to the content in the games were now split, they couldn’t get a new licensing agreement for them. Reminds me of when the movies stopped being called Friday the 13th and just started being called “Jason.” It makes me curious how often Jason’s appearances in video games afterward, like in Multiversus or Fortnite, include Part 1 content. As for the PS4 game, people do still seem to buy it physically, but it appears that the game saved and unlocked things via an always-online account syncing, meaning the absence of a server even breaks the single-player modes!

A Nightmare on Elm Street Now this is an IP; I always thought it must be a real nightmare to design a game around. The movies are about a child abductor who was burned alive by the parents of the town before he came back as a spirit to get the rest of the children, now teenagers, through their nightmares! He does them in with such unique and grand, non-repeating visuals, so how do you tackle this in a video game? Well, the idea for an NES game is that the player is Freddy and can travel through the electrical and plumbing lines as well as mirrors to get around Elm Street, slaying the teenagers trying to get rid of you by finding your scattered remains and burying them, finally putting your soul to rest. It’s also mentioned that some of those teenagers will have powerful dream alter egos that can awaken, implying they can become lucid-dreaming warriors to fight against you. Not much about this version of the game exists, as by the Halloween season of 1989, Nintendo Power would report the script has been flipped!

A Nightmare on Elm Street - 1990 - NES You now play the teenagers in 4-player, simultaneous, co-op! You’re still looking for Freddy’s bones, but you must also now find a key to Elm Street High School so you can burn them in a furnace. The world map was finalized to be side-scrolling with enemies to encounter. I will say Elm Street isn’t the prettiest to look at when so much of it consists of brick wall with just the night sky as background, but I do like that it doesn’t loop in this game, allowing you to hit a dead end and have to backtrack through danger. You have to decide if you’re going to go left or right when exiting a place with more consequence to choosing the wrong direction. It is also quite the diverse game world, from the cemetery to Freddy’s old boarded-up house. Each area is an abstract interpretation of the location, though there is an awake and dream world version of everywhere that are minimally different. They don’t change from the mundane to the fantastical; the world always looks like a nightmare and becomes a Silent Hill Otherworld version of itself when you fall asleep. Sometimes you will just fall asleep at set points to fight bosses too. Coffee can help you fight off your sleepiness, with the manual promoting you keep each other awake when in multiplayer since it drags all of you into the dreamworld. Having to keep each other awake on this sleep-deprived adventure is such a cool idea and so Nightmare on Elm Street! The game really does feel made for that group exploration. I find it simpler but harder than NES Friday the 13th when alone, so I might recommend only playing this with at least one other player. It definitely hits different when hitting the end of a level and realizing you missed one bone and have to backtrack alone. The trade-off to falling asleep is you can lucid dream in the form of 3 dream warrior classes, which you can each obtain and swap between. These classes only seem to be found in the waking world to then be used in the dream world, but if you’re in the dream world too long… Freddy will find and attack you. You’ll know he’s near as his lullaby begins playing, adding an element of pursuer horror. Hitting a boombox can snap you awake with the music ramp-up, feeling so invigorating that it really captures the vibe of the third movie for me. As for the actual enemies and Freddy imagery in this game, it’s so-so. There’s some pretty good designs, but the game lacks variety of enemy design overall. Still, it captures the vibe of exploring A Nightmare on Elm Street together.

A Nightmare on Elm Street - 1989 - DOS 2.11, C64 A more single-player-focused game that's an adaptation of the famous third movie. The DOS version gets minor additions, mostly visuals that make it my preference over the C64 version. The game can have quite the strong first impression with Freddy slashing his way through the bureaucracy of the opening logos to introduce himself. In the DOS version, he’ll already start cheating you in the character select screen! In both versions Joey serves as the damsel in distress as he did in the movie, making him unselectable, and there is an animation representing this on DOS, but as you decide who you want to pick, Freddy will randomly take people on the character select screen, laughing, “One less choice to make!” and he can start by taking your favorite, so pick before Freddy gets you in the menu! Once you select someone, you’re dropped into a surprisingly detailed top-down Springwood with diners, gas stations, parks, and parked cars…but this is a nightmare, and giant Freddy is chasing you through the streets! You’re on the lookout for Freddy’s old decrepit house to try to get in his head. This isn’t some set sequence, either. His house will be at a different address each playthrough. Once inside, you have but a moment to prepare yourself, as this real-time game has limited ammo, inventory, and you start with no weapon but can pick up a knife and/or bat here. Instead of picking up classes, each character is their set class from the movie, creating a wide variety of durability and abilities that may range in usefulness to you. For example, Will is a glass cannon wizard who can shoot lightning from his hands, while Nancy, perhaps driven to save him, can take more punishment before falling, but her dream warrior power is to stall the game clock. This is because opening a secret passage in Freddy’s house allows you to explore deeper and deeper into impossible space where the other dream warriors are about but vulnerable. How long will they last without you? You can try to find them to build up a party to take on Freddy as the dream warriors, but as the back of the box advertises, he will cheat! I can’t remember ever playing a survival horror game that screwed with me this much. This isn’t Eternal Darkness, where sanity effects are primarily visual. You have to live with the consequences of this game messing with you at any moment, which left me constantly on edge. You’ll see a weapon you want behind a locked door, and upon unlocking it, it not only turns into batteries for a gun you don’t have, but unlocking the door also moves you one space over to the spinning whirlpool that rapidly damages you next to it. Teleports, including the way forward, can be disguised as any number of things, including one of these whirlpools, which can make you unsure if you should try to jump into them! You don’t know what to trust! The spirit of Freddy’s mother, Amanda, is trying to help you so she and her son can both be laid to rest, but you can’t tell when the guidance you’re being given is maybe secretly Freddy trying to mislead you.

Much like the movies, he won’t wait for you to come to him either. When you hear steel claws scraping… He’s near and will try to get a quick cheap kill on you while still focusing on self-preservation, leaving and having a drop when damaged too much. To make sure you didn’t just copy the game, you may also run into quizzes asking about the game’s manual. I hope you saved before this was sprung on you because when I’ve tried to answer wrong, it locked my game…though you’d never get a shady copy of this game now, would you? I’ll tell you what’s really dastardly: placed in probably intentionally unavoidable spots throughout the game are magnets that, when touched, pull a random item from your limited 6-slot inventory onto the floor and take its place in your pocket. Hope you noticed and didn’t keep going until seeing the magnet in your inventory. These are often packed in groups to presumably troll you as you accidentally touch another while trying to drop the magnet and pick up what it pulled from your inventory. Coffee works as a healing item, which is weird because you’re not waking yourself up. Similarly, Hypnocil, which is used for dream suppression in the movies, both a heal AND replenishes your dream warrior mana. You’d think it’d be a healing item at the expense of your ability to lucid dream. There’s also holy water that acts as hand grenades on top of just regular old hand grenades. There’s even coins and vending machines to buy all kinds of items you can also explore for, which is the kind of goofy that fits right in with A Nightmare on Elm Street. It seems rare to find a map, and they are here but expensive, and I never personally found an area particularly hard to learn/remember the layout of. There’s also a tunneling mechanic where you can break through certain walls in chunks, which is why Kincaid is a fan favorite of those who don’t want more projectiles than the guns of the game provide, like myself. His super strength allows him to punch through these walls when others would need to have a pickaxe in their limited inventory. He is a power puncher who can gas out quickly to further balance that as well. When it comes to the game world, it mostly does a good job of getting me picturing the way the dream worlds are portrayed in the movies and show. The flaming rooftops in darkness, ectoplasm maze, it all coming to you finding yourself in the red boiler room industrial zone that’s become iconic of Freddy! I even take note of the C64 version of Freddy’s house using grey metal frames an uncross-hatched textures on chairs and… what are sofas in the DOS version but closer resemble metal frame benches in the C64 version. It doesn’t look like home furniture. In fact, when you get to the wheelchair enemies, it makes me wonder if this is a mind trick to look like the mental hospital your playable characters come from. Now that’d be some nightmare trickery, but I say the game mostly does a good job with environments because there’s this stereotypical ice dungeon that I feel is going too unfamiliar and generic when I already feel the ectoplasm maze is pushing it. To me, the familiar places of our lives is integral to the recipe of looking like a nightmare. Stray too far from those familiar places, and you stop capturing the personal aspect that makes dreaming impactful.

Of all the hardware out there, I hear the most misinformation about the MSX standards. I’ve often heard them referred to as a lone desktop or home console instead of them being a set of open hardware standards for any PC to follow to apply for an MSX seal, signaling that PC is compatible with any other PC’s peripherals and software that have been awarded that same MSX seal. By the 90s there were 4 MSX standards, but English speakers often refer to them as “the MSX” as if they’re a lone machine, and what does MSX stand for? Nothing, according to Microsoft’s president in a 1983 Log In magazine interview being asked if the “MS” is presumably “Microsoft,” what does the “X” stand for? He responded, chuckling, that “there isn’t a meaning, but a logo’s look, also sound, has to be good, right?” This would explain why even in the official “What’s MSX” introduction of the standard, the backronym is never defined and is only reported by third-party outlets like Peggy Watt’s 1985 InfoWorld to officially mean “Microsoft Extended Basic,” which Microsoft’s Kay Nishi, credited with coming up with the idea for MSX, seems to dismiss as an assumption. While he has his own definition for backronym and says it can mean different things to different people, he’s ultimately repeated over the decades that the name MSX just came from VHS, making them want a catchy name consisting of 3 letters. Kay Nishi is presented as the Forrest Gump of a version of desktop history riddled with common misconceptions, and why does the history of the MSX standards seem so disproportionately riddled with speculation? I commonly see English sources say the MSX standards made up most of the home desktop market in Japan during the 1980s, but nobody seems to know how much they sold, sometimes estimated to have numbers beneath NEC’s PC series alone. I’ve seen the MSX standards being presented as predating both the commercial microcomputer desktop and home console industries when both would have been in at least their third generations by the time the original MSX standard launched in 1983, which may have even helped that initial standard’s launch. If you were a company wanting to enter the crowded and competitive home desktop market, years after the leading brands had established their ecosystems, then getting an MSX seal, signaled your new machine was already part of a growing ecosystem of existing and upcoming products. So what horror games were on the horizon for this initial MSX standard?

妖怪屋敷 (Yokai Mansion) – 1986 – MSX

Yokai Mansion is about said mansion on the outskirts of town that gained a reputation for the urban legend of its name, drawing in a girl named Rika, but she hasn’t returned… You are Koji, a boy armed with a flashlight, going in and facing the dangers to find her. Fighting your way through the cemetery to enter the dark mansion that well uses decorative pieces like cabinets and torn screens, you’ll find the game is packed with strange and dangerous apparitions. You can run into some horrifying things while exploring the mansion and its immediate surroundings for key items to get further. The more batteries you have, the more powerful your flashlight is. Getting hit decreases your batteries, and if you run out, the thought of you being in the pitch black with the creatures around you is a creepy end to meet. You can find food around, but eating it doesn’t heal you. You’ll need to offer it at statues for that.

妖怪屋敷 (Yokai Mansion) – 1987 Oct 23 – Family Computer

Irem would give us quite the remake. The MSX original had you explore a normal-sized residence before realizing how far underground it was expanded, and you spent a lot of time in these lived-in cave areas. In the Irem remake, the game world is massive by comparison, being split into 5 self-contained zones, but thankfully still scroll screen to screen like Zelda 1 so you can map them out. Doing this will also reveal that each zone is shaped like a kanji with different things to worry about, like different apparitions from the original. It’s pretty nice playing them back-to-back, with this remake almost feeling like a sequel challenge from the MSX game. I’m glad to see these 2 games still get their well-deserved fanfare, which I attribute to how accessible and fast-paced the combat is.

魔性の館 ガバリン (The House of Demonic Nature: Gabarin) – 1987 – MSX On the slower-paced side that still has action, you have a licensed movie game of House or “Gabarin” as it was released in Japan. It’s about a horror author looking for his son after moving into his late aunt’s mansion, where he finds himself haunted by his late brother-in-arms, who is mad that he didn’t give him the easy way out in Vietnam, leaving him to be captured by the enemy and slowly go out in pain. Though primarily taking place in the infested residence, you’ll also play through run-and-gun Vietnam flashbacks that break up the gameplay but contrast a little harsh in pacing to me. I enjoy the enemies in this game. They can sometimes give you a twist, like the scissor assailant following you into a Vietnam nightmare. Of course, most of the game is exploring the mansion and perhaps using your wits to overcome its dangers.

MSX2 Now the idea of standardizing hardware sounds like a good way to make things simple for everyone, but then they released the MSX2 standard, so jokes on you for thinking your MSX would be THE standard. That lasted 2 years. Now you can’t play this new Metal Gear series that’s for the MSX2 standard. Then to scare you out of keeping up with the Jonses was the MSX2+ standard about 2 or 3 years after that! I’m not sure either of these were good moves. These 2 new standards’ spaced-out launches and naming convention can come off less like offering a 3-tier product line and more like frequently moving on from focusing on customers’ expensive investments.

死霊戦線 War of the Dead (Undead Frontline: War of the Dead) – 1987 – MSX2 War of the Dead’s scale and visuals overwhelmed me in a good way. One day all communication and transportation with the town of Chaneez Hill ceased. There’s no consensus on how to translate this town’s name, but it is spelt チャニーズ ヒル as opposed to チェイニー for Chaney/Cheney or チャイニーズ ヒル for Chinese Hill. Either way, those attempting to travel to this town never returned! A military company was sent in, and within hours, the government lost contact with them. What was happening!? It was beyond understanding… so they sent in the newly established Supernatural Special Weapons Attack Team (S-SWAT). You play as a member of this elite supernatural warrior group with latent powers to further awaken, which essentially just buff you as you explore the town that you’re a native of. It’s interesting seeing the state of this town mid-apocalypse instead of post-apocalypse, facing things from some good monster designs to the military the government lost contact with. Combat goes into a side-scrolling view, and you have quite a variety of items and arsenal to work with despite the game’s design emphasizing that you should pick your battles, especially with your limited inventory. You’ll see a lot of people primarily doing knife runs of this game, but it’s not as impressive as it initially sounds. A thorn in this game’s side is that it’s far too easy to escape combat since you start at the end of the screen, and this decision looms over the entire experience of this game. Apart from that, this is yet another game that gets called “the first survival horror game,” and I wouldn’t even consider it an early survival horror game by the fourth console generation, but while nothing in 1987’s War of the Dead is anything we haven’t seen before in earlier horror games, it’s a great execution of these gameplay ideas outside of escaping in combat. I love being able to sleep to speed the day and night cycle. I love that feeling of anticipating what horror you’ll run into while exploring. Mixed with the slower pacing, it can give you satisfying agency to have you tactically think about how to approach day vs. night.

死霊2戦線: War of the Dead Part 2 – 1988 – MSX2, PC-88 This sequel ditches the limited ammo, varied arsenal, day and night cycle, and side-scrolling combat in favor of becoming a fully top-down real-time game, which does fix the issue of it being too easy to escape combat but overall feels like a downgrade in not just options but satisfaction during combat, as now you don’t worry about supplies at all. It kills the game for me, which is a shame because I’m highly interested in this sequel’s urban setting but not with such shallow gameplay.

死霊戦線 War of the Dead (Undead Frontline: War of the Dead) – 1989 – PC-88, PC Engine The PC Engine version of this remake seems to be more updated and is the one I’ve played. I don’t think this remake is as stripped as the second game, but removing the sleep system, the time of day, and the zombie grunt enemy in a game subtitled War of the Dead? It ultimately makes the game less interesting to explore. You do, however, start in the center of a usually much larger playing field in combat now, which makes you have to actually juke aggro’d enemies to get away. This I like! There’s also experience points for upgrades serving as an incentive to not run away, and I feel there’s a much lower frequency of overworld encounters, making it feel a bit less intrusive. That being said, while the graphics are more complex, I’m not a fan of the art direction. From the replacement of those zombie enemies to the urban downtown area being made into a roadless suburb. I can’t deny the fluidity of gameplay, though. Mixed with this degree of color variety, it’s an example of what people were doing with the 16-bit PCs of this fourth console generation that predated what was the current MSX standard.

By the 1950s, digital computers that were general purpose and could store programs were entering the market, and Nippon Electric Company (NEC) were joining in on making electronic computers more of a thing in general. Through the 1960s computers kept getting smaller until you got to the microcomputers of the 70s. NEC took full advantage of this growing niche, forming a microcomputer sales department and even releasing an introductory book for people that sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Of course, what got so many into desktops in the 1970s was the pre-built market. The casual person didn’t have to build their own computer setup. You could just buy a box and plug it into a screen! Suddenly, companies like Sharp offered a pre-built alongside their build kits, and NEC were focusing on a carefully planned pre-built with all the bells and whistles to end the 70s strong, and THAT would dominate the desktop market in Japan. The 1979 NEC PC-8001 is home to one of the most interesting horror FPSs to me.

The Alien Island 3D Version – 1985 Feb - PC-8000

Nobuhisa Fujinami's The Alien Island 3D version, though I'm not aware of any other version, has you arrive on forested islands infested with monsters! Your goal is to stop them from deforesting the islands and explore for treasure, though the thing that stands out to me is your shots have a range longer than an entire island, meaning if you shoot and miss, it keeps going until it either hits something else or flies off the coast of the landmass you're on. You can even accidentally hit your own boat and strand yourself! Apart from that, not wanting to lose points by Swiss cheesing the trees you're trying to save as you exterminate and not destroying the treasures of these islands promotes a satisfying care to your approach. By this point you even had open FPSs on VCS with visually beautiful environments, but this raises the bar on a mechanical level! You can drag bodies, but be careful, as, like insects with egg sacs, the babies can hatch from a downed body. They can't swim, though, so maybe take advantage of nearby water when moving a body with an unhatched egg sac. For years, I assumed this random, but only recently read someone breaking down that there are male and female aliens, and when on top of each other, the egg sac forms, with hatched babies only growing to adults after eating enough trees, creating a living ecosystem of this invasive species wreaking havoc! I’m almost more surprised people are doing zoology of this environment when it’s so hectic. If a treasure you so seek is destroyed, you get a message telling you to end your player, and you can technically hit yourself with your own shots to do so. Eventually, you'll begin to run into enemies who are also armed, and then you'll be engaging in firefights, including worrying about ricocheting shots. This game is such a bar raiser to me.

PC-8800 series Succeeding the PC-8001 was the PC-8801 alongside the cheaper 6001. The following year would even see the more premium 9801 making the 8800 series the middle ground and quite the impactful one. It's where Snatcher is from. It's where Ys is from. It's where the Screamer is from.

The Screamer – 1985 – PC-88 MagicalZoo's The Screamer is a game I always see brought up when there's any discussion of horror games of this era. Accomplishing such a good job of making you feel like a part of Beast City, riding in, finding your way around the civilization once run by the artificial system, BIAS, before it became corrupted. You don't want to be ill-prepared when entering the dangerous infested facility that housed the system or when you run into the world's colorful cast. After all, as the game tells you in the beginning, the only way to survive is to dehumanize, and surviving might be more on your mind when the game deletes your save upon death. The game's art direction is such a treat that complements running into interesting design after interesting design with thought-provoking story to think about. From the nationalist who wants to rebuild the government to the former company president that lurks the abandoned BIAS building, seeing how World War 3 effects a civilization so built up compare to those effected by the second one creates an interesting tale of a more privileged society facing the aftermath of such a conflict which creates victims with grander ambitions to self-indulgently react to what it took from them while they, knowingly or not, are still creating the precedents for the next generation who are growing up with them as the grown ups around which I definitely felt when running into a 12 year old in a dungeon and readied myself for combat before finding out what path in life he had chosen. While there's been a couple of adaptations of The Screamer to other media, the way you explore in first person with this tension of running into something in these over-the-shoulder reveals does so much for the spectacle of these designs and the stories of what you're seeing. The packaging of this game is also very satisfying. It’s a book that begins with a prequel graphic novel that becomes a regular novel and then becomes the game’s instruction manual (which is the type that continues to worldbuild); then finally, there’s blank pages to serve as a journal for your adventures and hollowed-out pages hiding the game disks. Now THIS is style and creates cohesion in art direction with the game mimicking that black and white, hand-drawn panel look.

Horror House series – 1983 - PC-88 In 1983, students at the University of Kinki would create Horror House, sold through Nihon Falcom as the first in a series of occult mystery adventures. Peaking the interest of many with its visual style, predominantly a shot of one of its monsters haunting the F family’s new house that you’ve been sent in to investigate. You’ll be looking around the puzzling manor with the tension of running into these entities, including the main entity controlling the others, hiding around to get the jump on you. The game is small and quick to pick up and do runs of, with it never feeling like you could lose too much progress, also making for fresh tension each time. Not long after, we'd get the Building of Insanity, though despite this being the cover and cassette label, the title and game over screens refer to the game as Horror House Part II. People are consecutively going missing in said building, and finding a body is probably not a good sign. This game has a bit more to sink your teeth into while still keeping it brief for the replay and with a more dramatic use of colors highlighting things in the otherwise colorless environment. It reminds me of Sin City’s art direction, where everything is colorless except for red and yellow. A rumored third game that would have sped up the image processing and go for a larger scale, titled Ant World, allegedly fell by the wayside as they focused on Demon’s Ring but interestingly is described as being about rescuing your girlfriend who got pulled into an anthill at the park. Sounds like quite the evolution of setting, yet not too crazy for this genre that’s not exactly always known for being as grounded as Mystery House.

Monster House – 1983 or 1984? - MZ Fret not, however, as despite not popping in more games to find they're secretly a horror house sequel, Nihon Falcom offered more games that you could easily have done this to. The obvious one being Monster House, which didn't have that striking art direction of Horror House but was basically a Sharp MZ equivalent where someone never returned from a house and you're going in to find out what happened to them. While following the formula of Horror House, Monster House is quicker and easier to do things in thanks to actions being mapped to single keys instead of having to type things out, making encounters with monsters essentially feel like Quick Time Events.

FM-7 Despite NEC's dominance in the market, there was a large variety of popular pre-builts to target when making games. Furukawa is another company that goes back to the 1800s, with even their grandchild, Fujitsu, being seen as one of the oldest IT companies in the world. They would release a junior version of their 1981 Fujitsu Micro 8 as the Fujitsu Micro 7, which was a stripped-down, more affordable version of it at almost half the price. This allowed it to become popular and supported by a plethora of games, from simplistic art styles like Elevator Game, where you play as a group of 5 people trying to stop a woman from jumping, to Relics’ more detailed, third-console-generation, detailed tiled look, including its large characters taking up multiple tiles.

Relics – 1986 Feb - FM-7, MZ, X1, PC-88, PC-98, MSX In this game you play in far from the fluidity you'd expect from a console, which was apparently a particular hurdle, especially faced in porting to other desktops, though it would get a sequel FOR the Family Computer that fixes that. In the 1986 original, you play as a spooky spirit exploring the mysterious place you’ve found yourself in and have the ability to spirit ride or possess the bodies of those you perish to use their abilities and fool their colleagues into thinking you’re one of them. Something I wish more games where you can equip enemies uniforms would take into consideration.

Dezeni Land – 1983 – FM-7, PC-8000, PC-88, X1 While I doubt anyone considers it a horror game, I thought fans of Disney's Discovery Island might get a kick out of the 1983 game, Dezeni Land, where you go places you probably shouldn't while exploring a close parody of the theme park in your goal of robbing souvenirs. Make sure you don’t find yourself face-to-face with a lions while spelunking. It can also serve as somewhat of a time capsule of the park and games, with these full-colored images would be a bar quickly rising throughout the 1980s.

Sharp X1 Unlike the MZ series, by their computer division, the X series by their television division seemed to wipe out that computer division, with its reputation almost being solely its red options pretty cases. Do not underestimate style. Alongside Fujitsu and NEC, this trio would come to be known as the “8-bit Esteemed 3 Houses.”

暴龍ゴジラ 大都市壊滅!! (Violent Dragon Godzilla: Big City Destruction, sometimes also translated as Fierce Dragon Godzilla: Metropolis Destruction) – 1985 – X1, FM-7

Godzilla for the Sharp X1 might have what you consider to be an overenthusiastic use of colors in its top-down segments, but I have to admit it has some great-looking head-on segments of you taking on humanity. This being a game that just lets you play as a giant monster destroying a city is what many wanted from a Godzilla game, and I love the reporter's panic serving as feedback for your actions, but, of course, by even looking at the game in motion, you might question its gameplay’s fluidity.

177 - 1986 – X1, PC-88 An erotic comedy where, like 1983’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you play the pursuer set in the fear of being chased on your way home at night, leading to poking fun at the trope of running away in a horror movie like Friday the 13th, in which people often joke about how unbeatable a challenge it seems to outrun a Jason figure, though if he were hurling grenades in the woods at night, I can see it tripping more people up. This is played up to a humorous extent of fans pushing you two back and both of you trying not to trip on various animals like cats and tortoises. I love how the game sells an even playing field where both of you can get messed up by all the goofy things and maybe even trying to trip each other up on them. You can imagine the antics that ensue in the finale of adult media, with the game never taking itself seriously, with the ending you get depending on how well you satisfied after the chase.

Produce – 1987 – X1, PC-88, PC-98 Now if you're looking for less tongue-in-cheek horror, in 1987 dB-SOFT would drop on us, Produce, an interesting horror strategy played more seriously where you're consumed by jealousy that two people in your friend circle are dating. You make a deal with a demon to lure them to their end in an abandoned building with an understanding that you’ll be rewarded with the one you secretly love. As you strategize manipulating your own friends into the final action of their lives, you have a lot to think about.

妖姫伝- 1987- FM-7, PC-88 To go further in the direction of shock horror, 1987 would also see Youkiden, which can really raise the bar of your worry for how dark things could possibly go in its story of a group of friends who stumbled into an old temple while having fun in the woods and, in taking something as a souvenir, ended up cursed. This game is most known for a scene where someone has their hands and feet ripped off, and then as her face, still moving, presumably experiencing the pain of this, the thing behind her catches up to her in 177. In introducing players to how bad things could possibly get in an unknown video game, it then transfers over a worry to future games you play. Now it's in your head that things could get this bad.

デウリング ～魔王の館～ - 1987 Feb? – PC-88 Exploring the world of Dwelling is worrying. It feels like a world designed for a children’s fantasy book. Vibrant, full of dung humor, and with logic unlike what’s normal to you, yet you feel like the gloves are off when it comes to what can be done to you. You may run into a pig, dressed as a butcher, preparing a human, but he’s not going to attack you on sight. You’re both intelligent enough to talk as you eyeball his work. It’d be less scary if what you encountered in Dwelling were attack-on-sight enemies. Instead, you feel like you’re face-to-face with dangerous creatures you don’t want to set off.

魔界復活 (Makai Resurrection) - 1987- PC-88 Now if you want to get into games that replicated what horror movies do, 1987's Makai Resurrection is probably the most one-to-one. The pacing and direction of the cinematography, synced with a score I can only compare to 20th-century horror films, is the most accurate depiction of a horror movie I've ever felt a video game accomplish. That constant direction of how a film's score syncs with its visuals or when it chooses to let the environmental ambiance be what takes over a scene's audio. The way the pacing slowly eases the viewer, or in this case player, into the anticipation of what's going to go down is identical to that of a 20th-century horror movie to me. The game being in first person also makes you feel like a character in the movie instead of its director or viewer. You're often bouncing off your supporting cast members in a plot that felt like an 80s horror movie I never heard of.

波動の標的 Legend of the Melvel – 1987 - PC-88 Legend of the Melvel takes into account that it's not a movie or comic book in its direction. You still have cool effects like the flicker of neon lights and separate shots taking into account how they complement each other when in view simultaneously, but the game never restricts itself to replicate a format that it's not. It will go from a scene playing out in widescreen video to multiple windows being overlaid simultaneously. As you investigate the mysterious sudden extinction of an entire church, it creates a dread that hangs over the fact that most of the game is just you being a living journalist, trying to get to the bottom of what's happening. I do think the music is a bit overbearing at times, and the downtime is not well executed, to me.

闇の壱与伝説: 女王塚殺人事件 – 1989 August? - FM-7, X1, PC-88, PC-98 Apart from going for the much more traditional direction of its visuals, I find 闇の壱与伝説 (Darkness's Iyo Legend?) improved all the strengths of Legend of the Melvel and even looks better, but its strength for me was an improvement over Legend of Melvel's slow pacing and use of tonal contrast. The calming upbeat music in your vibrant yet not overbearing office with the strong sun shining through the window in a way that evokes a nostalgia in me for taking a moment to relax inside during vibrant summer days. This not only lets you catch your breath but gives you a baseline to then contrast the game's darker moments with, and Iyo Legend has a lot more downtime; it’s just executed in a way that holds my interest much better, whereas Legend of Melvel, despite also having downtime, might have you feeling like there was no time to rest because you’ve lacked progress in a time-crucial case versus the slower pacing in Iyo Legend. I find a lot of horror games decide not to include many purely pleasant scenes, and I imagine they view it as unimportant filler that makes it take longer to get to what people came for, but I wonder if it's overlooked how much it helps the effectiveness of horror moments to provide non-horror that they contrast with. It shocked me to go back to Mikami and Kojima talking about their upcoming games Silent Hills and The Evil Within because Mikami said "if there's too much information, even if the atmosphere is scary, you don't know where to focus." It’s interesting hearing him say that because I find The Evil Within to be the greatest offender of this. Despite having rooms with just a thought-provoking chair, everywhere you look can be a horror screensaver with no breaks, making it all blend together. You stop thinking about what you're seeing because nothing looks off. That requires contrast. Iyo Legend allows you to develop that sense of normalcy for it to shatter, thus fostering a fear that your warmth can be taken away by the horror you're dealing with. This is also helped greatly by the world feeling populated with many interactable people in places as dense as cities that your life can become intertwined with in ways you won't be sure will end up positive, negative, or more nuanced than either. I also appreciate this game’s ability to feel like a fully sized, functioning country while keeping you in the minority that you can interact with.

The open sea can be a dangerous place, and by the 1950s, people began taking note of how many incidents were occurring between Florida and Puerto Rico. Nowadays, it’s most believed this is just an area of harsh environmental surprises, not unlike any other particularly harsh sea route to traverse. It might have only drawn attention for being between very populated areas of media-producing people to ponder all the disappearances, creating a canvas to paint horror stories onto, and those horror stories got game adaptations.

Bermuda Experience – 1982 – Atari 8-bit 1982’s Bermuda Experience lets you play through these spooky stories from the perspective of the heavily armed S.S. Nemesis, exploring and managing supplies as you attempt to survive the various horror stories that’ve been written about the area, from time travel to aliens. From the creator of Forgotten Island, this has that text-cursor-style movement but feels so fluid with how you seamlessly transition from ship to land to back to ship without a second of delay. There is occasionally loading areas and disk-swapping as you explore the open world that expands past the triangle all the way to Jamaica, and don’t forget with time travel, you’ll be seeing other periods than modern day. A step forward from Forgotten Island that makes me ponder its obscurity in conversations. I’ve enjoyed playing maybe 3 Crystalware-published games and feeling that leap in quality, but when I look at the entire catalog, I wonder how many people skipped around like that and how many people grew fatigued from getting the games in between.

the Second Generation Ended Like the First There’s often cited to be a general negative outlook toward frequent releases that didn’t raise the bar enough at the time. As much as people like to over-exaggerate with misleading statistic labels, video games as a whole were quickly finding themselves right back where the first generation ended about 7 years prior, with consumers growing bored by the sea of clones, not raising the bar, leading to them moving on. Atari reportedly had over 6,000 people lose their jobs over this. That being said, it’s not like Atari or the still multi-billion-dollar video game industry were about to go away. There was still an overwhelming amount of video games releasing and being celebrated. There was a bunch of Game of the Years for 1984! This was more of a mass shaving off of the shovelware culprits via everyone growing more skeptical about which games they buy, fund, and stock. 1983 might be the noisiest year in terms of that shovelware, so what horror games were being drowned out by all that noise?

Ghost Manor – 1983 – VCS, VIC-20 Ghost Manor is one end of a double-sided cartridge and has you choose one of two buddies to rescue the unchosen of the duo from the clutches of Dracula when horrific lands suddenly rise from the ground around you, as if being caught in an echo of what once stood there. It would, however, seem that with the character select being done via the color switch and the default being the girl, there’s no way to select the boy on a 7800. Perhaps a classic case of backwards compatibility problems. With a goal of going in at night to rescue your imprisoned companion by dawn, as the game puts it, "a scary challenge awaits," but first you begin the game by meeting either a friendly rainbow ghost or Bones the skeleton, who you gather supplies with in the graveyard, playing tag with the next area and your goal viewable in the distance, which is one of my favorite environmental art choices in games. Combined with the level of animation, it leaves a good and fun first impression, and once you have enough ammo (which depends on which of the 4 difficulties you’re playing), you can attempt the actual rescue where, at the castle gates, you’re introduced to the game’s antagonist faction of iconic horror monsters, and this collective doesn’t plan on splitting up to be your bosses throughout the game; they all jump you at once! If you can survive that, making it into the castle itself is where the game turns into a more explore-the-danger-filled-mansion type of horror game. There’s moving walls that can crush you, but thankfully not when you touch them while they’re moving away. Much like Haunted House, the previous year, you’ll be in darkness, outside of the lightning through the windows briefly illuminating the environment, unless you’re on easy mode, which begins you with a lamp. Alongside finding crucifixes that can serve as special ammo for one weak to it, there’s also general loot to find that will add to the points that make up your score. I find this game well-suited for subsequent runs! This game offers what might have been split into multiple full-price single-screen games by other publishers of the time, which makes me think of the variety of scale of games.

Frankenstein's Monster – 1983 - VCS When I think of VCS games, I think of the larger-scale ones as opposed to the quick single-screen games. Of course, sometimes quick amusement is all you need, which is why a horror game of 1983 that seems frequently remembered is Frankenstein’s Monster! Outside of a screen where you dodge bats, it’s primarily a single-screen platformer where you make multiple trips back and forth to barricade the monster in its chamber before it awakes. What a grim fate to leave it to. Failing to do this results in one of my favorite game overs in history, where he stomps toward the camera until all you see is flashing green, symbolizing the doom of him being unleashed on the world! I find this game fun to run with its scoring system and even a competitive mode that has 2 players alternate attempts. The whole act of collecting bricks always reminds me of Revenge of the Beefsteak Tomatoes.

Revenge of the Beefstake Tomatoes – 1983 Feb - VCS I could never quite decide my feelings on this game. The 1978 musical-comedy-horror Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is a movie that’s lived on perhaps through having a title as fun as its tone. The 1983 VCS equivalent mirrors that tone. With its perhaps appropriately poor visuals, it comes off as a parody of the video game landscape of the time. It’s satisfying to take and place bricks while in the constant chaos of the infestation, the 3 color-coded walls that you need to keep on top of clearing “brick eaters” from, but while I find the task itself to be mindless fun, once you clear a screen, there’s a lack of that feeling of accomplishment caused by you having infinite lives. To have a higher score, you don’t need to survive longer; you just need to have not put the controller down the longest, which, for whatever reason, makes it feel less satisfying to me. The simple look on a black screen does remind me of another game, though:

Nightmare – 1983 - Odyssey² This has you attempting to escape a mansion that’s being rather conductive in a lightning storm while dangerous ghosts are about! The exit is right there! Can you make it? How about in competitive multiplayer, where a human controls the ghost, making the whole experience reminiscent of the 1972’s Haunted House for the Odyssey 1? It also makes me wonder how people still felt about single-screen games at the time. Sometimes you paid more than Pitfall and found out you bought another Pac-Man clone that got a 7 out of 10 from the reviewer you saw despite being called middle of the road, which you’d think is a 5 since even the publication said that’s a 5. Hmm…

Dracula – 1983 - Intellivision Perhaps the most impressive horror game of 1983 for me is Dracula for the Intellivision. It’s visually dense yet fast-paced and dynamic while taking place in a seamless world in which you could transform on the fly to explore weather, causing lightning effects and a day and night cycle! You’re a nocturnal member of this ecosystem of predators and prey, from wolves that attack ground animals to flying members of this ecosystem like vultures! As a vampire, you hunt humans, scope out their houses, see them home through the windows, and try to get them to open the door to come out, as you can’t come in without being invited, and they won’t open the door if they see you’re a vampire through the window beforehand. You’ll also want to avoid the dangerous constables taking a stand against you! You may overwhelm them by switching to a zombie, which themselves are a result of being bitten by you, turning from one part of the ecosystem to another. Just remember what happens to vampires during the daytime. As the manual puts it, Dracula, “my man, I’d say you’ve got some grave problems!” I find myself favoring dynamic systems over scripted set pieces in games, and this delivers in spades!

Forbidden Forrest – 1983 – C64, Atari 8-bit Forbidden Forest may not have as complex a living world as Dracula for the Intellivision, but had an impressive use of parallax scrolling, creating a greater feeling of perspective in motion to sell said dangerous nature you’re exploring! While not exactly smoothly transitioning, there is a change in color palette to denote a darker time of night with stars shining brighter in the darker night sky and the moon slowly progressing. I always see it referred to as a day and night cycle, but it doesn’t cycle or become day. It seems to just go from evening to so early in the morning that the sun hasn’t risen yet. I see how this game puts people on edge. The giant snake positioned behind the trees, the Demogorgon’s position being revealed by lightning strikes—the presentation is incredible! Two years later, a sequel would even play more with moving in the Z axis, giving it a 3D playing field long before the 2003 remake, though there was no shortage of 3D games in 1983:

Crypts of Chaos – 1983 February - VCS If slow-paced but real-time horror is your preference, a game whose name is evoked occasionally in horror discussions is Crypts of Chaos! An FPS for the VCS where you explore a dark labyrinth of creepy halls. Outside of long-range firing, your ultimate weapon is a ring that can steal monsters' life force for yourself, but you have limited 'munition for the ring too, and ammo isn’t just lying on the floor! You’ll need to work quite a bit, taking all eight layers of a floor before advancing to the next floor for just 10 extra shots and 2 extra ring charges. If you squander your supplies, you may have to fall back to your blade for close-quarters combat! Of course you can always try to talk your way out of situations, but not every monster is one that can be reasoned with. Real-time combat is something I always have an appreciation for, and there can be an extra layer of tension from real-time switching of your weapon while something is still barreling at you! I’d describe the aiming as original RE4 minus the Y axis. You’re pretty free in aiming but can’t move and aim simultaneously. This also creates a feeling of random battles, as once something spots you, you’re locked into your action menu to talk or fight but not run. There’s even a 180-degree turn button in your action menu, but it’s un-pressable if a monster is in your sights. This game is definitely not for everyone, and I would not call the graphics good for VCS given the other first-person games on the console, but I find it captures the atmosphere of its cover art and is a very interesting curiosity.

Monster Mansion – 1982 – Cassette Vision During the second console generation, many went back to the format of having swappable games to be sold separately, like the early days of the first generation. Epoch followed suit, allowing for a greater variety of games to be made for the same platform, being their second-gen console, the Cassette Vision. They’d release Monster Mansion in 1982, where young Taro attempts to rescue one being held… in a monster-filled mansion! You’ll need a crucifix to take out grunt monsters, who will run when they realize you’re armed, like ghosts in Pac-Man. That being said, this game is overall an example of the Donkey Kong-like genre sweeping through. 2 years later, Elevator Panic would essentially be a sequel to Monster Mansion, but with elevators. You might think, their visuals, less detailed than what was achieved with Monster Panic, but to go the opposite direction, at the same time, Sega was approaching this kind of fast-paced side-scrolling monster game in an arcade cabinet.

Monster Bash – 1982 – cabinet Monster Bash has its hero’s focus being not on the rescuing part of Donkey Kong but the defeating the antagonist part, as in this game there are 3 iconic monsters to challenge: Count Dracula’s bat-infested house, Frankenstein’s castle that you’ll find, not only has his monster freely lurking about for you to hunt, but the place is infested with wolfmen, and of course, there’s the Chameleon Man’s bug-rich, that's top-down to shake things up! Imagine Donkey Kong being able to freely move about. That’s what this game does, giving you more to keep track of like a true duel in these environments.

“Beware… playing Atari can be pretty hair-raising!”

Haunted House – (seemingly copyrighted in 1981 and released in 1982) - VCS If you’re up for a slower-paced horror game, though, this is also when Atari released quite the impactful horror game for their console. I’d preface this with a flashing light warning because 1982’s Haunted House is about exploring in the darkness with only the sound and flashes of lightning through the window, briefly illuminating the environment as well as the small illumination of a match. The idea of exploring a pitch-black house at night, infested with tarantulas!? Now that’s scary… and, when thinking of ways to only draw what’s necessary in a game, having only the player’s expressive animating eyes is an impressive idea to me. The game is about a magic urn that was the heirloom of the first family of Spirit Bay. During an earthquake in 1890, it shattered into pieces that the townsfolk believe were kept by Zachary Graves, who wasn’t very liked in the town. He was an introvert who would spend most of his life in his decaying 4-story house before passing with his residence being condemned. Urban legends that it’s haunted would emerge, but so would the tale that the scepter old man Graves carried was so he could ward off spirits, which is where you come in. You are to enter the condemned tarantula-infested house in complete darkness (some of whose rooms haven’t been entered in 50 years) and perhaps find this scepter, hoping it protects you so you can finally try to find this urn of legend.

With one hand being used to hold matches, you could only hold one thing at a time in the other. For example, having to drop the scepter to pick up a key to unlock a door. Shoulda come wearin’ pockets, or perhaps they’re full of matchbooks that are also under your arms and filling your shoes as you can light matches to your heart’s content. For a task so daring, you can be easily startled, as encountering anything can blow out your match, and anything from bats to spiders touching you can fatally scare you. Interestingly, the scepter is better than the legends say, as it will ward off anything from the one ghost to bats and spiders on the easier difficulties. There’s 9 difficulties in total, including a training mode that illuminates the entire mansion, removes the doors/keys, and only has 1 of each enemy type in the mansion. The game, in general, felt fairer than I’d expect, like the music playing notes going up in pitch when ascending stairs and notes going down in pitch when descending them. It’s also nice that the camera scrolls with you, with each floor being its own screen instead of each room being a screen to load into. After finding all the pieces of the urn, you can make a mad dash out of there to see how you scored, which takes into consideration how many matches you’ve used as well as how many of your 9 lives. Even without the advantage of the most popular home console of the second generation’s install base, I can see why this has stood the test of time as a popular horror game that I’ve seen brought up so often!

Horror vs. Scary I think the idea of Haunted House for the VCS being considered more horror than Monster Bash is an example of “horror” being used interchangeably with the word “scary,” which is something I’ve noticed more in recent years. As I’ve always known it, horror refers to the intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust, and when used as a genre, also categorizes the use of horror iconography, like using Universal Monster designs for something like Monster Bash that isn’t necessarily trying to evoke the feelings of horror but celebrate how cool its designs and settings are. A good example being that to most people, House of the Dead is not scary, but it is a horror game. I say good example because it’s one commonly agreed upon, but there’s games with much less consensus.

Lucifer’s Realm – 1981 – Atari 8-bit Lucifer’s Realm is a game where you find out your paperwork has gotten mixed up and, instead of going to heaven, you go the opposite, where you find out a former leader whose silver tongue is matched only by the devil raised the question of if the devil’s ability to get people behind him could be surpassed over the millennia of people coming in, with you entering an underworld where you might be shocked to find Satan is no longer the ruler, as he had once lost the war to a new empire. Not letting that undermine his own silver tongue, he asks you to join his rebellion in exchange for promising to fix your mistaken sentence, but how much do you trust this? Now this game seems like a dark comedy, but with the imagery you encounter, I can see why people also call it a horror game, and it is quite the horrifying situation to find yourself in, but so is Lunar Lander, and I wouldn’t consider that a horror game.

Here’s the thing. Anything can be horror to someone, which is why I never scoff at something being referred to as a horror game, though genres that refer to gameplay, I have stricter definitions for.

Action Horror Perspectives like first person are as strict as genres get. On the opposite end, the term action horror is almost meaningless, as everyone has their own arbitrary line for when a game has too much combat. Action really only means real-time when it comes to video games, and anything from Dead Ops Arcade to the original Alone in the Dark fits this.

"I got a shotgun"

Survival Horror Now survival horror is a subgenre of horror that almost lost having any definition in the 2010s after being used interchangeably by so many to just mean horror games overall. Slender: The Arrival called itself a survival horror game, and I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t call it the same subgenre of horror as Dino Crisis, and it wasn’t uncommon at the time to interpret the term survival horror to simply mean a horror game where the goal is to survive dying, labeling every horror game where you can die a survival horror game. Originally, survival horror was a genre that gained traction because they were horror games where you could fight back with satisfying combat that refreshingly distinguished survival horror from both horror games where you’re powerless and ones where you’re too powerful to worry. To make it simple, survival horror meant Resident Evil-like, and I still think that’s the best use of the term because any broadening beyond that will make it a meaningless distinction from any other type of horror game. The point of a subgenre is to specify what kind of horror you’re talking about, so do you consider a game to be a Resident Evil 1-8-like? If no, then it wouldn’t be a survival horror, and I’m glad that use of the term came back around after the 2010s… is coming back around anyway. Again, the definition of genres is subjective. The reason I’m doing this is to let you know which definition I go with so you can better understand what I mean when I use the term. Within the context of the original marketing term, “the world of survival horror” was a challenge to survive this specific gameplay style of limited ammo, healing, and even saves. As opposed to any game where you can die, it was the survival genre, as in a resource management game. The core of survival horror is how limited supplies affect the thrill of combat. Without the limited supplies, it wouldn’t be a survival horror, and without the combat, it also wouldn’t be survival horror.

AX-2: 宇宙輸送船ノストロモ (AX-2: Space Transport Nostromo) – 1981 – PC-6001 ASCII Publishing’s AX series are collections of games, with 1981’s AX-2 being alien-themed. You have Steal Alien, which is like Space Panic, but instead of the goal being to get every alien into a hole, that’s just to defend yourself as you find all the money. Dual Alien, the twist is that you’re controlling 2 people on the left and right boards simultaneously with the aliens moving independently, forcing you to strategize how every movement affects the other you. In The Woods has you exploring poisonous woods to collect diamonds, but without the ability to stop moving, it’s like navigating a car through a multi-story parking lot with no brakes. The Dante’s Inferno of AX-2’s Divine Comedy is Nostromo, where you break through walls to get material out of rooms without being touched by a seemingly invincible pursuer. This game is looked back upon more than the other games in this collection because it was sometimes called “the first survival horror game,” like Hunt the Wumpus is, though I’d lean more toward a Wumpus game holding the title because I’d consider Pac-Man a survival horror before this game. Nostromo is more of a Clocktower/Outlast-style game. Back in the 2010s, I never really heard of an accepted name for this subgenre of horror games, but nowadays, I hear them referred to as chase games the most, which makes me happy. The convenience of having more defined subgenres is to sum up what you’re looking for within a genre to sort if it’s a horror game like Ju-On, Evil Within, or White Day because if you’re in the mood for one, they’re probably not gonna scratch each other’s itch, so I find it beneficial to categorize them in different subgenres. If you want a top-down Dino Crisis, Nostromo is not it, but if you want a top-down White Day, it is.

Action Adventure Games In the tape for this article, I showed footage of the survival horror Wikipedia page to show how bloated consensus on the definition got in the 2010s, but one thing I consider to be an improvement is survival horror less being called a subgenre of action-adventure, as that might be the most unproductive label in all of video games. While action can communicate real-time, which would bar games like Hunt the Wumpus, Sweet Home, and probably the 1980 House of Usher, which technically had a form of active-time battle? To be frank, the adventure part is becoming word salad. It’s not like this is its own thing from the adventure genre either; every big place from GOG to IMDb will communicate action-adventure as something being both the action tag and adventure tag. I doubt most people see Nostromo and think ADVENT. I think when games like The Curse of Crowley Manor were referred to as adventure games, it was to communicate their main meat was their unfolding plot instead of communicating anything about gameplay. You’re a Scotland Yard detective trying to solve a case with supernatural twists happening. What the gameplay of that looks like is not described in that. Not even if the adventure ever ends, which some adventure games generate their unfolding plot indefinitely, so does adventure communicate narrative progression? Nostromo doesn’t fit that unless the unacknowledged story we make in gameplay or the existence of a premise makes every game an adventure game. Some people consider adventure to focus on exploration, which is not how I’d describe a single-screen game like Nostromo or the Uncharted trilogy’s keep-going-forward-into-the-corridor-shaped-level design. To others, the vibe of an adventure game is their MacGyver-esque puzzles, but is that how you’d describe Nostromo or Uncharted? Am I thinking too hard about this? Yes, but how useful is a label that incorporates every game from Crowley to Uncharted to Nostromo? The point of this article is to explore more productive use of subgenres, and in the case of “adventure,” I’m not sure I see a use in the label anymore. You know what I mean when I say “point-and-click game” without the word salad of “adventure” added to it. Even in the case of Crowley Manor, my whole life, I’ve seen people call “graphic adventures,” “text adventures,” and both simply “text games,” referring not to their display but their input, and I’m leaning more toward that being a far more useful description.

Dread Horror Speaking of Crowley, I’ll never forget someone saying they didn’t want to watch Nick Crowley’s videos because they were depressing-scary, which is why they like Nuke’s Top 5, which the find more their preference of light-hearted scary. Even within the subjective question of “Is a game scary?” lies the further question of “What kind of scary?” Take something like 1981’s NORAD for the Apple II, where you fend off nukes in a time of fearing WW3 would break out. I can easily see why people consider this sort of nuclear fiction to be horror. Part of horror is dread; however, The Alien for Apple II is also a management strategy game. You’re managing a research vessel where a professor tells you the alien she was working on escaped, causing a lab animal break-out! Both this and NORAD are immediate danger, whose consequences I imagine the visceralness of. Both cause tension and fear of failure to equal degrees to me, but I imagine most people see where I’m coming from in drawing a distinction between the feeling of dread in a WW3 horror and the fear of a monster movie like The Alien goes for. Both are the fear type of horror but different subgenres of fear. You might say it’s the distinction between the dread in 2024’s Mouthwashing and the dread in 2014’s Alien: Isolation.

Epoch

Tokyo toy company, Epoch, has some interesting contributions to video games. From their 1-game-built-in home console, Electrotennis, in 1975 with the controls on the wireless console itself, to, their 1984 Game Pocket Computer’s ability to play it’s locally stored built-in games on top of being a handheld with separate swap-able games. I also always liked that it has a little window so you can see inserted cartridges’ label art. In 1981, they’d offer us MONSTER PANIC! A 1-game-built-in handheld where you’re awarded for every accession of 3 floors of iconic monsters from Donkey Kong-ing a mummy to sword fighting a skeleton. On the first floor is Frankenstein’s monster alongside Dracula and the following year they would release Dracula House, a more complex 1-game-built-in handheld where you are to break into a vampire nest and try to sneak up to their caskets to rob them without being caught! You’ll even have to worry about locked doors!

Bandai’s Solar Games

Bandai are always the first I think of when thinking of early 80s handhelds. They advertised solar power for their 1-game-built-in handhelds, and they had some sleek clamshell designs. In Frankenstein, you play as him, scrambling around the lab before needing to deal with your monster out in the world, as their handhelds could have multiple scenes! They have Invaders of the Mummy’s Tomb, where you fight your way through the desert into a tomb to be faced with those rising mummies who might spook you but not away from a little tomb raiding. You have 謎の沈没, which I’d translate as Mystery of the Sunken Ship, where you dive into shark-infested waters with a speargun and face a horde of sharks darting at you before making it into the sunken ship to see what lies within. Spoiler alert, it’s the rising dead! 1982 would also bring the world 悪霊の館, usually translated as Terror House, which is the Bandai handheld I see brought up the most to this day. I think it’s all in the branding too. Truly, it’s just Bandai’s Monster Panic but with 2 scenes. (1 inside the house and 1 outside, approaching the house) The opening of its commercial, however, is what burned Bandai into my head as the face of early 80s handhelds, with a man clad in scarlet red slowly looking up to present the game to you before growing scared himself as he tries to keep calm the Grim Reaper behind the camera, casting his distinct, menacing shadow with his arm and scythe raised as they are in-game. Instead of 3 floors, there is 2 with the Grim Reaper and Frankenstein's monster on the first and Dracula on the second.

Digi Casse

When Epoch released the Game Pocket Computer with its separate, swappable games, Bandai dropped the Digi Casse (as in Digital Cassette). This runs on those round, silver, watch-style batteries. When I first saw the Milton Bradley Microvision, I initially questioned if the window on the massive cartridges that covers the front of the device was the game screen, and that’s the case with the Digi Casse, where the screen is built into the cartridges that take up the top half of the device. Now I want you to imagine how horrifying Mount Fuji erupting would be. Now what if monsters were erupting out? That’s what you’ll face in 富士山大爆発, which you can translate as Mount Fuji eruption/explosion! Picture Space Panic, but instead of digging holes for the aliens to fall into, you want to be on the platform above them and shovel dirt on top of them, though if they jump up at you, you can hit them with your shovel!

Game & Watch

You know, I’ve always been surprised video games built into wrist watches didn’t take off. I’d expect that to have the always-on-you convenience of phone games today but I’ll admit my vision of them being games like Break-Out played on a rotating bezel, vortex style or maybe just sim card sized game cards to buy addition games is an expensive feat of engineering to risk. Instead the word “watch” turned out better for Nintendo’s Game Boy Micro/DS shaped Game & Watches. Now I never considered horror game & watches and yet I found people adding some to horror lists and I realized that I was only blind-sighted by this because I’m in the minority who aren’t absolutely terrified of sharks! I didn’t realize how many people don’t even go the ocean at the beach because they’re nervously thinking about shark attacks. It reminds me of people with Thalassophobia that can’t handle boat rides. In finding worlds to transport themselves to in video games, they would see games like Life Boat or Parachute where you’re rescuing people from shark infested waters as a horror scenario to imagine yourself in!

Game Boy Nintendo’s been in the commercial video game business since before Pong! They had a part in what might be the earliest known example of purchasable games for your home console with Shooting Gallery for the Magnavox Odyssey. I guess that makes it poetic that that would make them the ones to finally break through a handheld supporting swappable games into mass popularity with the Game Boy! Its games often mirrored the game design of their third-generation console, which was the most popular home PC of its time. As a matter of fact, it shared a portion of its horror library, like Swamp Thing, Kid Dracula, Gremlins 2, Alien 3, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It even got ports from elsewhere that the famous NES never seemed to get, like Bubble Ghost, Godzilla(kun), and the infamous case where Kemco cloned the Amiga game P. P. Hammer and his Pneumatic Weapon as Mickey Mouse IV: 魔法のラビリンス (The Labyrinth of Magic), bringing it to Europe as Garfield: Labyrinth, and then bringing it to the United States as The Real Ghostbusters. As you might suspect, this results in the region’s IPs being unfitting skins over Pneaumatic Weapon like using your proton pack to dig up things in the ground. Thankfully the Game Boy already had HAL Laboratory’s Ghostbusters 2. A great adaptation that’s an example of a handheld game getting a home console sequel.

Another being the Ghost and Goblins spin-off Gargoyle’s Quest which I often see compared to Dragon Quest but I might compare it more to Zelda 2 where you have top-down world to explore with towns and people to talk to while combat takes you to real-time side-scrolling with the verticality you’d expect of Ghosts ‘n Goblins and you are winged gargoyle after all. You’d think the simple quick games would dominate the handheld form factor but it seemed to be a mix with these larger games packed with text boxes and save systems. The Game Boy of course is the birth place of the highest grossing media franchise in humanity’s history, Pokemon, which itself loves to use horror from the Lumiose City ghost girl to the first game’s death themed dungeon being in Lavender Town that’s gained QUITE the sizable fanbase as a horror location, inspiring much! On a side note, I always found it funny that people express how scary they find the error messages in the Game Boy’s camera app to be. If you do things like try to start a slideshow with no pictures selected or try to run from a battle with no enemies too much, you may get an error message like “Who are you running from?” accompanied by one of 3 pictures of people with things drawn over them. I can see how an unexpected picture of a strange man in low resolution monochrome, drawn over can be creepy and with the accompanying long sound that plays, I can’t tell if it’s unintentional. It has that “Please insert a PlayStation or PlayStation 2 format disc” error message energy. It borders that “fun is infinite” from Sonic CD energy… and I love that! If you’re in charge of software, make the error messages as scary as possible! I love hearing what makes people scared in games. It can be the silliest thing sometimes.

Dracula: The Undead- 1991 – Lynx While Nintendo would dominate the market with the Game Boy, the power-hungry still had the option to pay more than twice as much to sacrifice that portability for more horsepower! Also releasing in 1989, the Atari Lynx offered color, 16-bit games, but, for horror fans, Dracula: The Undead wouldn't need all those colors. With fixed camera angles, it uses those color capabilities to mimic the look of a sepia-toned film from the time of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, which this game has him read to you. You take on the role of Jonathan Harker trying to survive this classic horror. Probably to avoid hitting you with too much exposition and lack of gameplay, you could see Bram doesn’t read through the first few pages and seems to rush through and summarize, which makes me feel they missed out on the mood setting and mystery of those scenes.

The Alien Syndrome Trilogy Competitors are always around every corner in the handheld market, and in 1990, Sega aimed to compete with the Game Boy, using the strength they held over Nintendo in that home market (being that they had a fourth-generation console out for years and Nintendo still hadn’t.) The Sega Game Gear had some interesting exclusives, like a sequel to 1987’s Alien Syndrome. The original arcade game saw Ricky and Marry rescuing comrades from a horrifying infestation. The Game Gear sequel, set and released 5 years later, sees a space transport send out a mayday as they’re faced with an unknown creature, plunging Ricky and Marry back into action against this universe’s unsung monster designs. The variety of enemies can really capture the feeling of walking through the hallways, on edge at what you’re going to see next. In 2007, there would even be a third game taking place 100 years later, seeing Aileen Harding enter a ship fallen to the syndrome! Keeping true to the previous games, it’s also a rescue mission, but now you get to see some of these designs in polygons!

PC Engine GT/Turbo Express The NEC PC Engine is known as starting the fourth generation but what I always think of them for is having a handheld that took their current premium console’s physical games! Being able to pull your game out of your console and put it in you handheld means you may already have a library! Now that’s a true companion! While the game cards the home system used included games like Samurai-Ghost and Devil’s Crush but quite a few notable titles like Horror Story, Godzilla: Battle Legends and even the fun them Them parody, it came from the desert, are for the CD attachment… I guess you could attach that too the GT since it doubles as a portable TV but how handheld is that really? Without all that, the PC Engine is still farther than I’ve ever seen a 20th century handheld take things. I know the Sega Nomad took Genesis games, by the time it came out, Genesis was Sega’s last gen offerings. With the Game Boy Pocket soon shrinking the Game Boy even more, it really highlighted how the competition was like trying carry around a 1970’s cellphone and their 3 hour battery life was not so acceptable in a time where most people were buying disposable batteries every time they ran out of juice. Things like the GT, Game Gear, and Lynx are novel but niche because they went too far in the power direction while others like the Gamate and Supervision felt a almost a generation behind the sweet spot that was the bar that Nintendo’s Family Computer raised games to.

Virtual Boy You’d think VR and horror games would be a match made in heaven, and yet, despite VR being around since at least the 60s, there’s not a lot of 20th-century examples. Over those decades of refinement, VR had become so approachable that Nintendo saw an opportunity to make their cheap portable headset, but that fatal flaw of being too scared to ship with a head strap seemed to deflate its entire library, making you constantly crane your neck into its desk stand. To this day, you need to buy third-party headstraps for Switch VR to cut down on the number of people walking down the stairs while playing BOTW, and unlike modern Nintendo VR that has head tracking, Virtual Boy decided that without a headstrap, they’d just cut it. All of that being said, Virtual Boy might be the most well-known VR device of the 20th century, one of the most well-known VR devices in history, and if you could only pick one color for a game to have, red would be the stereotypical one for horror.

Insmouse – 1995 Oct 13 – Virtual Boy Insmouse is an FPS survival horror game taking place in 1922 Massachusetts. You play as a detective offered an incredible payday if you find a book in the infamous forest locals are too scared to go near. Once you find this book, however, you realize what this is all about. It’s the Necronomicon, and the curiosity was irresistible! You just had to crack open the book to just get a peek…and with that… you are on quite the horror adventure to hopefully get to one of the game’s multiple endings. You have a limited amount of time to make it out of time-sensitive sections of the mansion full of Lovecraft-inspired horrors!

Tiger Electronics Now the Virtual Boy was not as relatively cheap as buying an attachment for your phone in 2014. You could buy 3 Game Boys for the price of it, but having gained a reputation as the cheap alternative to even Nintendo is Tiger Electronics. They’re probably best known for their 1-game-built-in handhelds but did have ones with swappable games like the Quiz Wiz, testing your knowledge with Monster Mania, or the R-Zone that really exudes Tiger’s reputation. You could pay $180 for Nintendo’s portable VR or $30 for Tiger Electronic’s 1-eyed AR games (with headstrap) and enjoy perhaps sub-second console generation quality games like Area 51 reflected off a transparent lens. They did try to release a premium handheld console for $70 that had everything from a touchscreen and stylus to (wired) internet. Being called the Gamecom but spelled with a period between the “Game” and “com” to presumably promote the website functionality, it would be the home of an RE2 port often looked down on for its great compromises. The system seemed to not do well, being short-lived, with them quickly refining it to also be $30 by the end of the 90s. The 1990s are when smartphones started popping up as everything was becoming a PDA to replace daybooks, and I view the Gamecom as an example of that move to making everything an all-in-one PDAs.

The Virtual Pet Craze In 1994, the MT-2000 phone launched and could play Tetris. You might imagine phone games like Nokia’s Hustle clone, Snake, in 1997 would begin to eat into people’s need to buy a separate handheld to play games, but even the simplest thing that’s fun can sell hardware. Perhaps it was better for them to not go big to compete as PDAs at the time and instead go tiny like keychains you don’t even need to put in your pocket. While people were playing their Tiger Electronics’ Giga Pets Salem the cat, Bandai, who had found much success with Tamagotchi, were trying to figure out how to get male players interested in this craze. Pokemon pulled it off the previous year, so Bandai would become their competitor with the Digital Monster. Raising and caring for collectible pets to battle each other, both Pocket and Digital monsters became the handheld equivalent of the pastime of children collecting bugs to battle each other. This tiny keychain form factor would continue from big companies.

Memory Handhelds 1998 would see Sega release the VMU (Visual Memory Unit) in July with a Digital Monster-like green Godzilla one. Its name, of course, being for its planned purpose of being a companion to Sega’s upcoming sixth-generation home console. It served as portable storage and a second screen experience that slotted right into controllers, like showing your health in Resident Evil games, and, being a dedicated handheld, some Dreamcast games even have companion VMU games where you can earn rewards to be transferred into the home game. PlayStation’s mascot, Toro Inoue, comes from their similar handheld, the PocketStation, released 6 months later. It's also a dedicated handheld, but instead of slotting into controllers, it slid into the memory card slot. You might be surprised what names supported it, from Megami Tensei to Digimon itself, bringing a multiplayer monster-battling Pokémon counterpart to PlayStation players. Both the VMU and PocketStation would be discontinued about 3 years after their release, and I’m surprised they seem so seldom looked back on compared to other handhelds of the 20th century. Maybe it’s their form factor running into the conundrum of making them as small as possible to be portable while still trying to make them large enough to be ergonomic to play while also thinking about how complex they want to make games on a keychain form factor, resulting in them undershooting complexity. I think this is where the PS Vita would one day misstep with its first-party library, but in the opposite direction by making games that seem more appropriate for the home console form factor than the handheld one. Still, I love the pure aesthetic of these handhelds!

Game Boy Color Between Sega and PlayStation’s handhelds, after nearly 10 years, the Game Boy would get a sequel in the Game Boy Color, featuring double the clock speed, 4 times the RAM, and backwards compatibility with… most Game Boy games… but it has an insane library of its own to sink your teeth into, though some games marked Game Boy Color would actually have an original Game Boy cartridge inside thanks to the backwards compatibility. To be clear, Game Boy Color games have clear cartridges and will specify they are for GBC only. There’s also the GBA that came out 3 years later and is backwards compatible with GB and GBC but seems to have its own hang-ups on what games it can’t play or plays poorly. Whether your favorite vampire hunter is Blade or Buffy, there’s a game for you. Whether you want a more serious fixed-camera survival horror, a Universal monster game, an Aliens, or… Smurfs Nightmare… there’s a game for you! Maybe you just want a new Ghostbusters, Addams Family, or Gremlins game for the new hardware. So many gems, but today I’m going for a mineral less valued.

Godzilla: The Series – 1999 – GBC Somehow it slipped my mind that the TriStar Godzilla got an animated series continuing the story, and I only recently learned that series got games like this! A slow-moving auto-runner with auto-generating health and block meters that squanders the fact that this is one of the most agile incarnations of Godzilla. The story is told through chatroom-looking text box exchanges with character portraits to set the stage of what episode you’re playing through, but I feel there had to be more exciting parts of the show to recreate and faster-paced gameplay. The variety of locations makes it feel fresh, but the slow pacing kills the overall game. I don’t know if a priced GBC game is the place for a less than hour and a half long auto-runner, but even within that genre, I think the 1988 Godzilla auto-runner everyone makes fun of is more fun because it’s faster!

Godzilla: The Series: Monster Wars – 2000 – GBC First and foremost, this game is no longer an auto-scroller. You can’t go backwards, but having control over walking forward aids you with how health and block meters are no longer regenerating. You’ll need to target health and defense pickups with your breath that now has an on-screen cursor. These games make the game so much more interesting. Whereas there is little worry in the previous game as you slowly rampage forward, this makes the game a challenge to rise to and overcome. The difficulty can even complement the slower pacing as you inch forward, trying not to overwhelm yourself. This game also doesn’t have a footstep sound, which played constantly in the first game. I assume this is to reduce repetitiveness in the audio design, which I’ve heard some complain about. I’m also more interested in the giant monsters they have you face at the end of stages in this game, so while I’m not sure that I would agree with this being the gameplay to go with for a Godzilla game, it’s fascinating and commendable to see how they changed the gameplay of a game that I only see negative opinions of to try to improve it, even if most people don’t seem to like it in the end.

WonderSwan Mr. Game & Watch himself Gunpei Yokoi founded Koto Laboratory before his untimely passing, with perhaps his last work being on the WonderSwan, which is appropriately named, as I consider it the swan song of Bandai’s presence in big handheld gaming hardware. Whether you’re playing a port like Clocktower, fresh adaptations like Uzumaki got, or an original sequel like Ghosts ‘n Goblins received, the WonderSwan has a library that might pique your interest. You have visual novels like the Terrors games or, my favorite:

リング ∞ (Ring: Infinity) – 2000 – WonderSwan Yes, the series about a cursed tape that acts as a chain letter where, if you don’t get someone else to watch it, its subject, Sadako, will have you referred to in the past tense. Ring: Infinity is about the culture of trading VHS tapes at school, which is such a great setting for The Ring! Think of the skepticism and daringness of teenagers, on top of the fact that you were often trading VHS tapes that weren’t labeled! The setting combined with the writing is such a great mix of hanging out with friends in a nostalgic time with a horror wrench thrown into the mix as rumors of a cursed videotape start to feel more and more real, especially after someone at your school is taken by cardiac arrest, leading to a suspicion that she saw the tape and worry you did too. Sometimes memories are preserved in dreams, and you have one matching the rumors of the tape’s description, but is your brain just creating that because it’s on your mind, or are you actually remembering seeing it mixed in with the random tapes you fall asleep to? There’s an interesting conversation you can have with a schoolmate where you speculate the rules of what counts as seeing the tape, like what if it was only in your peripheral vision while you were focusing on something else? The game can hit you with these new ways of thinking about The Ring. If the curse is the negative energy of Sadako getting onto you, wouldn’t filming someone who is cursed be like copying the tape? The most fascinating to think about to me is a scene where you deep dive online to learn about the tape and see people on the internet are talking about it! Usually these kinds of ghost stories present a feeling of isolation, as if the situation is only happening to the protagonist and everyone else who finds out keeps it a secret, but this game presents the interesting idea that after striking so much, all of society is becoming aware of Sadako’s existence. It gave the later game a feeling of county-wide panic, and the most genius thing was not knowing if you saw it or not! Are you attending a girl’s wake to sneak up to her room, hiding from the footsteps of her family members as you look for a copy of the tape to pass on for nothing!? What if you’re not cursed and you’re going to curse yourself!? Also, since the game isn’t rated, I have no idea how dark the story can get, which is a fear in itself. Outside of the game, I find its presence online interesting. People speculated for 16 years after it came out on how to get the best ending, DLC story to track down, and even just speculate on the motives of characters in the story.

Now to set the mood a bit…

My experience with the show, Inuyasha It’s 2002, and I’m in someone else’s house trying to get some shut-eye with the only illumination being a TV I’m watching from a sofa-bed when an episode of some new series comes on where bodies are rising with the body language of holding a puppet in the air by its strings. Turns out they’re being marionette’d by HAIR, and they’ll come right at you with knives! Of course I fall asleep and dream about this situation but have no idea what I saw. There’s a mystique to television with no guide, no rewind feature, no history, or recommended finding the right thing for you. Just pure, random art that you may never see again. You could spend the rest of your life wondering. In this case, I had a hunch about that art style and got the name off the girl at school who had all the anime VHSs, but instead of risking her trading me a cursed tape, I filed its name in my head and put it off until I stopped watching shows as a whole, with it keeping the mystique of being some horror thing I saw in the middle of the night and remembered for almost 25 years. I’ve occasionally thought about this scene where someone looks down a well at the remains of a centipede-human monster, once faced. Now it’s time to finally find out what it was.

犬夜叉 〜かごめの戦国日記 (Inuyasha: Kagome’s Sengoku Diary) – 2001 – WonderSwan Color The Inuyasha show was by Bandai’s film company, called Sunrise at the time, and across its initial run was a trilogy of games for their new WonderSwan Color that take you through the show’s story. The premise is that a modern middle schooler stumbles upon an ancient, monster-filled world through a well by her house. There she finds the demon, Inuyasha, who her ancestor once bested, sealed away. She has the power to subjugate this demon to combat the horrors of this new world, like the centipede-human, who has such a fun design. I’d describe the combat as Pokemon-light, where it’s turn-based with a menu for you to bark at the demon to attack, block, dodge, or use his own judgment with a whole temperament system, as combat really isn’t the main meat of this game. It seems first and foremost to be a teen girl romance novel, which I was not expecting! I did begin to suspect it when looking at the pink, frilly manual and commercials for the games. Now, you’re not trapped in the past. You can go back and forth to the present whenever you want (though so can other things) to access your diary and ask your mom for snacks, but your protagonist, Kagome, will be too nervous to ask for more than one snack per return to her house, commenting her mom might get mad. Meanwhile, in the past, you have Inuyasha, the dog boy, to build a relationship with and adventure alongside your fantasy friend group into a world of classic mythological horror. I can easily see the appeal of what's essentially an episodic visual novel, with how much of the game is just text boxes with people standing around, but also mini-games you can access whenever you want on the go and maybe even a little farming if you find an exploit to Mom giving you snacks like I did. This game is easy to digest and carried on the back of its setting’s aesthetic, but I think its moment-to-moment writing, audio, and visual design sell its source material short. I’m not recommending they try to recreate every camera angle of the scenes with Mode 7-esque graphics because that’s a lot of sprites, but a Ring ∞ wouldn't need to always show to paint a scene's picture, and its audio design had the restraint this game sometimes lacks. Sometimes I worry that people are seeing the sprites of a game instead of them being building blocks for your imagination to complete, and a lot of that can be on the game designers. Player agency isn’t just part of gameplay but visual design and writing. At the beginning of the game, they were able to keep up with showing a variety of imagery, but overall I notice this game’s scenes neither show NOR TELL. There’s a general lack of scene setting and flavor text to guide one’s imagination into seeing anything other than the characters in idol poses reciting dialogue. Even if you’ve seen the show to remember what the scenes look like, this can’t be a particularly satisfying recreation of these moments to relive. This is an overall fine game but with a valuable lesson to learn from.

Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 – 1999 Oct 21 – Neo Geo Pocket Color One day, I need to tackle the overall Beast Busters series, but no time soon, and no confusion will be felt not playing the previous 2 when jumping into this dungeon crawler. You are a foreigner to the dark, monster-filled realm and entered a contract with the master who teaches you to steal souls to develop bioweapons with him that you can use in gameplay, and he lets you stay at his house! From there you can venture out into the horror world that I found so interesting to explore! The circus was so inspiring as a horror location, and I felt the dread of approaching its entrance and wondering what it’s going to look like inside the tent. It did not disappoint me with its 2 rooms of pure horror. The game’s story, likewise, gives you a lot of gameplay in between to think about it as it slowly unfolds, feeling like a reward for that gameplay. It’s complemented by the contextualization of you living in a house where your bed, bio-weapon toolshed, and roommate to talk to and build your arsenal with are. You adventuring into the world from this save room achieves a feeling that you’re exploring out into a changing world thanks to the way it directs how you interact with its levels, including day and night, affecting what lurks about. Bravo on this horror game!

Insane asylums are a trope of horror for good reason. Being legally kidnapped over accusations akin to witch hunts to possibly be forever imprisoned to conditions that worsened many’s mental and physical health IF you survived being tortured, vivisected, or tied to something so long that your skin begins to grow over your restraints as you wait endlessly in a crowded pile of waste and malnutrition with the ambiance of adult screams and many committing even children through virtually no evidence to simply be rid of someone they don’t like or see as in their way. The history of asylums is a horror effective by even referencing, which can be used efficiently by horror games.

asylum – 1981 Feb – TRS-80 The duo of Frank Corr and William F. Denman would bring a new first-person escape game, but this time, it’s an asylum escape at night. You have until 5:30 am to make it out of the asylum’s anxiety-inducing layout filled with inmates you may have to ask help from and staff that’ll catch you! Your captivity can be made worse as you’ll have to deal with things like stealing a uniform or being forced into a straitjacket in your attempt to escape overnight. This game showed me the importance of red herrings. They can make the world feel large instead of everything serving a purpose and feeling like the world revolves around the player instead of the player being in a world that functions when they’re not there. Perhaps the most notorious thing about Asylum is that if you ever look up, you meet your end to a piano falling on you, and it’s not just you. You can leave someone a note telling them to look up, and upon doing it, it happens to them!

The Institute – 1981 – TRS-80 A text game primarily over a static background that got graphic adventure remakes for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and C64 in 1983. You play as John and may be certain you're mentally fit, but allegedly in a horrifying act of punitive psychiatry, are committed for political reasons to a heavy-handed asylum using medicine to keep you subdued. Some of these minor details seem to vary between the original and rerelease, however. Despite misbehavior like stealing possibly resulting in staff being fatally heavy-handed, you can steal sedative powder and hide in a closet throughout the day, where most of the game really unfolds in your dreams. This lets you explore John’s mind as he tries to find an escape from this loony bin in both senses!

Seventh Heaven – 1991 – Atari ST 10 years after The Institute, Seventh Heaven would have a similar idea, but instead of even being suspicious of punitive psychiatry, you are blatantly committed to protect you from yourself after you find out you are terminal with you having been given 5 years left to live…4 years ago. People’s legal right to end things on their own terms is itself an interesting subject matter. In this game you are spending your time napping on a bench in the asylum to explore your dreams in hopes of finding an epiphany to your struggle with mortality in the Astral Plane.

asylum II – 1982 - TRS-80 Of course, there’s many games just called “Asylum,” from the 1991 Gauntlet clone to the 1993 platform shooter where you literally enter young Sigmund’s mind and shoot the rogue brain cells to fix his mental health. Back in the ‘80s, however, William Denman would be solely credited for a sequel to Asylum for the TRS-80 that would get quite the visual update in later versions for the C64, DOS, and Atari 8-bit from 1985 to 1986. The later versions are retitled A.S.Y.L.U.M. (Adventure Syndrome Leading to Ultimate Madness), and because of this, Frank Corr is sometimes not credited for the original 1981 Asylum, as when people look it up, A.S.Y.L.U.M. comes up, and people assume it to be a C64 version of the original game. Personally, I actually prefer the first game for its level design and solutions feeling much more straightforward. The sequel was nice to look at, but progressing felt much more grueling to me. I’m probably just too novice compare to the more veteran players it may be made for.

You see, the story behind the title is that you’ve gotten into adventure games and, after being seen walking around town muttering possibly solutions to a game you may have been playing, are committed to an asylum constructed by the mental health specialists of the 21st century as a maze run by William Denman himself to reestablish a distinction between video games and reality, which reminds me of the Kirkbride plan asylums used in real life, where that stereotypical architecture and layout of insane asylums built in the 1800s was part of the treatment. You’ll need to avoid being strapped into electroshock therapy and, of course, failing to survive your stay altogether. The layout drives me crazy and is intentionally playing tricks on you. It’s a reminder of both the Kirkbride plan and the worry that the longer it takes you to escape, the more your sanity can be eroded by being in a madhouse.

Bedlam – 1982 – TRS-80 Probably the most infamous lunatic asylum is Bethlem Royal Hospital, better known as Bedlam. It goes back to medieval ages, and people started using its name as a term for irrational chaos or just interchangeably with madness. If you think patients were handled poorly in a time of television to report on it, imagine how they were handled in medieval times. Despite still operating today, you might imagine this creates a hard image to reform. Well… not to be confused with the shooter series of the same name, Robert Arnstein’s Bedlam focuses on the uncertainty of trust in its cast of characters. It wears what it is on its sleeve, being a text game where you try to reach a randomized exit while interacting with the sanity-draining environment of a psychiatric hospital, from an inmate who paints doors on walls before trying to enter them to a doctor who can decide your treatment shall be a lobotomy. He’ll do it too! It gives you brain damage that makes it harder to do anything! Such a messed-up but fitting mechanic. There’s also an interesting questionnaire to diagnose yourself for fun as well as coming into play later in the game. Its questions range from “Do you get depressed easily or often over “games”?” to “Do you think you are smarter than most people?” Be honest.

Madhouse – 1983 – Apple II, Atari 8-bit, DOS, TRS-80 Not to be confused with the ZX Spectrum game where you move left and right, this is a text game reminiscent of Bedlam that, much like Asylum 2, focuses on interacting with your fellow patients in what is almost a chain of fetch quests interlocking their usefulness, but it's not nearly as hard to get around and doesn’t seem to go as dark as Bedlam, making it a more casual and light-hearted alternative to the two. Sometimes people don’t like their horror to be too dark.

The Gerbil Riot of ‘67 – 1988 – Amstrad CPC You are responsible for it. This doesn’t seem to be a case of unjust commitment, and you weren’t recently committed. You’ve been here quite some time, and the game does a good job of painting a picture of your relationship with this place, including the fatigue of being here so long. I find this to be an interesting and refreshing concept for an Asylum game. (“Refreshing” being an ironic word to use.) While there can be mental exploration in games not set in asylums, there’s a specific horror to the imprisonment aspect that this game really nails to me.

Sanitarium – 1998 Apr 28 – Windows 95 Perhaps the most famous insane asylum set video game of the 20th century. A point and click whose writing and presentation are why it’s revered. It maintains a dark comedy style horror, like when you meet kids who are disfigured by their caretaker who challenge you to hide and seek but cheat by saying you didn’t find them all with the joke being that one of them hasn’t been seen in a whole because she passed… but you don’t take that sitting down, so you find her grave, dig her up, and win the game! It’s that style of writing. Now this is a 13+ age-rated game, so don’t expect it to go too dark, but it does have fun with its mental patient setting while seemingly exploring what it wants to explore, which many find compelling. You might find it humorous for me to say it now, but I’m not really into puzzle games. I think I’m also just not into its visual style. I don’t mean the Fallout 1-looking pre-rendered graphics. I mean the higher fantasy Tim Burton-esque style. I felt similarly about American McGee’s Alice, where I liked the concept, but the very specific visual style wasn’t for me. I also feel a bit more flavor text would go a long way in Sanitarium. 1994’s Psycho Ward did a great job of this but had a much smaller world to do that easily. Sometimes I just wished there was a bit more interaction with the minor things that catch my eye in Sanitarium.

Asylum Levels In Games (not even necessarily horror games)

(opening hospital level) - 白と黒の伝説 (The Legend of White and Black) – 1985 - MSX When it comes to the short and sweet, there are asylum levels in games otherwise not set in asylums that left quite an impact on me, like the opening hospital level of The Legend of White and Black. A patient seemed to just vanish in a hospital fire, and you’re left to just investigate the scene to the game’s incredible soundtrack. Now that I think about it, I may have just assumed the patient was a mental patient and had that in my head for the last 8 years. I should do a look back on that series in the distant future because despite not being a fan of the first game overall, I was so captivated by the opening that I’ve checked out all 5 games that I’m aware of and am curious to reexamine and explore why it didn’t click with me, but what I can say is the opening of the first left a permanent impact on me.

(the Turkish mental hospital) - Countdown – 1990 - MS DOS Countdown is an example of a trope I notice of opening a game with an asylum escape. Little Big World, Baldur's Gate II, Evil Dead: Regeneration, etc. In Countdown, you wake up as a patient with amnesia and quickly distrust your doctor. You try to find a way out while uncovering the foul play of the hospital.

Escape Crazy – True Crime: New York City – 2005 Nov 16 – PS2, GameCube, Xbox True Crime: New York City’s mental ward level almost felt like a throwback to insane asylum set games of the 1980s. You wake up feeling the effects of the medicine they put in you as you’re being disposed of as insane for trying to get in the antagonist’s way. Thankfully a fellow patient named Zeke, remembered for the appearance and cadence his actor Beetlejuice gave him, wants to join forces with you to break out. The most memorable part for me was passing by a shower where staff were holding a patient under the running showerhead and hitting him with a stun baton. Kinda messed up that they made this level in a real hospital. They never say its name in-game, but you go to St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan’s address in the game’s block-per-block rendition of Manhattan. The entrance you enter in the game still bears the St. Vincent engraving over it in real life despite the hospital closing 5 years after this game came out. Its closing is an interesting rabbit hole in itself. Now the building's been turned into condos, but I notice the courtyard with the fountain as it was in the game.

“This place reeks of nightmares and madness. But only the insane would stand against us!”

Ring of Steel/Asylum - Call of Duty: World at War – 2008 Nov 11 – PS3, Xbox 360, Windows XP/Vista, Wii World at War’s vacated asylum level adds quite the welcome spooks as you look around thinking about its past while the literal echoes of the horrors that took place there sound through its… hopefully abandoned halls. Both the environmental sound and soundtrack for the campaign and multiplayer version are not unappreciated by horror fans.

Patients Are A Virtue – Little Big Planet 2 - 2011 Jan 18 - PS3 That’s right! Even Little Big Planet 2 comes to mind! There’s an entire arc of the game where you visit Eve’s Asylum to retrieve a mad scientist to help you but find the asylum is being burned to the ground. It's refreshing that despite Eve running an asylum keeping people in barred cells, she's not presented as an antagonist. In the level “Patients Are A Virtue,” you play through a very real fear of asylums that in times of fire, patients imprisoned in those cells are left to a cruel fate. As you attempt to put out their engulfed cells, you may notice that some of the patients are the cast of the first game, which for many is whiplash from the brighter tone of that first game, but I find it fitting for the darker tone of this second game.

Norah – Beyond Two Souls – 2013 Oct 8 – PS3 I always see people bring up the Bellevue Hospital level in Indigo Prophecy when reminiscing about impactful video game asylums, but its patient breakout was rather telegraphed despite a well-done scene of trying to make it out before patients get you. For me, Saint John’s Hospital in Beyond Two Souls gave me what might be the scariest subversion of feeling safe in a game that I’ve ever experienced. You spend the whole game with the protagonist Jodie dealing with humans and a supernatural entity named Aiden protecting from supernatural threats but also being used on humans since he’s invisible. It’s a power trip controlling Aiden! He can freely fly through the air, phasing through walls, and nobody will know unless you attack them because you’re invisible! When breaking into a mental hospital in the dead of night, you can explore around, and phasing through a patient's room, he will say, “I can see you, Aiden” and that gave me such a creepy, unsafe feeling! Well played!

(Beacon Mental Hospital, the Village of Elk River, and the Victoriano Estate) – The Evil Within – 2014 Oct 14 – PS3, PS4, Xbox 360/One, 64-bit Windows 7 SP1/Windows 8.1 What really made me see the potential in insane asylum set horror games is The Evil Within, also released as Psycho Break. Since its release, this is the video game I have played the most. It would be an article longer than my Space Invaders coverage if I tried to go into it, but you upgrade via electroshock therapy, and I wondered about the large respirator in the room. This led me to finding the exact model in real life and find out the complications of electroshock therapy that might require it, which made me think about those complications every time I entered the room to undergo more therapy and saw it sitting there in case it needed to be used. I always found it interesting that the concept designer for the game said they had so many designs for each room because in earlier development, Beacon was “very large for an explorable area”. The hospital seems so big in the final game, and you get just about any asylum sight I can think of. You not only explore through multiple common rooms but also hallways that seem designed as makeshift common rooms, telling the story of overcrowding many real asylums were plagued with. Looking up as I approached it at the start of the game is the only time a video game building has ever triggered my megalophobia. Outside of a garden that would have presumably been behind the main entrance building based on concept art, I haven’t seen any other concept art depicting a part of Beacon that isn’t in the game in some incarnation. The game also has you jumping all around time, which lets you see different eras of the asylum, like the old-school massive hydrotherapy control unit covered in valves and dials or the lobotomy room, which has more than one chair! With all the beds outside and bags labeled Heparin Sodium, it hit me that this is a recovery room from the era they used to give out mass lobotomies. I love environmental storytelling like this!

The director expressed a concern for visuals being too overcrowded and that a chair in a room can be more scary, which is ironic considering how many of this game’s areas turned out, but there are multiple rooms with just a chair. The one that always stood out to me the most is in Elk River Village, where a chair is against the wall on the opposite end of the room from the window but facing it. It creeped me out thinking about the house’s occupant doing this specifically to watch people on the street outside without them being able to see them. There was also something oppressive about it, which is when it hit me that this reminds me of how asylums knew sunlight was good for you, so instead of taking people outside, they’d line up chairs like this by the closed barred glass windows to get sunlight into them. Not far from that house is the photography studio, where a room in the basement is used for developing the photos. The hallway leading to that room, however, transforms into a seemingly endless hallway that instantly reminded me of the long hallways of asylums where, despite their architecture being part of the treatment, they’re so massive that they give me the impression of a labyrinth trapping you through their sheer difficulty to navigate out. Apparently, Overbrook had an underground tunnel network that is said to have added up to over a mile of corridors! Elk River is where the character Leslie is from, and his original doctor’s hospice is also in the village and fully explorable, creating interesting thoughts of the contrast between the rural 2-floor hospice’s treatment vs. the grand Beacon Mental Hospital in Krimson City.

In the Victoriano Estate, there are puzzles that are literally brain surgery with you searching for the right part of the brain to jab based on audio recordings, but you may notice the person you’re probing is blinking, which led me to finding out that there is a controversial history of this practice but can't elaborate on tumblr.

When you’d look up Teknon Kogyo’s Dracula Hunter, non-English sources tend to list it as having a 1980 release while English tend to cite it as having a 1979 release—except for one I found listing it as 1980 with an accompanying picture of a Japanese advertisement referring to it as a 1979 game! I guess people want to be doubly sure if it counts as a 70’s game or an 80’s game.

Dracula Hunter – 1979 – cabinet Dracula Hunter is a game that caught my eye almost 10 years ago and has stuck in my mind for its striking visuals paired with sound design that never left my head. The well-done animated horde of “Draculas” scattering from a manner like insects. You, attempting to protect the laying body of someone donning a white dress by hurling crucifixes like boomerangs, which makes the sound I hear when just seeing an image of this game! While vampires, especially named Dracula, were already a trope of horror games, the way these animate always reminded me of my favorite kind of vampire, the Chinese hopping vampire, stiff from rigor mortis to the point that they moon hop at you in an unnatural feeling yet distinct manner. This type of vampire is not something I see in many games! It also feels like I rarely see this game’s awesome mechanic of enemies being able to dynamically turn innocents in gameplay, having you face an outbreak in real time! There are yellow Draculas worth 10 points, pink Draculas worth 20, and red worth 30, but what I truly look out for… are the bats whose score is listed as a mystery! While juggling all of this, you might want to consider attacking the vampires’ nest by timing a good hurl when the doors open, causing it to explode! I like this game, but maybe I’m in the minority because it’s grown so rare that it’s now considered lost media, last being spotted at an auction in 2018, but there are many unofficial home versions made so we could get as close as we can to experiencing the gameplay. People also always bring up the shmup someone made for Dezaemon 2, called Dracula Buster, that uses its assets. It can be humorous to see the Dracula Hunter protagonist rapidly firing crucifixes.

House of Usher – 1980 – Apple II, Atari 8-bit To shift gears to that home market back in 1980, the forward in the manual to Crystalware’s House of Usher calls the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe the inspirations to their work. This game is, of course, based on Poe’s 1839 work “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which detailed its protagonist receiving a letter from his best friend, Rodrick Usher, requesting his presence. Rodrick has grown ill. Upon going, the protagonist does what he can to help but ultimately watches the mysterious illness deteriorate the members of the house of Usher. The game itself has you explore the puzzle-filled mansion infested with enemies from humanoids to man-sized spiders! It also seems to add its own lore to the mansion to think about outside of the giant crab. There are multiple ways to beat this game. You can solve the mystery detailed in its manual, which offers a $100 prize to the first person who can solve it, or maybe you just want to see how much in-game money’s worth of valuables you can rob the Ushers of while they are down on their luck. Apart from having gradually draining stamina acting as a constant time ticking down, there is also an in-game time that ends the game at 6 A.M. to score you, with the game starting at 6 P.M. I’d say it’s about a minute per second of real-world time, but combat interrupts the rate at which time moves. I’m assuming the combat is turn-taking, but with a time limit that is so short, it feels like extremely laggy real-time combat. It must consider enemies more agile than you because they normally seem to be able to move 2 or 3 steps before you can take your next with us not being able to move or do anything while each other is taking their steps. If I fire, it seems, neither of us can move until that shot connects with something, and the clock seems to stop when they are taking their turn while in-game time progresses while you take your turn, which equates to 1 minute in-game or 1 second passing in real life when you take your turn while no time passes during their turn, which can feel as long as 3 real-world seconds at times. I never thought I’d say this, but doing turn-based combat like this is so fast that it feels slow because it feels like real-time combat where you are just lagging compared to the enemy. It’s not like the average person is going to strategize in a turn with a 1-second time limit, so it just feels like real-time combat where you can’t move or do anything for 2 seconds every time 1 second passes. I love the idea of exploring this mansion while managing limited resources like ammo to combat enemies that are in different places every run. You’re not sure what you’ll run into in each room, every run. Like other survival horror games, this game is structured in a way that would be fun to replay and do runs of if the combat didn’t feel as it does. This would quickly evolve, though.

The Forgotten Island – 1981 – Atari 8-bit The Forgotten Island (later re-released as Escape From Vulcan’s Isle in 1982) is always the first game that pops in my head when thinking of 20th-century open-world games. It’s another Crystalware game with that House of Usher movement, but it feels so much faster with you and the enemy each taking your turn in about half a second, which eliminates the feeling that you’re waiting to get control back, and instead of firing and repositioning with large amounts of health in House of Usher, combat in The Forgotten Island is done like a slot machine where, when you touch an enemy, it starts flashing numbers with you hitting the button to stop it and get whatever number of damage you landed on. This is the game designing more around the fact that you’re not moving with enough fluidity for firing and repositioning to feel too satisfying. It also feels much better to have this vaster open nature to feel like you’re dynamically running into enemies with the camera scrolling with you instead of entering the isolated rooms of House of Usher’s mansion that needed to load individually, though I can see a tension in thinking about what will be in the next room during each door loading. For The Forgotten Island, I always know it as the game that can put you a little more on edge when getting the notification that an enemy is nearby since it often initially happens when an enemy is off-screen, though overstaying its welcome by continuing to stop you from moving to notify you that an enemy is nearby when it is on-screen. That’s when it starts to feel like House of Usher’s issue…

so let's go fast paced!

Berzerk - 1980 Nov – cabinet Berzerk’s focus was purely on fighting through rooms of electrified walls and fully voiced robots that was apparently a sound chip meant to help the visually impaired, but the game designer Alan McNeil thought it sounded robotic and fit right into his game’s setting. Interesting to me is a review from the time that called the movement and aiming being tied to the same stick a setback. I can easily see how the game would be easier with a more twin-stick setup like Wester Gun had. Berzerk is said to be an inspiration to Robotron: 2084 that went twin stick, but I might like it more as it is for Berzerk specifically with you not being able to run in the opposite direction that you are shooting. Berzerk is brought up to this day as a cultural touchstone of horror games, thanks in no small part to its pursuer enemy, Evil Otto. You see, in arcades, you gotta keep the game moving because other people want to use the machine, so once a player clears a room, you could introduce a timer that picks a room to teleport the player to if they don’t pick one themselves, but that would rob them of their player agency, so why not introduce something that puts a fire under them? An unstoppable enemy named Evil Otto after McNiel’s former coworker, Nutting Associates’ security manager, Mr. Otto with no shortage of tales detailing how he was mean to Berzerk’s designer who combined this distaste with the imagery of the stereotypical “have a nice day” smiley face you may recognize from plastic bags that has quite the history itself. Going from a symbol of rebellious peace before quickly becoming a symbol of oppression, with Berzerk’s designer, seeing it as a display of fake righteousness with Evil Otto being what he really thought of it, feigning concern to someone as you beat them down. It’s such masterfully fitting imagery for the oppressive tone of the game. The VCS version fleshes Berzerk’s setting out to be the planet Mazeon, where you touched down to find it dark and uninhabitable before your ship is destroyed by the Automazeons led by Evil Otto. While you can argue that enemies like Dracula in Adventure International’s The Count are earlier examples of pursuer enemies in horror games, Evil Otto is the first big one that I see regularly brought up. My favorite detail is that the particle effect of enemies blowing up subtly forms his face, though it’s not so subtle in the VCS version. That version also doesn’t have to worry about getting players off an arcade cabinet quickly, allowing them to offer difficulty modes where there is no Otto or where he can be temporarily downed like he can in the sequel, Frenzy, where you can face multiple Ottos at once in destructible environments. Berzerk is also involved in what is often the earliest video game-related death people have heard of. I’ve seen early ones detailed, and to be clear, that’s video game related deaths—not saying it was the sole cause, but nonetheless, the news of an 18-year-old going into cardiac arrest while playing Berzerk led to urban legends of the horror of the arcade cabinet, still shared, sparking fear, to this day. I’ve heard someone describe Evil Otto as being on the other end of Pac-Man, which is a funny way to think about it and can make you realize the interesting coincidence that Pac-Man, released about 4 months earlier, also birthed an iconic yellow orb mascot in a pursuer game of blue hallways… Now that I think about it… Pac-Man’s primary ghost antagonists make it horror-themed… Maybe it shouldn’t be too often glanced over when talking about the history of pursuer horror. There are games people consider horror that are Pac-Man variants, like Monster-Man for the VC 4000, so let’s give credit where it’s due.

Mystery House – 1980 May 5th – Apple II I’ve gotten into games bearing the Sierra logo over the years and was surprised to find people mentioning their start in video games was a successful horror game in 1980. The company was apparently founded shortly before by a couple to create business software, or at least that’s what Ken Williams thought before his wife Roberta, who found herself deep into video games, wanted to make one with him, which sold so well they instead became a video game company! Mystery House was inspired by the novel And Then There Were None, about 10 people being invited to an island where there are 10 figures on a dining room table and a rhyme about 10 people meeting their ends, framed in their rooms—when a record plays… stating the date that each of them took someone’s life. They begin getting picked off, mirroring the rhyme with a figure disappearing from the table each time, causing them to infight over who the perpetrator is. Now you know to try to eat a sweetroll from the plate each time you strike in the Oblivion quest “Whodunit?”. In the Williams’ game, you are one of 8 people in a house being picked off, trying to figure out who is doing it before you’re next! Roberta apparently found the game suffered from a linear structure before looking to the mystery-solving board game, Clue, helped her escape this. After Ken proposed they add pictures, Roberta essentially drew the entire game so the player would always have something to look at. The pictures might seem odd in how un-rounded they are. I've seen it said that the VersaWriter tablet used to draw them was meant more for drawing graphs and diagrams before later advertising and expanding it to be used for drawing things like faces and animations. I've not been able to find any material for the VersaWriter that predates Mystery House to know for sure but it definitely advertises that you use it to draw faces, people, and even offers and expansion for animations after Mystery House. Either way it was about half the price of the official Apple II drawing tablet! Many people view this game as causing a fork in the road where text adventures continued down their path while this game opened up a new path of point-and-click games seen as a further evolution of these graphical adventure games. There’s a charm to both the original and redrawn art in the 1983 release by Starcraft (the company, not the RTS). I interpret Mystery House to be from the perspective of your eyes, making this game first-person to me, which would be a perspective you’d see a lot more of during the 1980s.

The Rise of First-Person Games You know, a common misconception is that 3D computer graphics came after Pong when they go back to at least the 1960s, often in the form of Wireframe 3D, where you only render something’s outlines on a blank background. This was useful for conveying depth, which would come in handy for VR in the 1960s. Yeah, it was around. Imagine wearing a VR headset where each lens is a cathode-ray tube. Don’t worry, the tubes jutted out to the sides instead of weighing your head forward. By the early 1970s, the earliest currently known traditional online competitive first person shooter, Maze War, was being played nationwide over the Arpanet which was already being called the internet by this point. I specify traditional because people debate whether this game got its online update before Spasim, which was a first-person shooter spaceship game where 32 players were let loose in a big space map to manage their own ships and fight each other. It was Maze War, however, that made me realize just how un-simple Wireframe graphics can be because the game determines which lines to no longer show when they are supposed to be behind a solid surface from your perspective. I would later read a VR document from the 60s about how they made 3D environments to be inside, where they mentioned not being able to find a solution to make the lines disappear based on the angle you’re viewing them from. Of course, by the 1970s, you already had first-person games like Escape with solid-colored surfaces, but many first-person games of the 1980s would still sport that Akalabeth style of white lines on a black background. In Frank Corr’s Rat’s Revenge for the TRS80 in 1980, you play as a rat trying to navigate a maze for cheese before starving, even having the possibility of getting to the point of hallucinating the cheese and in Deathmaze 5000 for the TRS80 or Apple II, you will do the same… as a human, looking for the exit in a 5 story building of maze-like hallways with monsters, puzzles, and traps before you starve. Wielding torches, you’ll need to keep at least one lit, lest you fall victim to the pitch black of the windowless building. This labyrinth is beyond me. It truly is the Backrooms experience. The same year, Frank would team up with William Denman, who is the author of Reality Ends (also 1980), a text game where every single step you take is a different parallel universe with you seeking a way to fight Baldir across its multiverse. William and Frank would team up to bring this rival aspect to Deathmaze 5000 with a game appropriately called Labyrinth, which plays and looks the same, but instead of escaping being the focus… it would be the battle of who gets who between you and the minotaur.

3D Monster Maze – 1981 – ZX81 In October of 1980, SoftSide magazine published Joel Mick’s Monster Maze, which was a top-down game where the player maps out a maze to find an exit while trying not to run into the monster, but you may be more familiar with a later, first-person version of this game made by someone else. Half a year later, a Malcolm Evans would receive a ZX81 for his birthday and wanted to see what it could do. He made a maze to explore, initially in 2D before changing it to a first person perspective. You can move left, right, and forward but not back, which doesn’t seem uncommon for the time. A John Greye from his Bristol folk music club is credited with recommending he add a pursuer enemy, to which Malcolm looked to a kids book and decided to draw a T. Rex. As he put it, he was making the game graphics first. As you get close, it will notice and become more active in searching for you, darting right for you if you’re in its line of sight. With an absence of sound denoting the T. Rex’s position from you, text at the bottom of the screen serves the role of your hearing (and ironically was added to ease the tension). He also added the story that you decided to take on this Nightmare Park-esque carnival attraction of trying to navigate a maze with a live T. Rex in it, warning you to enter at your own risk. Malcolm Evans had essentially made a first-person version of Monster Maze and appropriately landed on the name 3D Monster Maze, being told it’s good enough to sell. It seemed to initially be released in 1981 under Greye’s company, J.K. Greye Software, before being re-released in 1982 when Malcolm started his own company, New Generation Software. This seems to sometimes cause confusion about when the game’s initial release was. It looks most like a colorless version of 1978’s Maze Game, which was purely about exploration with you being able to access your map at all times, see your footprints, and there’s even a compass but no pursuer enemy. Now, 3D Monster Maze isn’t the first horror game. It’s not the first 3D or first-person game, and I wouldn’t even consider it a survival horror game because you can’t become the hunter, but people call it the first because it’s the earliest one they know of at the time and will call whatever is the earliest that they happen to know of, the first one to ever be made. They’re more likely to hear back to 3D Monster Maze because it’s such a timeless game. It’s a much more simplified version of its predecessors, like Labyrinth, and having that level of ease to get into it is probably why horror games like it are still made to this day, making 3D Monster Maze a recognizable form factor to people viewing it as like the later horror games they grew up with. Evans would continue to make games, including Corridors of Genon in 1983, where you attempt to take on a rogue AI and now can hear footsteps! He’d also make a top-down version of 3D Monster Maze, called Escape, where the maze is completely revealed at all times, unlike Joel Mick’s Monster Maze. Top-down games still have their advantages!

Godzilla – 1980 Apr? – PET/CBM Years before Sim City would debut with a kaiju on its cover to show off it's an RTS where you have to deal with such threats, the most iconic kaiju of them all, Godzilla (that Sim City was parodying), had his own game in a 1980 turn based strategy where you’re in charge of making sure the country survives such a horrifying threat! Organizing army, navy, and air force across the country, including decisions like missile strikes and nuking, with the game factoring in civilian and military loss as well as Godzilla possibly ending you yourself if he gets to the capital. Simplicity still tends to be the key when it comes to a novice to strategy games like myself, and this is a simple yet variable-filled game to run subsequently as a quick, neat little game on your computer.

Crush, Crumble and Chomp! The Movie Monster Game – 1981 – Apple II, Atari 8-bit, TRS-80 I really like playing as the military in Godzilla games, but if you want to just play as the monster and wreak havoc, you’d be eating well in the 80s. The year after Godzilla’s game, Crush, Crumble and Chomp! The Movie Monster Game would give you the opposite perspective, having you control a variety of parodies of iconic giant monsters, including the ability to make your own to attempt to destroy Tokyo, New York City, the Bay Area including San Francisco and Oakland, and Washington D.C., but not without the people of these areas putting up a fight, including the scientists racing to discover something to vanquish you. The need to eat can radically affect your strategies and willingness to risk putting yourself in harm's way to avoid losing control of your monster when being too hungry makes them go berserk! You can, however, play as giant robots who don’t need to worry about hunger. You’d think they’d just replace hunger with worrying about power, but perhaps they are meant to be a novice's entry point. I find this game to have an impressive amount of detail, like Goshilla’s footsteps being radioactive like they were in Godzilla’s debut movie, making a wall of danger anywhere you walked, but with so much complexity in a turn-based game, it feels like a complex board game that you might not have the patience to learn but is such a cool concept that maybe you’ll be willing to learn. These kinds of games including a more real-time version of this game simply titled The Movie Monster Game for the C64 in 1986, which the original Crush, Crumble and Chomp would have been ported to by that point.

Conclusion on the 1980s While the 1970s is credited with much when it comes to video games, the 1980s are often seen as an even more iconic era that was a refinement of the 70s, where video games becoming mainstream attracted tons of companies to all jump in, skyrocketing the bar of expectation. The 80's was not video game's adolescence. It was the video game industry's adulthood where it was in the form that it is still in to this day from online subscriptions to the format of game's journalism with eyes of various intents looking at the industry that surpassed Hollywood. How does a young 20-year-old in the 1980s follow up the greats of their childhood like Pong, Breakout, and Space Invaders, while veteran companies are putting out even more leaps forward in this packed market? I know video games have been taught in school since at least the early 1950s, but I imagine the leap in popularity of the home market in the 70's and focusing more on the video part of arcade cabinets' construction opened the floodgates for video games in the 80s to have a lot more milk for the cream to go through before making it to the top.

and if none of the horror games I’ve mentioned are your taste… then I have something really scary for you…

Heiankyo Alien: Pitfall Trap Game – 1979 Sep? (uncommercialized proof of concept) – Apple ][

Space Invaders was big, and Weekly Asahi magazine would run a story searching for the next big game, soliciting college computer clubs around the nation for new ideas. After visiting 2 at the University of Tokyo, Itaru Kawakami of the Theoretical Science Group (TGS) led an emergency meeting to come up with an idea before the article would be published. He put forth the idea of a game where the player is in their home attempting to trap cockroaches. Another member, Mitsutoshi Tabata, has implied that the idea would’ve played like a Snake type of game, and I’ve seen it cited that you would use glue traps, so perhaps the Snake element was the danger of getting stuck by your own traps as you lay more and more down. A fan creation of this game has since been made called Vermin Wars. TGS, however, were cautious about giving the player too much freedom of movement in an open space, so the playing field would be reimagined to resemble a Go board where you place pieces at the intersections of squares instead of within them, almost as if the lines are the streets and the spaces are buildings in a city grid. This changed their setting from a home interior to a city! With everyone talking about this new horror movie, Alien, they decided that could be the new monster that you trap. In brainstorming a city to take place in, they landed on the nation’s former capitol, once called Heiankyo, which had an impressively strict grid, making it an easy leap for them to then have you play as law enforcement of the time, attempting to dig pitfall traps for the invading aliens. Asashi would publish the idea, resulting in them being contacted by electronics company Denki Onkyo, who were interested. The group looked to Tabata to program it, as he owned the legendary Apple II, but the one thing he couldn’t do was optimize it. Apparently the game took 10 minutes to even boot, so Kawakami stepped up to optimize it and met Tabata at the train station to take the entire Apple II, which is humorous to imagine them lugging around. He would ultimately decide to switch to the Apple II’s low-resolution mode, effectively quartering the resolution and changing the available approach to visuals, resulting in humans, aliens, and holes being different colored blocks. This build of Heiankyo Alien: Pitfall Trap Game was taken to Denki Onkyo as a sort of proof of concept. According to an article instructing readers on how to make their own TK-80 version of the game in the February 1980 issue of I/O magazine, there were already PC-8001 and MZ-80K versions as of writing the article, with some version of the game being shown at a school festival the previous year, presumably the Apple II version.

Heiankyo Alien – 1979 Nov – cabinet

They were set up on the first floor of the Oda district office. Kawakami and Keiichiro Shimada would become the project managers, with the team fleshing out what should and shouldn’t be done. They changed the street layout to be less uniform. A timer was added to end the game in the event that the player closed themselves off from danger, and, inspired by the idea of using candy to distract the slit-mouthed woman of legend, they wanted to include a hard candy that can be used to temporarily stop all the aliens from moving, but midway through development scrapped the idea as they found it overcomplicated the controls. With a sole keyboard to type out what they wrote and burn it to ROMs, every time they wanted to test if what they came up with worked, multiplayer modes would be added, having you either take turns or co-op with both of you on screen together. One thing Denki Onkyo pressed them for was to give the player an animation for when they met their end, resulting in the last-minute addition of an angel sprite to float away. The game would be demoed at the Amusement Machine Show in October, where it was discovered that adding too many coins would cause the coin counter to spill into VRAM, removing one of the city walls, allowing one of the aliens to wander off, scrambling the game’s data, but when all was said, patched, and done, it would hit arcades (as Digger in the U.S.) to great success, being among the highest-grossing arcade games in Japan. Game Center Arashi was a book series about its protagonist conquering arcade games with its story about him attempting to score 10 million points in Heiankyo Alien in 20 minutes, spotlighting not only the game but its strategies and terminology, making them even more accessible. These were also detailed in I/O magazine, who, in their April 1980 issue, announced TK-80BS, MZ-80K/C, and PC-8001 versions for sale. Desktop versions of the game from the time are usually distinguishable by their use of green instead of blue, outside of the handheld version. I also notice the cover of Game Center Arashi has more square-shaped, pink aliens and green buildings while the city walls remain the blue that I’m used to seeing the arcade version be. The handheld version uses condensed, repeating stages and greatly simplified visuals to keep the core gameplay intact while maintaining portability and affordability. It would inspire many future games like its side-view counterpart, Space Panic.

Heiankyo Alien – 1990 Jan 14th – Gameboy

“Denki Onkyo was bought by Murata Manufacturing, and the rights were left hanging, but when the Game Boy version was released, they were transferred to a company called Hyperware, which was run by Takeshige Arimasa, who was a colleague of my brother-in-law at TSG.” -Norio Nakagata (alongside Takane Ohkubo are the Game Boy remake’s uncredited music artists)

As the 1980s rolled around, Denki Onkyo would not survive with the rights to Heiankyo Alien going up in the air. Hyperware was able to grab the rights and get to work on a remake. It features raising and lowering lanterns blocking the roads to keep the environment ever-shifting on the player and the monsters! A new boat mechanic allows you to traverse a river faster than taking the streets. Cinematics, including an ending, were added. While there would be a classic mode, the remake was rocking a faster pace to keep up with a new breed of alien sporting more erratic movement, and that’s not the only rocking being brought. The remake’s Multi Matrix Sound System (MMSS) is that when it’s multiplayer mode is linked to another Game Boy, it’ll combine both Game Boy’s sound systems into one, allowing for audio, twice as complex! The co-op of the original would return in classic mode, and the remake mode allows for competitive multiplayer where you each get your own screen and can affect each other’s game, sending aliens you’ve buried into their game as if you’re on opposite sides of the Earth, and those monsters evolve when they come up on the other side! The rebounded aliens can be taken out for good, and I have to mention how good the game’s overall branding is! The clean red, while only displaying the outlines of the monsters, is so classy yet harsh and vintage. Unfortunately for all involved, the remake did not seem well received in its time. Seemingly being dismissed as an overpriced repackaging of an antiquated 70’s game, even retrospective reviews years later were looking back on it negatively.

Nichibutsu Arcade Classics 2: Heiankyo Alien – 1995 Dec 15th – SFC

A new game for the SFC would attempt to try again with more screen real estate and modern graphics in the original game’s gameplay with multiple stages of dynamically dropping factors to deal with, from power-ups to power-downs to juke. This version would also not be a turning point for the series popularity. This also includes the ability to play “original” Heiankyo Alien, which plays like the arcade game but visually has an indigo background with green walls and buildings, which is not a color scheme of the official version of the ‘79 arcade game that I’m familiar with.

Heiankyo DX – 2003 Nov 17th – mova505i

After 2001 mobile versions, sporting both original and new graphics, a 2003 game titled Heiankyo DX would have you face 15 stages of alien tapping across night and day stages with further upgraded graphics. I’ve always wondered about the attitude toward mobile games from their regular players at this time. Perhaps the 2001 did alright to lead to Heiankyo DX, but the series overall 14-year absence following this gives me the impression it didn’t look like something with a lot of potential to commercially capitalize on, and I’d assume that simpler 1970s game design would have the best chance on phones at the time.

The 2017 Heiankyo Revival

Every time a new Heiankyo Alien came out, it would mention how popular the original game was, as, much like Space Invaders that inspired it, its original entry was something it never recaptured, but, just like Space Invaders, that’s not to say that not just the legacy but the idea of new games was not appreciated by players like the fan game that added guns, Heiankyo Crisis. By the 2017 revival, I note a general change in tone of people voicing their opinions of Heiankyo Alien from suspicious of its value as a commercial product to liking a new little game being offered, and I think the two factors that play into that are the lower relative price after inflation and in comparison to competition alongside Nintendo leading a shift in online and print discussions of home games away from almost only being the pushing forward of the bleeding edge of hardcore to also enjoying smaller, simpler games. By the early 2010s, Minecraft seemed to cement this rapidly growing market and general tone change in video game discussions, leading to opinions of not just new Heiankyo Alien games but older ones by first-time players seeming more open-minded to simpler than Triple-A games, though I do note Tetris on the Game Boy as an anomaly in this thinking. It again helped that people of the 21st century didn’t have to pay triple A price for Heiankyo games. Even outside of retro game prices in a pre-WataGames world, I remember people commenting in the 2010s how initial video game releases are cheaper than they ever have been due to the variance in prices on top of the great price reset PlayStation popularized. As of the publishing of this article, Triple A games are still less expensive than they were during the SNES generation. At least, that’s my suspicion for why the change in tone between the 90’s and 2010’s seemed to happen for Heiankyo Alien, but let’s get into what they actually offered!

NEO Heiankyo Alien – 2017 Sep 7th – FC

NEO Heiankyo Alien is a Family Computer entry taking place in 299X where you can trap multiple types of aliens in a vibrant nightscape or play a version of the original that has a similar color scheme of the “original” mode in the 1995 game but neon blue and green, perhaps reusing the neon blue and green of Neo Kyoto in the new game mode. You could also just listen to the soundtrack featuring a nice list of composers in "Heiankyo Music" mode. Over the years, the soundtrack of the 1990 remake, since credited to Nakagata and Ohkubo, seemed to become the series identity, and Nakagata, who's credited as NEO Heiankyo’s producer, made a new song in that style for this game’s soundtrack too. There was a remixed version of the game’s soundtrack released though, unlike the Game Boy game, they never seemed to release the in-game version of the soundtrack.

Heiankyo Alien – 2017 Oct 13th – Windows 7-10

Inspiration: The tale of this mainframe computer horror game begins with an earlier, more recalled game. A man by the name of William Crowther found he had an excess of free time that he used to make a video game to play with his 2 daughters on his work computer, a PDP-10 mainframe. Inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, he wanted it to be simple enough for them, and so he set out to design an RPG straightforward enough for even the nontechnical to enjoy. Coworkers would find it saved on the mainframe computer as ADVENT, play it, and share it online, causing it to be found on PDP-10s across the nation.

HAUNT - 1979 - Tops 10 Carnegie Mellon University’s John Laid would be inspired to make a horror version of ADVENT, calling it HAUNT, initially in 1979, but receiving updates for years to come. It tells the story of a picnicking family who were attacked by a moose, with the mother not making it and the father growing obsessed with her fate to the point of acquiring the land where the incident took place and vowing to find her soul to return to human flesh. He was dismissed as having gone mad from grief, not only from his wife’s fate but his child’s kidnapping shortly after. Years of never being seen leaving the residence in the area and suffering from a hereditary disease also led to people assuming he may have passed, but when coming to check on him, those people didn’t emerge from his house either. You are his kidnapped son, now grown up and having never known your biological father but find out you are his next of kin and plan to just sell the property to the government, but before selling it, you want to check out this residence, perhaps out of curiosity or uncaring greed of seeing what you can take and what you will sell.

Unreliable Narrator This set up not only establishes the world but the sanity mechanic as, throughout the game, you may quickly suspect your character is afflicted with the same hereditary disease as your father. This kicks off with you waiting at a bus stop and upon getting on the bus to go to the house, you realize there’s no one else on the bus, including a driver. The doors slam close and the bus takes off (a quick tone setter for the game). As it gets you there, the doors open and you’re sure you heard a voice from the speaker as if a driver were there announcing “ALL OUT, END OF THE LINE.” With the hereditary disease being established alongside your father going mad in the story, it creates an uncertainty of how reliable your protagonist’s perception is. Are you seeing real danger, only seeing a hallucination, or will you be harmed by a hallucination? Seeing the mansion in the distance, you can approach the front buzzer on the gate, which, if repeatedly buzzed, someone will eventually answer and ask you questions which can range from asking what your sexual orientation is (prompting the person on the buzzer to ponder what your mother would’ve thought) to the fourth wall-breaking question of what was the first production system with more than 1500 productions?- the answer being the game that you’re playing.

They will let you in, and you can begin exploring the mansion itself. You can hear noises that sound like distant screams, and one might lead you to a room with a closet where what lies within answers one question and raises another. You find your late father, whose last act was scrawling on the wall a message to you, claiming that he saw you and your redheaded wife in the paper and hopes your daughter won’t inherit the disease which he has succumbed to, after not being able to take care of a crop that can combat it, causing him to pass, failing to resurrect his wife, your mother. Now, earlier in the game, an urban legend is established that the reason people who did a wellness check on your father never returned from his house was because the legend states you have to be blood to survive, but I guess not. Furthermore… who answered the buzzer? Has someone moved into this house after your father, or was the person on the buzzer an example of your inability to trust your own perception? Perhaps someone masqueraded as a hallucination of your father to expedite his downfall and has that advantage over you now too.

What can you trust then?

Well, the game has no shortage of dangers while contrasting surprisingly well with more light-hearted humor, like finding a monster rising from beneath a sheet in the basement who greets you with “Trick or Treat.” Handing it candy you can pick up elsewhere causes it to run out of the room, through a wall, with excitement. The tone is humorous while keeping you on edge, like seeing Dracula rise from a coffin in one room, which you might think is a humorous discovery, but also that’s Dracula, so you might want to run away out of fear, hoping you lost him.

It also had moments that truly impressed me.

You can walk into a dungeon where someone is imprisoned. Setting this person free, you can talk but are now cellmates. Later, I found through Nathan Mahney's Let's Play that you can try to kiss them, which they accept and prompts the game to tell you to go for a homerun, which results in a relationship of this between talking and sleeping until after who knows how many days or weeks you’ve spent together in this dungeon; they say goodbye and turn to smoke in the air. Such a surprising detour that then just lets you escape but now with matches that your partner found and gave to you during the days you were trapped together, if they ever existed at all. Did days actually pass, or was this like one of those dreams where years of your life are lived and connections built with loved ones that never existed?

The Sanity Meter The sanity mechanic is not just for narrative. It also needs to be maintained throughout the game. As it drains, you grow dizzy. Your hands sweat, and if you let yourself go completely mad, you will end things yourself, giving in to a rumor that those who enter the house all meet this irresistible compulsion. Is that what happened to your father? Can’t be right? The rumor says it’s because they’re not blood, or is the urban legend itself only trying to piece together the truth while not entirely on the money of what is true? Is it Dracula!? Is the monster in the basement, your father turning into Frankenstein in trying to resurrect your mother? Most importantly, what was the crop your dad mentioned in his message that could combat this disease? Well, you can find a dried garden, and watering it will grow orchids that eating will gain sanity back, but only if when asked who you are, you answer that your name is St. John, and this is some obtuse adventure game nonsense, but the clue to this answer is that in your father’s message to you, he mentions seeing your redheaded wife and your daughter in the paper, as in the funny papers, not the news. It’s a Brenda Starr reference—that really raises the question of sanity! In terms of adventure game solutions, it's far from the upper tier in leaps of logic that I hear them taking, like the "cat hair mustache puzzle" in Gabriel Knight 3. Naming yourself St. John can automatically make your sexual orientation redheads, perhaps making the person in the dungeon an allegory for your wife. Do you have one? Are you sharing in your father’s disillusion? Creating the mind over matter to believe this placebo crop could keep your mental destruction at bay? The humor of it aside, I do find this to impressively blend the gameplay mechanic with the narrative.

Scale & Variety When it comes to the scale of the game, I’m also taken aback by just how big this game is. You can really find your fear. I suffer from megalophobia, or the fear of large scale. Anything from being next to a docked ship to even a room with a high ceiling can set it off, so in comes an elevator in HAUNT’s residence that descends down and opens into the airlock of a bathysphere with a speargun inside that takes you down into a massive body of water with a sea monster. Now I don’t have a thalassophobia, but an underground area large enough to house this body of water and massive creature didn’t paint the most comforting imagery in my mind. At first I wondered how this would help Dad bring Mom back, but then I found there’s a treasure chest at the bottom he must have been trying to research, or we’ve both gone crazy from that disease, and I’m just reaching into a fish tank with an eel. That would explain the ability to summon and befriend the sea serpent.

Substance Mechanics This game is a trip and that's literally a mechanic! You can find more than one substance, one of which can give you a hallucination telling you to “follow the wire,” referring to music playing in a section of the house. If you follow the music player’s wire, it leads to a secret stash of another substance that will drive you to eat through your inventory. The cops will even arrest you if you kept substances on your person by the end of the game.

Multiple Endings Treasure you want to take can be brought to the front of the house, but finding a way to leave was not as straightforward as I anticipated. You can dig up a grave outside and keep digging, past remains, deeper and deeper in that spot until hitting a pipe whose emergency release began filling the grave with oil, giving me a moment of panic that I just dug my own tomb, only to manage to scale the dirt wall out and see a maintenance truck came to fix the oil spill. Upon escaping, you meet with a James Watt from the government, and you’re actually given the choice to preserve the land instead of go through with the sale. If you preserve it, you ride off into the sunset. If you choose to sell it, you will be charged by a moose in front of Watt, mirroring the same fate as your mother.

By the 1970’s, the horror game genre spanned across all major platforms, from 2 generations of home consoles to arcades to desktop and mainframe computers. Commercial general-purpose digital computers that can store programs and games for them had been around since at least the early 1950’s. The 60’s advertised compact and affordable minicomputers, and, in the 1970’s, surged in popularity in what is referred to as “the microcomputer revolution” after a 1968 breakthrough resulted in things becoming even tinier and soon more affordable. Alongside them, commercial video games (which had arguably also been on the market since, at least, the 1950’s) had finally become mainstream, which is a phrase that almost gives me PTSD with how annoying people used to be about it, but by the 1970's, video games were mainstream entertainment, so large that within just 3 more years, they would be considered bigger than Hollywood and pop music COMBINED! You can imagine, by the 70’s, home computers were already made with developers in mind. For the average Joe simply wanting to play horror games in the 1970’s, consoles being streamlined home and portable personal computers made for that purpose would be the way to go, which is probably why so many did, and that history is often celebrated, but I’m curious about the landscape of the desktop PCs. I’d like to take a look at this microcomputer revolution from the perspective of its horror games.

Microsoft

This “revolution” is often attributed as starting in the early 1970's, where Lakeside high school students Paul Allen and Bill Gates commonly sought access to computers, even being banned from seemingly more than one place like Computer Center Corporation, where they exploited a bug to get additional free computer time. They would form the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money working with computers, including for the center that banned them! After high school, they’d go to different colleges, and Paul Allen would drop out to become a programmer for Honeywell. A week before Christmas of 1974, a new issue of Popular Electronics would drop, showcasing a new player in the microcomputer game, the Altair 8800, using the new Intel 8080, whose predecessor, Paul and Bill, worked with in their younger years. Inspired to start his own software company, he would contact the computer maker about software and convince Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard and join him in making an interpreter for BASIC programming language to run on it, forming Microsoft. Paul flew out to deliver what they made and showcased it by playing some version of the 1969 game Lunar Lander.

Kadath- 1979 July 15 – Altair 8800

The 8800 would become a popular PC to the point of being credited as the start of desktops leap in popularity during the 1970s, which is what people refer to as the “revolution” as opposed to the 1968 breakthrough itself, and, on July 15th of 1979, a horror game would be written for it. A fan fiction set in the world of the works of famous Rhode Island author, Howard Philips Lovecraft. Kadath tells the story of said world Yaddith being in danger of the return of a precursor civilization, whom a stone tablet you find on an archaeological dig prophesies will return when the stars align correctly. You have set out to find the eye of Kadath, a gem thought to be powerful enough to destroy the gateway from which they would enter, which you plan to do by cracking open the eye to unleash its power. Kadath framed its writing seriously and had content I found more visceral than previous games of its genre. Despite infamous typos, I found it well written, though it’s not my taste in horror. Gameplay, however, I found to be an improvement through its use of multiple-choice actions instead of making the player figure out what to type. Depending on how you feel about text adventures, you might find this to be a downgrade, or if you find figuring out what to type in a text adventure a horror in itself, you might see it as a relief. This game would also not remain exclusive to the 8800 and be brought to future home desktops.

Apple

When a now famous hacker by the name of Steve Wozniak was working at Hewlett-Packard, his friend told him he should meet a high school student by the name of Steve Jobs who likes electronics and playing pranks. At the time, Wozniak was inspired by an article in Esquire magazine about blue boxes that emulated the sounds phones make to connect people, therefore allowing you to hack free calls. He wanted to make his own, and Jobs wanted to sell it. Selling them for $150 each, splitting the profits—this would be the dynamic people remember of “the 2 Steves”: Woz knows how to make the tech and Jobs knows how to sell it. What I always remember though is how Jobs believed his vegetarian diet ensured he wouldn’t produce body odor and thus he wouldn’t have to shower, which his coworkers at Atari didn’t seem to agree with, causing them to quickly put him on the night shift, which didn’t exist, meaning he’d come into the building when everyone was gone and be able to bring Wozniak in to get things done. His boss, Nolan Bushnel, was aware but didn’t really care because, as he put it, he got “two Steves for the price of one" He did offer Wozniak at least one bonus, but through Jobs, who hid it from him. Woz would eventually make a computer for his homebrew computer club, and after his workplace was uninterested in buying it from him, Jobs would convince him they should start their own company and sell it themselves. After this 1976 referred to as the Apple 1 would find good success, the Apple II the following year would become sought after by aspiring video game developers as a desktop made for making video games. It shipped with an interpreter made with hobbyists and game devs in mind that allowed users to immediately write software without additional stuff needed.

Akalabeth: World of Doom – 1979-1980 – eventually Apple II

Now dawn your thinking beard for this one. A question I’ve pondered is the Venn diagram of considering something in the stereotypical old European fantasy setting and something being considered a horror game because there are a lot of games like 1979’s Dungeon of Death which are considered to be horror games that I never would have thought of as horror games. I’m curious what percentage of people consider which of these to be horror games from that first-person dungeon crawler Puyo spawned off from to Baldur’s Gate or Untold Legends. There’s no wrong answer to me. I just notice it’s a far higher percentage than I thought. I bring all this up because one of the people to make games for the Apple II was soon to be famed Ultima creator Richard Garriott, just 2 years before Ultima. It apparently started as a high school project he made on a school computer, which was one of 28 fantasy games he made in high school before getting his hands on an Apple II and making the more fleshed-out version, Akalabeth: World of Doom, and I can see how its cover sets a tone that carries over into the first-person dungeon crawler featuring hooded figures and the general tension of running into danger while exploring, especially in a first-person game. Picture Zelda 2, where there’s a top-down overworld and sidescrolling dungeons. This is like that where there’s a top-down world to explore with towns and mountains while dungeons are explored in first person, which was inspired by the 1978 game Escape. The worlds are randomly generated, asking you for a world seed so you can always get the same world if you use the same seed, technically meaning you can collaborate with other players by sharing knowledge as you learn specific worlds. The game takes place in the aftermath of British, the bearer of white light, having driven off the dark lord, Mondain, who spread evil to the land. Now, arguably, you don’t have to, but the game recommends you search for the castle of Lord British, who will task you with slaying various monsters located in these dungeons that are remnants of the dark lord. Apparently Richard Garriott was working at ComputerLand at the time, which was a computer store chain in the 1970’s, and showed the game to his boss, who told him they should sell it in the store! He had his mother draw a logo to sell the game in Ziploc bags, which is the version of packaging I like to see, but it eventually got the attention of California Pacific, who contacted him, wanting to publish it professionally.

Commodore

Back in 1975, electronics company Commodore was beginning to run into a concerning situation when, to compete with the lowering prices of calculators, Texas Instruments entered the market themselves, antiquating those they sold chipsets to like Commodore. Realizing the calculator game was over for them, they would attempt to jump onto the hype of the desktop side of the microcomputer revolution and look to the Apple II to sell. They considered Steve Jobs offer too expensive and decided to make their own computer! The Commodore PET was named after the 1975 Pet Rock craze for their goal of making a pet computer. Despite being sighted as releasing in January of 1977, this seems to only be the date of a Consumer Electronics Show appearance it made after it’s 1976 announcement, but perhaps people could start placing orders at this point. Whenever orders could start being placed, they’d be sent out in late ‘77, starting with developers and magazines in October like Byte, who would later be credited with referring to it as part of their famous trinity of 1977 desktops alongside the Apple II and Tandy-RadioShack Z-80. While all 3 of these computers licensed Microsoft BASIC, having one video game run across all of them did not seem so basic. Ports for games can be years apart, sometimes changing game content and even names like the Commodore version of Kadath, Eye of Kadath, seemingly being far more abridged. I’ve seen some people prefer the more condensed Eye of Kadath, and there can be a strength to the short and sweet format.

Haunted House – 1979 – Apple II

A common name for a game which wants you to escape said Haunted House by midnight but it’s full of so much danger that you may find yourself trying new things across multiple playthroughs with your eye also on the clock ticking down on the clock ticking down to midnight assuring runs don’t last too long even if you avoid the densely packed danger. It encourages a form of running the game in short, sweet, trial and error attempts to make it easier to approach and just try again on a different day with short play sessions alleviating a bit of concern for how much time you have to set aside. Its writing style is brief, expecting to be repeated instead of approaching writing more like a horror novel as Kadath does.

There is also what I find to be a middle ground to these 2 writing styles in a series that has stood the test of time as fondly looked upon desktop games of the era.

Voodoo Castle – 1979 – Commodore PET, Exidy Sorcerer, TRS-80

Scott Adams had been making computer games since the 1960’s and, as early as 1975, was working on home computers. In ‘78, he would make a game called Adventureland that would find success, and the following year, he and his wife Alexis would found Adventure International, continuing to make these games. Number 4 in the series would be Voodoo Castle, dedicated to all moms and solely credited to Alexis Adams, though Scott, as early as 1981, saying they both worked on it, contrasting with Alexis’s wording in a ‘98 email, has led to a mini-drama over proper credit. The game itself is about you attempting to rescue Count Cristo from the slumber result of the voodoo curse his enemies hexed him with. You begin in a room with Cristo laying in a casket. From here you can explore the residence, which I assume to be the count's, as you can run into a maid who doesn’t seem to fear you as an intruder, leading me to believe you are someone who knows the count looking for something in his spooky dwelling to break the curse. This game is not too tense, but there is the fear of comically being your own undoing, like trying to experiment with the lab chemicals and they blow up in your face or simply examining an open cell in the dungeon and the door closes behind you, accidentally trapping yourself! I can see the appeal of having a simple spooky-themed puzzler like this but was truly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Something that always stuck in my mind is Tim Schafer remarking how Sandover Village in the first Jak feels like a real town where people live, which creates an effect of dreaming or thinking about wanting to go back and hang out there when you’re not playing the game. It made me realize the deliberateness of making a world capable of building a relationship akin to a hometown with the player as opposed to just being a setting you happen to develop nostalgia for after playing a lot of the game. After only my first time playing Voodoo Castle, I’ve been having that feeling Schafer was talking about, thinking about seeing into the chapel from the room to the south or how I imagined it because I played the text-only version of the game with the environments leaving that positive of an impression on me, but I think what really makes this game work for me is that the word limit for typing a sentence is 2 words. I can’t tell you how intimidated I am by text adventure games, but simplifying it to that makes it very approachable, at least to start off with and explore around without being immediately scared off.

The Count – 1979 - Commodore PET, Exidy Sorcerer, TRS-80

The next game number in the advertised Adventure International series would have you on the other side of a count with you attempting to defeat Count Dracula. After awaking in a bed in Transylvania, you must survive days trying to remain un-hunted by Dracula to hunt him yourself. This game of predator vs. predator felt very tense to me. There can be a spy vs. spy tension of trying to sleep in fear that he’ll get you over night, you being robbed, or even Dracula finding out what you plan to use against him. A 1981 review for this game in Space Gamer magazine mentions using a tent stake as a weapon, but it’s far from as simple as running at the supernatural being. It’s a puzzle game with the added element of having this supernatural wumpus somewhere in the castle, outsmarting you to make you his prey in an instant as you try to do the same back. I may not like puzzle games, but this is a cool idea.

Adventure International opened my mind to text adventures

Something that surprised me is how many people consider SPACE INVADERS a horror game. I’ve seen it sighted in books, horror wikis, and countdowns as an early horror game, so I looked into the game I barely knew. I remembered alien horror had been a thing for at least decades by this point, but then I found out it was originally planned to be called Space Monster, which is about as stereotypical as 20th century horror gets, and, wow, I never noticed its official cover monster or its revered horror soundtrack, so now I’m interested to dive into one of the most iconic horror games in world history!

Inspiration

This Tomohiro Nishikado was interested in working development with his engineering skills, which is why he quit his job at Takt, which had him feeling unfulfilled, and joined Taito Corporation in 1968, developing various arcade games from 1970’s Sky Fighter to ‘73’s Davis Cup and his favorite project, 1974’s Speed Race. The same year Ramtek released Clean Sweep, landing as the third best-selling arcade video game of the year behind Atari’s Gran Trak 10, which was Bushnell's long-awaited release of his own version of 1969's Speedway. Atari, of course, was founded and made a name for itself, cloning, well-received games, and just as Pong was a successful clone of Magnavox Table Tennis, Atari’s suspiciously similar game to Clean Sweep would dwarf the original’s notoriety, and Tomohiro would get deeply into it. Now in 1972, he dissected Pong’s hardware to clone it as Elepong for Taito, but this time he was reverse engineering the aspects of gameplay that made Breakout so satisfying to push the concept forward. His idea was a cover shooter!

Construction

While Breakout consisted of rectangles, Tomohiro was going for more detailed graphics, considering various things from tanks with rotating cannons to combat planes physically turning in the sky to be what the approaching waves would be, but the difficulty of implementing so much animation on such a mass scale proved a challenge. He then saw a magazine article about Star Wars and realized… Space! He thought of the martians in H.G. Wells 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, trying to stick to a theme of octopus-like aliens descending like spiders that don’t need to be animated as turning when changing direction. He also ran into the famous blessing in disguise, where the sheer amount of animating enemies on screen would slow the game down, but the player defeating more and more sped the game up, meaning the difficulty scaled with how well the player was doing, so he decided to leave it in, sometimes attributed as the first game with difficulty scaling, but I wouldn’t be too confident about that. A mirror would be used to reflect a CRT to achieve a crater-filled rock and stars behind the animating enemies, making the game’s setting. It’s sometimes thought to be inspired by the destroyed Earth that was bombarded by meteorites in the show Space Battleship Yamato. It used orange and green strips, overlaid on portions of the screen, to add further color, as it was not using a color CRT. The game’s soundtrack is revered for evoking tension and being one of the earliest known examples of dynamic music. Speeding up when less enemies are on screen is often compared to a heartbeat, much like the increasing speed in the Jaws movie soundtrack. Tomohiro said it took him about 9 or 10 months to make the game overall. He decided to name it Space Monster, but possibly due to already having a game called Space Monster, they told him they had to go with another name, so Space Invader was born (it was then asked to be pluralized to Space Invaders); though, Tomohiro suspects, the cover monster looking as it does could be a result of the artist being given the name Space Monster initially and not actually looking at the game itself. Philips would however release a Space Invaders clone called Space Monster for the Odyssey² about 2 years after Space Invaders launch in 1978. This makes me suspect that Space Monster did not release outside of Japan because I’d assume they’d have some sort of trademark for the name in the countries they release.

Reception

Tomohiro’s bosses reportedly feared Space Invaders reception due to a “game over,” possibly resulting in a shorter playtime compared to a timer-based approach, and yet it would become so popular that Space Invaders only arcades began opening as it became the arcade game industry’s all-time best selling and sighted as the start of the golden age of arcade video games. It popularized things like having a high-score list and that move away from time-based games in general. In the next 2 years, it would technically become the earliest known horror game to win a Game of the Year award (2 years because it released delayed from Japan to America, where it won the award). It’s home console version by Rick Maurer broke sales records with over 2 million cartridges sold in the first year after being licensed to Atari, quadrupling their console's sales, and it is the earliest known horror e-sport.

The 1980 Space Invaders National Championship

Video game competitions predate Pong, with the earliest known tournament being held by Rolling Stone magazine in October of 1972 for the grand prize of a year's subscription to the magazine. Throughout the ‘70s, they’d grow to nationwide tournaments like Sega’s 1974 national championship and Gremlin challenging anyone to try to beat their pro-players Lynn Reid and Sabrina Osment, who’d tour across the U.S. to accept games of Hustle for a hundred 1977 USD. (That ain’t $100 today.) Space Invaders was giant. It had strategy guides on sale, and it would have an appropriate-sized tournament to test its players’ mastery. The 1980 Space Invaders Championship to promote its console release would draw in over 10,000 players from across the country with prizes ranging from desktop computer to the grand prize of some sort of arcade machine. I’ve seen it sighted as an Asteroids cocktail table, but the victor would refer to it as a stand-up cabinet in an interview and would be offered jobs in games journalism following the victory.

It’s popularity made it a target of legal legislation.

Space Invaders’ popularity is quite something. Apart from the famous corporate gift given at a Coke event turning the monsters into the Pepsi letters, the monsters are often used as logos and even the symbol for video games as a whole! It’s soundtrack has been covered by many music groups, but like anything this popular, it was not without its detesters. United Kingdom politician, Baron Foulkes of Cumnock, moved to allow the restriction of the video game for it’s addictive properties through the Control of Space Invaders and Other Electronic Games bill. It would seem the medical condition referred to as “Space Invaders elbow” was not the only side effect of the game. Parents from U.S. to Japan had attempted to get legal legislation passed to restrict Space Invaders on the grounds that it’s addicting nature caused truancy, but their fate would be like The Lord Foulkes of Cumnock’s bill which which was defeated 114 votes to 94, which is way too close for my comfort.

Space Invaders Part II – 1979 Jul - Cabinet

Of course, with the game's popularity, even in the ‘70s, they’d think about annualizing games, and Tomohiro would get to work on the sequel for the following year’s release. Working with the same technology as the first, but now with a color monitor, Space Invaders Part II (eventually released in North America as Space Invaders Deluxe) would add much vibrancy to the iconic monsters, though the U.S. release would stick to using color overlays instead. Set in a more fleshed-out surface base, you now have to worry about monsters splitting in 2, like worms, into what became known as Shape Shifters! The new blinking saucers would become iconic of this game, sometimes bringing reinforcements. To help you keep track of everything, your cover will now display the current wave number, and the game would incorporate cutscenes, expand on a glitch in the first game, causing a trail behind the enemy (now being incorporated as a bonus reward), and improve the bragging rights of high scores by allowing the player to enter their name. While dwarfed by coming out only a year after the original, which would continue to be a top-sensation for years, Space Invaders Part II would make the rounds, leaving a large impact itself. I only wish I knew what it looked like then. Surviving standing cabinets have changed so many details over years of repairs, from using different kinds of backlights to different monitors, that what the game actually looked like may only exist in the fading memories of people who were there. While competition was quite convenient on cocktail tables that could flip the screen between each player, the same year, Midway would release competitive multiplayer tables, titled Space Invaders II as apposed to Part II, where a second player would be atop as the 2 compete from either side of the Monster Invasion.

5 years would pass…

Return of the Invaders - 1984 Sep 12 - Cabinet

The arcade golden age was over, Atari’s dominance was over, and Space Invaders got a third entry in the series. Return of the Invaders would be easily distinguishable from its predecessors at a glance, from its speed and monster flight patterns to its more detailed sprites. The player could now equip a variety of weapons to face new enemies, bosses, and mechanics like shifting cover. The dynamic soundtrack was back and crisper, though a single track has been criticized as the fatal flaw of this game since you hear it the most, with it sounding too whimsical as opposed to the looming dread of its predecessors’ original score. While making improvements and climbing charts, its fatal flaw seems to leave it not as fondly remembered as the fourth game.

The fourth console generation had people saying “Super” and Space Invaders was no exception.

Majestic Twelve: The Space Invaders Part IV - 1990 - Cabinet

Majestic Twelve: The Space Invaders Part IV, more commonly known as Super Space Invaders '91, would be released in arcades and, eventually, many home systems with the arcade version, understandably, not having the long cutscene telling the story of how, in the year 2061 A.D., a garbage dump in space was opened and a passing cruiser dislodged an original ‘70s Space Invaders cabinet that would float through space for years before being found by an advanced civilization that decides to recreate the game’s enemies in real life and use them to wipe out humanity across the galaxy! My favorite thing about this game is how it describes Nishikado’s original game caused people to steal money, skip work, and even ruin their marriages to play it. I suspect it did the same to this advanced civilization, causing them to seek revenge. The tone carries to the game. Probably most remembered about this game is the missions protecting cows from being abducted by saucers, but overall this game is a leap on all fronts with a variety of locations and adversity to overcome to a soundtrack that did not repeat the mistake of the third entry.

Space Invaders '90/ Space Invaders ‘91 – 1990 Sep 7 – Mega Drive

While Majestic Twelve: The Space Invaders Part IV would be ported to the Master System and even Game Gear, the Sega Megadrive game would drop the “Super” from its title and be a completely different game on its own with an upbeat soundtrack and generally faster pacing, though it still had some relaxing, slower-paced levels.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. This all sounds too scary… so lets take a breather for a second.

Space Invaders '95: The Attack of Lunar Loonies – 1995 Jun - Cabinet

Space Invaders '95: The Attack of Lunar Loonies lets you play as a toilet, dog in a trashcan, or other colorful characters as you fly through vibrant and visually captivating worlds. This might be my favorite Space Invaders game. It’s so fun and visually appealing!

Space Invaders X – 1999 Feb 17 – PS1, N64, Windows, GBC

I know a lot of people like this game. Space Invaders, released in 1999, presents the classic Space Invaders game-play, with powerful new weapons, through the lenses of an action hero wiping out the invaders in an art direction, abandoning them being giant organic monsters to instead all be ships. I assume this was to make them consist of flat shapes with little curves so that they could be done in polygons easier. Despite it’s contemporary soundtrack, the enemies only really goes for the original’s formation pattern, with bosses being the only real deviation from this. It’s the opposite of what I’d want in a sequel to Space Invaders, being to move the game-play forward. It feels like it reverted the improvements that the previous sequels made, though I guess this would be more akin to a reboot where you go back to basics. It just went a little too far back to basics for me, and its choice of going for ships instead of organic monsters is just far less interesting from a setting perspective for me. I don’t think this is a bad game, especially as I got further into it; spoilers on that, but I did appreciate the humerus battles with the cutouts of the original cover monster and a classic sprite, including a recreation of the original game’s setting, referred to as the alien’s home world. It’s a little goofy like Attack of the Luna Loonies, and I probably would have liked it more if the whole game was like this. The Game Boy Color version would be barely recognizable as the same game but not do anything to stand out on its own against any other Space Invaders either. These are games that gave me a bad first impression, but I can see myself getting more and more into them as I play them more and more. They definitely haven’t taken me away. They just didn’t impress me as much as the other sequels.

Space Invaders: Invasion Day – 2002 – PS2, GameCube

In terms of “actually” making a sequel, they would return to a different perspective. In 1995, Taito licensed to an Ultraman game that played like a behind-the-back version of Space Invaders. In 2002, Space Invaders: Invasion Day would do the same, contextualizing the game-play as a lone survivor on Earth, trying to survive the invasion, featuring new and classic monsters, including the original cover monster! The iconic crab, the face of Space Invaders, and sometimes videogames as a whole gets such a glow-up in this game, and I love seeing the scale of it to a normal person because you’re normally in a big machine. I never really thought about the scale of these giant monsters before now. Invasion Day may answer every gripe I had with the 1999 "remake,” but it introduced new ones. Only afterward, I found out, there’s unlimited continues where you resurrect where you were slain, meaning there is no “game over” state, and what I did notice right away is that so many grunt enemies take multiple hits regardless of the character you play. This removes the impact of a shooter for me. It’s something I don’t mind being reserved for bosses, but a lot of the impact of what made the original Space Invaders work for me is you’re both out in one hit. This is removed by giving either of us health bars! I would call this my fatal flaw that sours my taste much like that song does for so many in the third game. This game’s music is also not the dynamic slow dread revered about the series but matches what the game is going for in telling a dire story about being overwhelmed by the sheer scale of adversity that at times seems hopeless. It never felt impactful though, which could have been greatly aided by a more restrained, dynamic score like its predecessors. The overall sound design truly lacked impact for a variety of reasons, but, other than that, I found a lot of things I liked about this game. It’s a very specific vibe of game that I can only describe as Michigan: Report from Hell. Don’t expect anything too crazy! It’s a 12+ game, but I don’t know how to describe it other than that. I’ve come to appreciate this very specific vibe. It clears the admittedly low bar of being the most interesting visuals and story direction I’ve seen in Space Invaders, ignoring the apples to oranges of comparing it to Space Invaders ‘95. I honestly found its 3 characters interesting, with 2 looking to avenge their fallen loved ones and the third seemingly going mad in desperation from the fact that she never found her significant other in the chaos of the invasion. Whenever the game’s tone took breaks from the actiony or tongue-in-cheek, it would always return to the direness of the situation, which it did a good job of conveying through game play… but that decision to have health bars ruined that game-play for me. Its story is also a single event in an ongoing invasion which never got a sequel, likely to this one’s negative reception. This is the last time they would ever try to make a big sequel to Space Invaders, but far from the last time they’d use the IP for games!

Space Invaders: Evolution – 2005 Sep 22 - PSP

After a few years, Space Invaders Evolution would have a quite unambitious by comparison rhythm game that I might call even simpler than the original with one row of enemies that don’t change speed and are simply fodder to build yourself up to enjoy beating the background saucer. This was packed as an extra new Space Invaders in the Space Invaders Evolution UMD, which was a collection also featuring a…very visually incomplete original and an old-school versus that treats your PSP like a cocktail table, and there was also wireless play. Having less ambitious new games in a collection like this is probably what I would have wanted Space Invaders X to be if it wasn’t made into a more ambitious sequel than it was.

Celebrating the retro of 70’s Space Invader is what the series would be from now on.

Space Invaders Revolution – 2005 Mar 24 - DS

Evolution was in line with Revolution that same year, having you globetrot to play 70’s style Space Invaders with modern sound design.

“Those are the Space Invaders. I thought we killed them all 30 years ago.” – Space Invaders: Get Even

Space Invaders 30th Anniversary Celebration (crazy to think this celebration is now retro itself)

When the 30th anniversary arrived, they’d release a plethora of games to celebrate! Space Invaders: Extreme added many visual effects and challenges to the 70’s era Space Invaders game-play, even receiving a sequel the following year. Space Invaders: Beat Attack would have you play 70’s style Space Invaders with your feet! Space Invaders: Get Even would have you play as the invaders, returning after being defeated in the original game. You pilot the saucer, trying to destroy the Earth by dropping sprites of the monsters. It's my favorite of the 30th anniversary games, but most surprising to me is Space Invaders: World War, which is an MMO-light Space Invaders where you fire at random sprites approaching for points that go to your country in a global competition. Both you and the sprites seem to have no movement restrictions from the footage I’ve found, but it was shut down a little over a year after launch. I was expecting it to look like the 40th anniversary game, Space Invaders Gigamax, where you simply have multiple players on screen, but as it is, it does seem VR port-friendly, like a shooter version of Beat Saber… Is that just Rez?

Reflecting on Space Invaders

What was the first horror game?

Killer Shark – 1972? – Cabinet When the question of the first horror game comes up, the poorly kept, early history of video games as a whole becomes an obstacle. You can find conversations about what the first horror game is, bring up seemingly lost cabinets of uncertain construction, or a scene in the 1975 movie Jaws in which it cuts to gameplay of an arcade game called Killer Shark where the player is a deep sea diver, armed with a speargun, shooting said killer shark, who appears from the darkness of the deep ocean… The arcade cabinet has a Sega logo, with various websites sighting it as having a 1972 release in the U.S. with no month or day specified. There's also a flyer, circulating, that shows the machine with 2 play prices, whose currency implies a Japanese release that may have been simultaneous or prior, considering the space for its second coin slot still exists in all the pictures of the U.S. release. Both sensible information and interest in this game are sparse due to its stroboscopic disk approach to film being considered so primitive that it becomes divisive as to if people even consider it video, thus making its historical value as a horror game as divisive, causing the credit of the earliest known horror game to often be split between it and another 1972 game, Haunted House. 

Haunted House – 1972, Aug-Oct? – Odyssey When attempting to create a variety of first-party games for their new home console, horror would join the likes of sports, education, and science fiction games, the Odyssey would see. While the creative mind behind the console would be against packing in games that required more than TV and controller to play, the console was under Magnavox, who would ultimately lean into the more board game design, relying on physical pieces in attempting to capture the family market. Released around September of ‘72, Haunted House would take advantage of the video game format by having a multiplayer game where one player is a ghost that can hide within things with the illumination of their body standing out while also blending in with the natural illumination of a CRT screen that lit the entire environment. The other player would be the detective, attempting to survive the mansion, with physical cards guiding the game without having to approach condensing text into hardware, which was meant to be cheap and thus simple. The game’s approach to horror relied on the tension of anticipating a failure state that allowed the player controlling the ghost to initiate a jump scare that would flash the screen white while they screamed “BOO!” Real scary, I know.

So what’s the earliest known survival horror game?

Hunt The Wumpus – 1973 – printed BASIC code After arcade and console players got their horror fix, the following year would see the release of a desktop computer horror game that would rely less on visuals and more on painting a picture through text like a horror novel. Gregory Yob found the output of the trend of hide and seek games published by People’s Computer Company to be… underwhelming considering what could be accomplished. He would avoid the easy grid pattern level design and have the player explore a cave system where a man-eating beast called the Wumpus was sleeping somewhere around. Also within the cave… were bottomless pits and bats—so great, they can carry a person right off! The player, armed with 5 crooked arrows, named for their… unrealistically generous movement through the air in the game’s dodecahedron-shaped world, would need to explore the cave system to hunt the Wumpus in complete darkness via their other senses like smell and feel, as light would alert the beast, and if you move too close to it, you’ll turn into it’s prey. Because of this, it’s retroactively referred to as the earliest known example of a survival horror game: exploring it’s cave system, managing your limited arrows, to hunt the monster while trying not to squander your limited inventory and become its prey. It was sold via mail order in 1973 and People’s Computer Company who advertised it as a possible tool to teach first grader’s math is credited as its publisher.

It became a franchise.

By 1975, multiple horror games were being released per year. Hunt the Wumpus’s source code was released in Creative Computing Magazine and became a series with ports, sequels, and custom alterations. Wumpus 2 would focus on re-playability. It’s new cave systems bringing changing difficulty and strategy, being described as “the same old Wumpus in a different setting, including those of your own design,"  referring to the ability to create your own cave system in this new entry. Wumpus 3 would advertise new hazards to the mix like earthquakes and bat migrations. Jack Emmerichs is credited with the creation of Super Wumpus, a more complex version of Wumpus where the beast would be aggressively active, while an Altair 8800 parody of the original, titled Wampus, would give players the option to primarily try to escape the cave and avoid confrontation all together.

What was the first video game adaptation of a horror movie? Could it have been inspired by:

Maneater – 1975 Mar? – Cabinet In 1975, Project Support Engineering released Maneater, advertising up to 2 players can indulge in it’s “video terror!” Controlling divers in shark-infested waters, players are to retrieve packages from the bottom and bring them to the surface, and this would be far from the last shark game…

Shark Jaws – 1975 Sep 25th – Cabinet Video game adaptations of other media predate Pong, and Pong’s company, Atari, would join on this, forming Horror Games, a front to take the bullet in case they were sued for their unlicensed adaptation, Shark Jaws, though keen eyes would recognize it using an Atari Tank II cabinet, and those who got inside might note its circuit board, marked "Atari,"  whose marketing VP is quoted as saying the company behind Jaws would find out Atari is behind Horror Games in only 3 days. Advertised as “exciting underwater video terror!” Shark Jaws had you swimming for fish in a third person while trying to avoid being shark food. It’s been praised for it’s sound design, using heavy reverb to emulate its setting, and despite claims of it selling thousands, tracking serial numbers have led to collectors finding it, more likely, only had 500 ever even made. Coincidentally, much like Killer Shark, it too would be used in a movie and 3 years after its release, to boot!

What was the first journalist attack on horror games?

DeathRace – 1976 April - Cabinet Games in the horror genre would, of course, eventually attract backlash. In December of 1975, Destruction Derby would release where the player, controlling a car, would attempt to ram into others. It was licensed to Chicago Coin by Exidy, who would clone the game to also profit from it without competing with their licensee. New hire, Howell Ivy, said the easy approach would be to replace the visuals, which was done by replacing the other cars with fleeing people! Allegedly titled Pedestrian before becoming Death Race 98 and then shortened to Death Race. The cabinet featured 2 Grim Reapers, driving cars, with the pedestrians being named Gremlins, who would scream before being run over. A reporter would see kids lined up to play Death Race and run a story in Seattle, beginning a snowball of media covering the controversial game about running over fleeing pedestrians. Becoming taboo, of course, caused the game’s sales to shoot from hundreds to thousands, with video game magazines reporting it in the top 10 highest grossing arcade games for 2 years! 

How much of an arcade game is in the cabinet’s construction, itself?

Triple Hunt – 1977 April – Cabinet On the market in 1977 was a new 3 in 1 arcade cabinet by Atari, Triple Hunt: a collection of shooting games, featuring Raccoon Hunt, where you shoot raccoons before they get to the top of a tree; Hit the Bear, where you take aim at bears with attached targets that, because the sprites display horizontally stretched, look more like eyes; and a game called Witch Hunt, where you’re firing at a haunted mansion where a witch circles the sky. The game tracks the gun’s position on the screen via 2 potentiometers in the gun, while a display mask and a one-way mirror in front of the monitor let light through and reflect the game’s sprites, creating a sense of depth and allowing them to pass behind and in front of objects. This allows the game to advertise multiple 3D environments. The game’s creator, Owen Rubin, would explain that the more complex method of gun tracking was chosen over using a light-gun, sensing the sprites when they’re not behind objects out of fear that outside lights like fluorescents would get in the way. This cabinet’s construction is an example of how I think so much of the experience is often lost when trying to translate an arcade game to a 2D screen. So much of the experience is in the cabinet’s construction itself, which is often not even attempted to be replicated. The game’s spooky sound design came from a combination of the game’s microprocessor producing sound effects and an 8-track tape producing the ambient environmental noise. Witch Hunt would have the most tape and not be the only witch game of this error.

There’s a horror game of a city’s tourist attraction.

The House of Seven Gables - 1978 - Apple II, TRS-80, Sorcerer Perhaps the most well-known thing about Salem, Massachusetts, is the witch trials of the 1600s. During the time, stood the Turner house that would eventually sell to the family of Susanna Ingersoll, who would entertain her cousin there, telling him stories of its old history. The attic had bits of framing and plaster from former gables built in 1668. This cousin would make the house famous by being inspired to write the 1851 novel, The House of the Seven Gables. The house is now an icon of Salem, becoming a museum and one with a horror game. Greg Hassett’s 1978 text adventure, The House of Seven Gables, advertises you raid for valuables but must defeat the witch to escape…  and said witch is not the only danger. Lurking the house are life-threatening ghouls who—you can throw chemicals in their face. A GHOST who also doesn’t want you to leave with valuables and can be life-threatening himself if you refuse to relinquish your plunder. There’s even a vampire who you can drive off with garlic found in the kitchen, but it won’t work forever… so you might want to prepare to combat it a different way.