In a first-person horror game there is no camera placed to show the player what is coming. You see what the character sees, and nothing behind. The designers of the late 1990s learned to work that limit for all it was worth: they let the player hear a monster before they could see it, kept the light scarce, and placed their scares where the player had just started to relax. “You can always hear them before you can see them,” PC Zone wrote of Clive Barker’s Undying in 2001, in a review that imagined what Poe and Lovecraft might have made “had they teamed up to create a first-person horror game”.
Fast facts
- An early example: 3D Monster Maze (ZX81, 1982), a maze seen in 3D with a Tyrannosaurus rex somewhere inside it.
- Named in the period press: Realms of the Haunting (Gremlin, reviewed January 1997) for unease; Aliens Vs Predator (Rebellion, 1999) for “sudden scares”; System Shock 2 (Irrational/Looking Glass, 1999) for “sustained psychological unease”; Clive Barker’s Undying (2001) between the two; Doom 3 (id, 2004) for the flashlight and the dark.
- The design statement: Ken Levine on System Shock 2, 1999: “more [for the] feeling of suspense and terror [than] actual gross-out gore horror.”
- The recurring tools: sound cues that come before sight; flickering or absent light; a motion tracker or other instrument that reports what the eyes cannot see; triggered events “just when you thought you were safe”.
- Later: Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) took away the weapons; P.T. (2014) and Resident Evil 7 (2017) brought the form back to consoles.
A dinosaur in the maze
The idea is older than the PC games. J. K. Greye Software’s 3D Monster Maze for the 16K ZX81, advertised in Your Computer in March 1982, drew its maze in 3D from the player’s point of view: “The EXIT is there somewhere, but then so is a T.REX and its after YOU! All in 3D.” The player had no weapon. Messages on the screen, Wireframe recalled, did the frightening: “Rex has seen you” and “Run, he is behind you”. The wider history of games like it is told in horror games.
Unease before fright
Edge reviewed Gremlin’s Realms of the Haunting in January 1997 as a fusion of “two very familiar 3D game styles - the adventure and the Doom-alike” held together by “the essential element of horror”. Its method was already the genre’s: “Realtime lighting effects add to the ambience created by the eerie and demonic visuals, while the soundtrack successfully plunders such horror staples as quickening heartbeats, ominous musical crescendos and disembodied shrieks to add to the feeling of unease.” The magazine faulted the engine and the interface, then called the game “a triumph” for “brilliantly handled set-pieces, some well-crafted location work, intelligent placing of enemies”, and observed that a new monster creeping up was “suitably heart-stopping when played alone”.
Hearing them first
PC Zone’s review of Aliens Vs Predator in May 1999 was introduced with the line “Everyone in the PC ZONE office could hear Richie Shoemaker scream”. AvP “may not be the best-ever 3D shooter”, Shoemaker wrote, “but, thanks to its cast, it’s certainly the scariest. Well, a third of it is.” The third was the Marine; as the Predator, “against Marines, you have little to fear.” His account of first playing the Marine demo in the office is the technique from the player’s side: “sneaking down a flickering corridor, chucking flares ahead, listening for movement.” The Marine’s motion tracker “works up the fear factor by registering not only enemy movement, but also breaking glass and flying limbs”, and “Flickering lights even cause you to see things that aren’t there. Then, when you’re convinced you’re not going mad, an Alien drops from the ceiling or a Predator phases into view.”
Mark Hill’s Undying review two years later set out the rule in one line: “You can always hear them before you can see them”. What the player hears, “the sound of the weather, while the unobtrusive music, the distant howl of monsters, the creaking of floorboards, even the breathing of a nearby creature”, is the sound design of the form. Undying added a touch that only works through the character’s eyes: when attacked, “your screen is physically affected, jolting your vision and tearing streaks of blood that last a few seconds, long enough to throw you off balance and make you panic.”
Suspense over gore
Previewing System Shock 2 in July 1999, PC Zone asked Ken Levine whether he was going for big scares. “Oh yes,” and then: “you certainly need a se[nse of] Grand Guignol in these things, but we’re going at it in a fairly restricted manner. We’re going more [for the] feeling of suspense and terror [than] actual gross-out gore horror.”
Paul Mallinson’s review of the finished game credited the effect to the sound designers: “monsters that groan in the distance and get louder as they near you; the calming sound of the machine that goes ‘ping’ in the medical wards; the crackle of the Geiger counter”. Together, “they bring the whole environment to life in a way that has never been seen for as long as this reviewer can remember”, and “it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll jump out of your skin on more than one occasion”. The magazine’s editorial that month made the general case: “any game that scares you half to death is already halfway to capturing your attention completely and making you believe you are ‘there’.” Hill’s Undying review later split the two schools: for a “similar atmosphere” turn to System Shock 2, “and for sudden scares there are few better than Aliens Vs Predator”, with Undying close to the “sustained psychological unease” of the one “without abandoning the shock tactics” of the other.
The flashlight and the dark
Computer Gaming World’s Doom 3 review of October 2004 describes the form at its most concentrated. “You’ll be wandering darkened hallways armed with a flashlight. You spin around to a hiss, but it’s only some hydraulic machinery grinding away. Can a human being sustain that kind of heightened paranoia for hours at a time?” Darren Gladstone compared the pacing to “the classic horror-movie scene in which there’s a sudden musical spike and a cat leaps from the closet”, noted that “All the event triggers are strategically placed and add that extra bit of fear just when you thought you were safe”, and gave the practical advice the design forces: “go slow and steady through each level”, and, if you had no 5.1 speaker kit, “buy one quick”.
No way to fight
Later games took away the gun. Previewing Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent in 2010, Edge started from the old rule that “it’s not what you see that scares you, but what you don’t see”. The monsters were rare, and “with no means of fighting them the only option is to run or dive into shadow”; darkness drained the hero’s sanity, but he might still need to hide in it. The small Swedish studio, the magazine thought, could “maintain an atmosphere of unrelenting dread and then slap you sharply with total panic at exactly the right moment.”
Hideo Kojima’s P.T. (2014), a “Playable Teaser” for a Silent Hills game that never appeared, sent the player round and round one looping corridor. Wireframe described its “pared-back, defenceless, and downright unsettling approach to scares”, found its influence in many later first-person horror games, and noted that Resident Evil 7 “made the switch to first-person soon after P.T. arrived”. Capcom’s series, which had made its name with fixed cameras (see survival horror), was now seen through its hero’s eyes.
Sources
- Your Computer, March 1982: J. K. Greye Software advertisement for 3D Monster Maze (Gamestape 4, 16K).
- Wireframe issue 67, October 2022, pp. 22–23, Mr Biffo, “Jump scares and creeping tension”: 3D Monster Maze and its messages; pp. 38–39, “Perfectly Terrifying”: P.T., its influence, and Resident Evil 7.
- Edge issue 41, January 1997: Realms of the Haunting review (Gremlin, £45, “Out now”).
- PC Zone issue 76, May 1999, pp. 81–83: Aliens Vs Predator review by Richie Shoemaker.
- PC Zone issue 78, July 1999: System Shock 2 preview and interview with Ken Levine.
- PC Zone issue 80, September 1999: System Shock 2 review by Paul Mallinson; editorial.
- PC Zone issue 101, April 2001: Clive Barker’s Undying review by Mark Hill.
- Computer Gaming World issue 243, October 2004, pp. 71–73: Doom 3 review by Darren Gladstone.
- Edge issue 218, September 2010, p. 55: Amnesia: The Dark Descent preview.