story of survival horror

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A short history of videogame horror and the current crisisin console scares

Chris Pruettat 02:30pm October 28 2013

Chris Pruetthas made it his personal mission to play, promote and deconstruct horror games. His website, ChrisSurvival Horror Quest, chronicles his experiences good, bad and often very ugly as he journeys through the

medium, seeking out the lessons and learnings of horror games old and new. Here, Pruett offers his unique

timeline of videogame horrors evolution and his thoughts on where it might sink its teeth next

What is a horror game? Its a difficult genre to pin down.

Unlike racing games, shooters, match-three, horror isnt a genre label that describes specific mechanics. Nor can

it be identified purely by virtue of content or iconography: there are plenty of non-horror games leveraging The

Walking Deadright now, for example. No, the glue that ultimately holds the horror genre together what makes

it unique is that its a family of games designed with one specific goal in mind: to scare the hell out of you. Its

a genre that requires a unique approach to criteria quite without equal or parallel in videogames. Its about a

sensation, fear, rather than a quota of mechanics or images.

The tense Halloween adventure game released in 1983 for the Atari 2600? Horror game. The Friday The 13th

side-scroller released in 1988 for the NES? A horrible game. Not a horror game.

To examine the evolution of videogame horror through the ages, then, I find it best to consider the history of the

genre in terms of design lineage rather than whether theres a witch and a broomstick present.

Once upon a time, horror games were hard to find, but what was there proved to have a lasting legacy: it shaped

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what would come later. There was Infocoms The Lurking Horror (PC/Mac, 1988), ICOM Simulationss Uninvited

(Mac, 1986), Sweet Home (Nintendo Entertainment System, 1989) among others and, while few in number, their

impact can still be felt today. Uninvited, for example, along with its predecessor Deja Vu, established puzzle

mechanics (such as manipulating items via a palette of action verbs) that have proved a mainstay of many

adventure games.

Horror game historians often declare Sweet Home the precursor to Resident Evil, largely because it uses the

same creaky door cinematics that Capcoms title later employed to mask load times and transition between

areas. The resemblance between the two games is more tenuous than is widely acknowledged, though: Sweet

Home is, after all, an RPG with random monster encounters and a party mechanic that couldnt be further from

the calculated scares of Capcoms mansion and the splintered, isolated protagonists trying to make sense of it

all.

In truth, Sweet Homes wider impact and influence is down to far more than those shoddy door animations. It

turned item management into an axis for fear. Each character in Sweet Home has just two inventory slots and

those slots are usually occupied by crucial heath and puzzle items to really make survival a war of attrition.

When you run out of inventory space which happens often in the thick of a puzzle your only recourse is to

drop a peripheral item on the floor and come back for it later. In a game where every excursion is dangerous,

every avenue leading to potential damnation, youd frequently have to work your way back across the map to

retrieve an important item in a nerve-wracking race against time. Even more nail-destroying, Sweet Homes

game-loop forces players to periodically shed powerful items in order to progress to the next stage, thereby

destroying any comfort zone and sense of strength or certainty they may have attained. Resident Evil initially

softened Sweet Homes inventory system by adding those rather magically interconnected item boxes, but in

Resident Evil 0 (GameCube, 2002) Capcom returned to the high-stakes drop-anywhere system, reminding us all

of Sweet Homes lasting legacy.

Despite the early experiments of pioneering titles like Sweet Home, the horror genre arguably didnt truly arrive

Sweet Home (Nintendo Entertainment System, 1989).
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until its more widely known 90s titans Alone In The Dark (various platforms, 1990) and Clock Tower (Super

Nintendo Entertainment System, 1995) made their indelible mark on the timeline.

Alone In The Dark took the point-and-click adventure genre and dragged it kicking and screaming into 3D

compositions and control methods. As in earlier adventure games, the background art was a static image, with

character art composited on top. Characters were rendered in realtime 3D, and its backgrounds had perspectiveand depth. Its hard to overstate the importance of this revolution in horror the ability to compose and frame

scenes this way bestowed designers with unprecedented power to build tension through cinematography. The

move to a perspective camera with cuts between shots also necessitated direct control over the playable

character (leading to the now infamous character-centric tank control scheme which subsequently became one

of Resident Evils most hated features).

The development and success of Resident Evil (PS1, 1995), a direct descendant of Alone in the Darks design,

flung open the horror game floodgates. Many, many horror games were released in the late 90s and early 00s

following in Capcoms footsteps. The best of the bunch modified or manipulated the newly established format to

explore fear in different ways. Silent Hill (PS1, 1999) pioneered the use of lighting and audio, Parasite Eve (PS1,

1998) resolved the tank control problem posed by 3D perspectives, Fatal Frame (PS2, 2001) and Siren (PS2,

2003) introduced unique forms of interaction (first-person combat and sneaking mechanics, respectively) and

Silent Hill 2 (PS2, 2001) showed how horror could be used as a vehicle for a complex, enigmatic narrative. The

influence of this golden age of horror design spread to entirely new genres titles like The Suffering (PS2, Xbox,

PC, 2004) applied many of the lessons from earlier horror games without being tied to the plodding pace of Alone

in the Dark.

Despite this rapid progress, the horror boom began to show signs of exhaustion. The market for Alone in the

Dark style games became saturated, and as new consoles loomed on the horizon the popularity and fiscal

Alone In The Dark (various platforms, 1990).
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viability of the genre began to decline.

But as one form of horror game sputtered and breathed its last, another was born. Just as the original Resident

Evil had done so, Resident Evil 4 (Nintendo GameCube, 2005) changed the way horror games were conceived

and developed for some time. Resident Evil 4 modernised many of the core design conventions from earlier

horror games and shucked off the rest, focusing instead on high-stakes, close-quarters combat, uniting the

strands of action and horror in an irresistible, immediate mix that made Alone in the Dark and its children look

creaky and cumbersome by comparison.

Resident Evil 4 was a huge success, of course, and it remains the model for third person action design. Though

it abandoned of many of the core tenets of its predecessors, Resident Evil 4 retained enough of that DNA to

prevent its horror muscles from atrophying completely. However, subsequent games following in its footsteps

(such as the Dead Space series, and even more recent Resident Evil games) slowly replaced horror-affording

mechanics with slicker systems in the name of modernity and adrenaline. As a result, most of the games now

employing elements of Resident Evil 4s design are no longer technically horror games at all, having polished the

action bits to a shine at the expense of fear.

In a twist worthy of a Dario Argento flick, however, an older, half-forgotten strand of horror game design would

return to pick up the genres flickering torch. Though it was released several years after Alone in the Dark, Clock

Tower represents an alternate branch of the horror design family tree. Released exclusively in Japan, Clock

Tower broke the adventure game mould in a different way. Rather than pursuing 3D perspectives and

compositions, Clock Tower embraced its point-and-click roots and focused instead on creating tension through

disempowering the protagonist and player. Clock Towers Jennifer is a normal teenager: no special powers, no

battle armour, no weapons or combat skills. When attacked by a crazy nine-year-old wielding a pair of giant

shears, her only recourse is to flee, to hide. Clock Tower was arguably the first game to put great emphasis on

the vulnerability of the main character and to build a game around that conceit. No longer just about escapism,

the horror genre was now about escaping.

Resident Evil 4 (Nintendo GameCube, 2005).
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The charts had been dominated by the Resident Evil brand and its ilk since its debut but much like the series

signature Scissorman the Clock Tower model had been waiting quietly in the darkness. It had been incubated

and nurtured by titles like Hellnight (PS1, 1998), Echo Night: Beyond (PS2, 2004), and Haunting Ground (PS2,

2005). Then, around 2008, a few obscure Japanese games began to explore first-person horror games that

starred regular-joe protagonists and featured no combat. One of the first, The Nameless Game (Nintendo DS,

2008), alternated between a 3D viewpoint and a cursed NES-era RPG that slowly infected the real world. It was

followed by Ju-On: The Grudge (Nintendo Wii, 2009), Calling (Wii, 2009), and Night of Sacrifice (Wii, 2011), all of

which were first-person, combat-free, run-and-hide horror games. Perhaps it was the accessibility of the Wii

nunchuck-as-flashlight interface that made these games appear after such a long hibernation Night of Sacrifice

even made use of the Wii Balance Board to make fleeing from its ghosts physically stressful. Regardless, these

children of Clock Tower established a format that is now one of the most popular in the horror genre.

But they were not the games that made the format explode. With the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent

(2010, PC) and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009, Wii), the Clock Tower approach to horror design suddenly

came crashing through the skylight into public view. The release of these two games, which placed emphasis on

exploration, featured no combat, and starred protagonists that have no special abilities, caused the horror genreto undergo another major shift.

Like Silent Hill 2 before it, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories showed that horror could play host to a strong,

personal narrative. Its use of exploration and audio logs (as proven by System Shock 2 a decade earlier) to tell a

story was ambitious in its simplicity. Its a strand that has been furthered again in the likes of Gone Home

(PC/Mac, 2013) and Dear Esther (PC/Mac, 2012) which similarly trade away a significant amount of interactivity

in order to explore a story as a physical space.

Clock Tower (Super Nintendo Entertainment System, 1995).
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