Survival Horror | Code Like It's 198x

In a survival horror game you are weaker than whatever is hunting you. There are never quite enough bullets, healing items are rationed, saving the game may cost you something, and the camera is placed to hide what is around the next corner. Running away is often the right choice. The genre got its name in 1996, and the name came from a publisher before any critic used it: Capcom sold Resident Evil as a “world of survival horror”, and Edge repeated the phrase in its review, noting that “Capcom hasn’t coined this new genre ‘survival horror’ for nothing.”

The ideas are older than the name. They run back through Infogrames’ Alone in the Dark and a Capcom role-playing game that never left Japan, as far as an Atari cartridge of 1982 in which the player was a pair of eyes in a dark house.

Fast facts

Name: Capcom’s own phrase, used to launch Resident Evil on the PlayStation in 1996.
Early ancestors: Haunted House (Atari VCS, 1982), 3D Monster Maze (ZX81, 1982), Sweet Home (Famicom, 1989), Alone in the Dark (PC, 1992), Clock Tower (Super Famicom, 1995).
Defining traits: scarce ammunition and healing, limited saves and inventory, fixed or restricted cameras, slow and awkward movement, puzzles and locked doors.
Later branches: Silent Hill (1999) and Fatal Frame (2001) towards psychological and ghost stories; Resident Evil 4 (2005) towards action.
Today: Resident Evil, the series that named the genre, had sold 213 million games by June 2026.

Before the name

Haunted House (Atari VCS, 1982) sent the player through a dark mansion to find the three pieces of a broken urn. ANALOG Computing listed it among Atari’s titles for February 1982 and summed it up: find the pieces “before using up your 9 lives as you prowl the corridors and rooms of a haunted mansion.” The player was shown only as a pair of eyes. The objects in the house could be seen only after pressing the button to light a match, and a ghost, spider or bat appearing would snuff it out. Looking back in 2022, Wireframe’s Mr Biffo wrote that it “had a lot more in common with what became the survival horror genre” than the earlier Haunted House board-game hybrid for the Magnavox Odyssey. It cost £29.95 in Britain.

3D Monster Maze, advertised by J. K. Greye Software in Your Computer in January 1982 for the 16K ZX81 at £4.95 (“Find the Exit before the T. Rex gets you!”), had no weapons at all. The player walked a maze while messages warned that the dinosaur had seen them, or was behind them. Retro Gamer later wrote that “survival horror may have been a phrase first coined by Resident Evil, but it could’ve easily applied” to Malcolm Evans’s game.

Sweet Home (Famicom, 1989) was Capcom’s game of a Japanese horror film of the same name, directed by Tokuro Fujiwara. Five treasure-hunters explore a haunted mansion, each carrying one item the others need, such as a key or a camera. It stayed in Japan, although Electronic Gaming Monthly listed it in January 1989 among Capcom’s planned American NES games. Capcom said openly where Resident Evil came from. “Way back in the NES days we developed an RPG called Sweet Home and it’s from there where our inspiration comes,” Capcom’s Akio Sakai told Edge in March 1996. “Sweet Home was an adventure set in an old mansion like Resident Evil’s.”

Alone in the Dark (PC, November 1992), designed by Frédérick Raynal at Infogrames, put polygon characters in a haunted 1920s house seen from fixed, film-like camera angles. The formula is covered in pre-rendered backgrounds and tank controls. Edge called it “virtually a blueprint” for Resident Evil, and its review summed up Capcom’s game as “Alone in the Dark directed by George A Romero with the design sensibilities of Myst.”

Clock Tower (Super Famicom, 1995), by Human Entertainment, gave its heroine no weapons at all against Scissorman, who chases her with a giant pair of shears. She can only run, hide or use traps in the house against him.

What Resident Evil fixed in place

Edge’s June 1996 review described most of the conventions that later games copied or reacted against:

Scarce ammunition. “Half the puzzles … yield the simplest of all possible rewards: ammunition. There’s been nothing in other games to compare to the panic and despair that you feel as you hammer shot after shot into an advancing zombie … only to hear the dull click of an empty service revolver magazine.”
Limited carrying. The review noted that “Resident Evil restricts the amount to eight” items, with storage trunks for the rest. Saving took an ink ribbon at a typewriter.
The camera and the controls. “Everything in Resident Evil is geared towards suspense: the skewed camera angles, the haunting strains of the soundtrack, the fact that you can run forwards but only retreat in painfully slow steps.”

The director, Shinji Mikami, described the blind spots as deliberate. “Even if you knew before looking round a corner that a zombie was going to be there, we set up blind spots so that players wouldn’t be able to see the zombies [immediately] and that in turn produced an uneasy feeling that caused players to feel afraid,” he told Retro Gamer.

By 1999 the phrase had become a label. GamesMaster introduced Capcom’s dinosaur game Dino Crisis as “the latest survival horror epic from Capcom”, and the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine invited readers to “enter the world of survival horror” once more with Resident Evil 3 Nemesis.

Other directions: Silent Hill and Fatal Frame

Konami’s Silent Hill (1999) built its town in real-time 3D and filled it with fog. Other games used fog to hide how little the hardware could draw; Edge noted that Silent Hill used it “to heighten tension”. Its difficulty, the reviewer thought, lay less in puzzles or monsters than in the story: “By usual benchmarks it’s terrible; in the context of reproducing a nightmare, it’s nearly brilliant.”

Tecmo’s Fatal Frame (Project Zero in Europe) took away the gun. Its heroine, Miku, searches a haunted mansion for her missing brother, and her only defence is a camera: switch to a first-person view, frame the ghost, and take its picture. Edge found the setting “quintessential survival horror” and gave it seven out of ten, and thought that “purely in terms of intelligence, it may be closer to the future of the genre” than its better-funded rivals.

The turn to action

Resident Evil 4 (GameCube, 2005) moved the camera over the hero’s shoulder and set him against crowds of hostile villagers. Edge’s review began: “The Resident Evil series as it existed was a shuffling, stumbling carcass that needed to be destroyed.” What replaced it was “rammed with action”, and “at its core, the game is simply a shooting gallery, albeit the most deliciously presented one you’ve ever seen.” In the same issue Edge argued that talk of the genre going stale was unfair, because Capcom itself had “taken interesting strides to address the traditions of the series”.

Critics came to count the cost. Writing about the series on handheld consoles in 2012, Edge argued that “in its drive to make Resident Evil more accessible, the developer has surgically removed one of its most pivotal suspense devices: your sense of helplessness.”

Revival and the present

The way back began with a demo. Konami’s P.T. (2014), a “Playable Teaser” for a Silent Hills game with Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro, was a single, seemingly endless looping corridor through which the player moved defenceless. The game it advertised was cancelled, and Konami pulled P.T. from the PlayStation Store in April 2015, but Wireframe found its influence in many later first-person horror games. In the same year Alien: Isolation made its tension, as Wireframe’s editor remembered it, out of “the build-up to the appearance of the title monster”.

Capcom went first-person too. Resident Evil 7 biohazard (January 2017) went back to managing scarce resources and solving puzzles, closer to the early games, and it was the first game on Capcom’s new RE Engine. Capcom then used the engine to rebuild its old games. The Resident Evil 2 remake of January 2019 had sold 19.7 million copies by June 2026, more than any other game in the series, and Resident Evil Requiem, released in February 2026, had sold 8 million. Konami followed with a remake of Silent Hill 2 in October 2024 and a new game, Silent Hill f, in September 2025.

Sources

ANALOG Computing issue 5, January 1982: Atari’s 1982 titles, with Haunted House for February, and its description (the urn, nine lives).
Computer & Video Games issue 7, May 1982: Haunted House preview (the dark house, £29.95 in Britain).
Electronic Games, July 1982, and Electronic Games 1983 Software Encyclopedia, p. 25: Haunted House (Graves Manor, the magic urn, 24 rooms).
Your Computer, January 1982, p. 78: J. K. Greye Software advertisement for 3D Monster Maze (Gamestape 4, 16K, £4.95).
Retro Gamer issue 45, 2007, ZX81 feature: 3D Monster Maze and survival horror.
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, Alone in the Dark; p. 39: P.T. and its withdrawal in April 2015, Resident Evil 7’s first-person view.
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 1, January 1989, p. 29: Sweet Home among Capcom’s NES games planned for 1989.
Retro Gamer issue 109, December 2012: Sweet Home (the five characters and their items).
Wireframe issue 7, February 2019, pp. 50–53, profile of Tokuro Fujiwara: Sweet Home and its link to Resident Evil.
Edge issue 30, March 1996, p. 51: interview with Capcom’s Akio Sakai (Sweet Home as the inspiration; caption comparing Resident Evil with Alone in the Dark).
Edge issue 33, June 1996: Resident Evil review, nine out of ten (“world of survival horror”, the coinage, the ammunition, the eight-item limit and trunks, the camera and the slow retreat, the Alone in the Dark comparison); feature on Frédérick Raynal (Alone in the Dark as “virtually a blueprint”).
Computer & Video Games issue 176, July 1996: cover line and Resident Evil review.
Edge issue 150, June 2005, pp. 105–107, “The Making of… Alone in the Dark”: the November 1992 release.
Wikipedia, “Clock Tower (1995 video game)” (web, secondary): Human Entertainment, the Super Famicom release in September 1995, the heroine unable to fight Scissorman. Edge issue 231, September 2011, p. 131, refers to “Bobby the Scissorman’s shears in Clock Tower”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_Tower_(1995_video_game)
Jonti Davies, “The Making of Resident Evil”, Retro Gamer, reprinted in Retro Gamer Collection volume 4, 2010, pp. 118–123: Mikami on blind spots and fear.
Edge issue 237, February 2012: survival horror on handhelds, typewriter saves, Revelations and “your sense of helplessness”.
GamesMaster issue 81, May 1999, p. 24: Dino Crisis. Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine vol. 2 issue 9, June 1999, p. 83: Resident Evil 3 Nemesis.
Edge issue 70, April 1999, pp. 72–73: Silent Hill review (KCET, the fog, the story).
Edge issue 112, July 2002: Fatal Frame review (the camera, seven out of ten, Project Zero in the UK). Official PlayStation 2 Magazine (Australia) issue 2, May 2002, p. 40: Project Zero preview (Miku, the Himuro mansion, the producer Keisuke Kikuchi and director Makoto Shibata).
Edge issue 147, March 2005, p. 73, “Scare Tactics” feature, and p. 76, Resident Evil 4 review.
Wireframe issue 7, February 2019, p. 5: editor’s letter (Alien: Isolation).
Wikipedia, “Survival horror” (web, secondary): Resident Evil 7 “encourages resource management and puzzle-solving, more akin to earlier entries in the franchise”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_horror
Capcom, “Corporate History”, “Platinum Titles” and “Game Series Sales”, figures as of 30 June 2026 (web, secondary): Resident Evil as having “established the genre of survival horror”; release dates and sales of Resident Evil 7, the Resident Evil 2 remake and Resident Evil Requiem; the series total. https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/company/history.html, https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/million.html and https://www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/business/salesdata.html