Horror Games | Code Like It's 198x

The first horror game was played with a sheet of plastic stuck to the television. Haunted House, one of the games packed with the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, had one player move a dot of light as a detective through a house drawn on a screen overlay, looking for clues, while a second player played the ghost hiding in one of them. Looking back in 2022, Wireframe’s Mr Biffo called it “the first game to pay a nod to the horror genre”.

Horror has been a setting for games ever since, and increasingly a way of designing them: keep the player in the dark, make them weaker than what is hunting them, and let them decide whether to open the next door. A developer interviewed by Edge in 2012, Joonas Rikkonen, put the difference from cinema this way: “Horror films [make] you afraid of something bad happening to the characters, but a game [makes] you scared for your own safety.”

Fast facts

Earliest example: Haunted House for the Magnavox Odyssey (1972), a two-player game on a screen overlay.
First fear in the dark: Atari’s Haunted House (VCS, 1982) and 3D Monster Maze (ZX81, 1982).
Certificates: CRL’s Dracula (1986) was reported as the first computer game given a 15 certificate by the British film censors, the BBFC; its Jack the Ripper (1987) was the first given an 18.
Survival horror: Sweet Home (Famicom, 1989), Alone in the Dark (PC, 1992) and Resident Evil (PlayStation, 1996), which gave the style its name. See survival horror.
Later turns: Silent Hill (1999), the sanity meter of Eternal Darkness (2002), Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) and the small independent games that spread through YouTube videos in 2012.

In the dark: the first frights

Atari’s Haunted House for the VCS (1982) had nothing to do with its Odyssey namesake beyond the setting. The player was a pair of eyes in a dark mansion, looking for the three pieces of an urn, and the rooms could be seen only by striking a match with the fire button. A ghost, spider or bat appearing would blow the match out. Computer & Video Games previewed it in May 1982 and priced it at £29.95.

In Britain the same year, Malcolm Evans’s 3D Monster Maze for the 16K ZX81 put the player in a maze with a Tyrannosaurus rex and no way to fight it. J. K. Greye Software of Bath advertised it in Computer & Video Games in February 1982 as “Gamestape 4, for 16K, only £4.95”, and messages on screen such as “Rex has seen you” and “Run, he is behind you” told the player where the dinosaur was. When Edge told the story of the game in 2006, it wrote that it had shown “that games could invoke emotion. Mostly panic and terror”.

Not every early horror game tried to frighten. In 1983 Wizard Video released Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the Atari VCS. Video Games magazine found the first “a bore” once the novelty wore off, and complained that the second, in which the player controls Leatherface, had been turned “into a surefire soporific exercise”. Mr Biffo’s survey reached a similar conclusion about much of the decade: horror games “concentrated on action (Castlevania) or comedy (Maniac Mansion) over true scares”.

Horror in words

Text adventures could describe what early graphics could not show. Scott Adams’s The Count, advertised for the TRS-80 in 1980, put the player in “Dracula’s castle” with a mission to destroy him, and Infocom’s The Lurking Horror (1987), by Dave Lebling, trapped a student in a university computer building on a winter’s night, where a maintenance man turns into “dozens of squealing little creatures”. Computer & Video Games called it “an Infocom shocker … very much in the style of a modern horror movie”.

In Britain, horror adventures ran into the film censors. CRL’s Dracula (1986), written by Rod Pike and closely following Bram Stoker’s novel, went to the British film censors, the BBFC, and came back with a 15 certificate, “apparently the first computer game to receive such an accolade”, as CRASH put it. The magazine noted the lack of “blood and gore in the pictures that would warrant such a certificate”, but gave the game 89% for descriptions that “read as well as a book”. Amstrad Action was more sceptical: “(heaven knows how) CRL has managed to get the British Film Censors to slap a ‘15’ certificate on the game”. Pike’s Frankenstein also received a 15, and CRL’s Jack the Ripper (1987), written by St Brides, was reviewed by CRASH as “the first computer game to receive an 18 certificate”.

Sweet Home, Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil

The design that would become survival horror grew in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and its history has its own entry, survival horror. Capcom’s Famicom role-playing game Sweet Home (1989), based on a Japanese horror film of the same name, was in Capcom’s words “an adventure set in an old mansion”. Infogrames’ Alone in the Dark (1992), designed by Frédérick Raynal, who told Edge he had loved horror films and especially George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, put polygon characters in a haunted house seen through fixed camera angles. Mr Biffo dated “the modern era of gaming horror” from it.

Capcom’s Resident Evil (1996) drew on both. Before it came out, Capcom’s Akio Sakai told Edge that “Way back in the NES days we developed an RPG called Sweet Home and it’s from there where our inspiration comes.” Capcom sold the game as a “world of survival horror”, and Edge’s review observed that “Capcom hasn’t coined this new genre ‘survival horror’ for nothing.”

Horror also brought games before the US Senate. Digital Pictures’ Night Trap, a video game made of filmed footage for Sega’s Mega-CD, was one of the violent titles Senator Joe Lieberman spoke out against in 1993, alongside Mortal Kombat, in the campaign that brought the Senate hearings of December 1993 and led to the American ratings board, the ESRB, in 1994. Its designer, Rob Fulop, later told Retro Gamer that there had been “a lot of misinformation” about it.

The mind as the monster

Konami’s Silent Hill (1999) wrapped its town in fog. Edge noted that where other games used fog to hide a short draw distance, Silent Hill used “the effect to heighten tension”, and found the game hard less because of its puzzles or monsters than because of its story: “By usual benchmarks it’s terrible; in the context of reproducing a nightmare, it’s nearly brilliant.”

Silicon Knights’ Eternal Darkness for the GameCube (2002) turned fear into a game rule. Its sanity meter fell every time the player met a monster, and as it dropped, Edge reported, “strange and unnerving effects begin to take place”: camera angles shifted and flashbacks played. Edge would not give away what happened when the meter hit bottom, beyond warning that “it’s not a good idea to believe every message that appears onscreen.”

Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) took the player’s weapons away altogether. Its hero, lost in a Prussian castle with no memory of how he got there, measures his sanity like health; darkness and horrors drain it, while the monsters have to be escaped by running or hiding in the shadows, since there is no way to fight them. Previewing it, Edge credited the small Swedish studio with “an atmosphere of unrelenting dread” in spite of its plain graphics.

Playing to an audience

Horror games became something to watch as well as play. Edge reported in 2012 on a wave of small independent horror games built on stories invented on the internet: Mark Hadley’s Slender, in which a faceless figure stalks a player collecting eight notes in a dark park, and Rikkonen’s SCP – Containment Breach. “YouTube is packed with playthroughs,” the magazine wrote, and Rikkonen said he loved watching the “let’s play” videos: “some of the reactions you see in them are pretty extreme. People falling out of their chairs, pausing the game and going for a cigarette to cool their nerves.”

Sources

Ralph H. Baer, Videogames: In the Beginning (Rolenta Press, 2005): Haunted House among the Odyssey’s games, and the 1972 production run.
Wireframe issue 67, October 2022, pp. 22–23, Mr Biffo, “Jump scares and creeping tension”: the Odyssey and VCS Haunted House games, the matches, 3D Monster Maze and its messages, horror games of the 1980s, Alone in the Dark, Sweet Home and Resident Evil.
Computer & Video Games issue 7, May 1982: Haunted House preview (£29.95).
Computer & Video Games issue 4, February 1982: J. K. Greye Software advertisement for 3D Monster Maze (Gamestape 4, 16K, £4.95).
Edge issue 161, April 2006, pp. 86–89: “The Making of… 3D Monster Maze”.
Video Games (US) vol. 2 no. 2, November 1983, pp. 73–74: reviews of Wizard Video’s Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the Atari 2600.
SoftSide, S-80 edition, February 1980, p. 31: The Software Exchange advertisement for Scott Adams’s The Count and Voodoo Castle (“You’re in Dracula’s castle”).
Computer & Video Games issue 71, September 1987, p. 95: The Lurking Horror review.
CRASH issue 37, February 1987: Dracula review, 89% (the 15 certificate). Amstrad Action issue 17, February 1987: Dracula review. Computer Gamer issue 22, January 1987: Dracula and the publicity over its rating.
CRASH issue 48, January 1988: Christmas special feature on book tie-ins (Rod Pike’s Dracula and its 15 certificate) and Jack the Ripper review (St Brides, the 18 certificate, Dracula and Frankenstein “both given 15 certificates”).
Edge issue 150, June 2005, pp. 93–95: “The Making of… Alone in the Dark” (Raynal, 1992, Dawn of the Dead).
Edge issue 30, March 1996, p. 51: interview with Capcom’s Akio Sakai (Sweet Home and its mansion, the inspiration for Resident Evil).
Edge issue 33, June 1996: Resident Evil review (“survival horror”).
Edge issue 46, June 1997, p. 61: Senator Joe Lieberman, the December 1993 hearings, Night Trap and Mortal Kombat, the ESRB.
Retro Gamer issue 44, 2007: Rob Fulop interview (Night Trap and the Senate hearings).
Edge issue 70, April 1999, pp. 64–65: Silent Hill review (the fog, the story).
Edge issue 114, September 2002: Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem review (the sanity meter).
Edge issue 218, September 2010: Amnesia: The Dark Descent preview (Frictional Games, sanity, no means of fighting).
Edge issue 245, October 2012, pp. 14–15, “Campfire 2.0”: Slender, SCP – Containment Breach, YouTube playthroughs, Joonas Rikkonen.