Not wanting to fall into laboured metaphor too early on, the horror genre is the reanimated corpse of the videogames industry. Not twelve months ago, years of increasingly stagnant gaming conventions had reduced enthusiasm for traditional survival horror to practically zero. With genre kingsCapcom completely revitalizing itsResident Evil series withRE4, it seemed we'd seen the last of wonky camera angles, super-restrictive gameplay mechanics and, sadly, one of the purest game forms out there. Quite unexpectedly though, horror in games is seeing a massive resurgence; upcoming traditional offerings include Sony's Siren: Blood Curse on PS3,Silent Hill Homecoming and Atari's third attempt at reinvigorating itsAlone in the Dark franchise. Meanwhile, developers continue to adapt established western genres to deliver their own take on the horror game - witness EA's Dead Space and Monolith's Project Origin, for instance. To celebrate this revival of fear, we take a tentative, if far from exhaustive, peek at horror's frightfully illustrious gaming past.
Sweet Home: Capcom's Resident Evil forerunner.
Although
Alone in the Dark laid the groundwork for "survival horror" titles and
Resident Evil made horror games famous, the roots of the genre can be traced much further back to the days of the
Atari 2600 and titles like Haunted House. Considered one of the earliest examples of survival horror, where evading enemies and solving puzzles took precedence over violence, 1982's Haunted House charged players treasure-hunting in the eponymous homestead with an urn, using one of three items at a time to avoid such nasties as a spider, a bat and a ghost. Elsewhere, the 1988 arcade beat-'em-up Splatterhouse gained notoriety with its very visceral form of horror. Its home console port would earn it a parental advisory warning for excessive gore and violence, long before the ESRB and PEGI ratings existed.
Despite its family-friendly image, the
Nintendo Entertainment System wasn't horror-free either. In 1989, a Capcom RPG called
Sweet Home served as the inspiration for what would later become its flagship
Resident Evil series. Set in a mansion, it focussed on using items to solve a variety of puzzles and escape the myriad creatures within. It also contained the tense "door opening" scenes that would later serve as Resident Evil's loading screens. The Japan-only game contained many unique features for its time, including five playable characters with their own special skills, and a risk of permanent death should they fall foul of any of monsters.
Alone in the Dark: Oozing fear through its pastel pixels.
Arguably it was
Infogrames that established today's familiar 3D survival horror template with
Alone in the Dark. Taking on the role of either Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood as they tried to escape the zombie-infested Derceto mansion, the game attempted to recreate many horror movie tropes, incorporating striking cinematic camera angles to complement its focus on quick wit and puzzle solving over combat. It also featured the now-familiar assortment of notes and books as an expository device, later adopted by
Resident Evil and
Silent Hill. Many point to
Alone in the Dark as the game that created the 3D survival horror genre, establishing many of the conventions still in use today.
As the interactive movie bandwagon rolled into gear in the mid-'90s, it seemed Alone in the Dark's revolutionary approach to horror in games was about to be superseded by titles taking a more literal approach to cinematic horror through film-replicating FMV. In 1992,
SEGA unleashed its panty-fixated zombie title
Night Trap while 1995 saw point-and-click games tackle horror in their own unique way. Of these, Phantasmagoria is perhaps most notable for its shockingly brutal FMV cut scenes, still barely matched today. Meanwhile, Human Entertainment's
Clock Tower on the Super Famicon introduced 'stalker' elements to horror games, players tasked with avoiding a relentless pursuant, solving puzzles to proceed while not succumbing to panic.
Silent Hill 2: An absolute masterpiece in the survival horror canon.
However, the industry's fixation with live-action titles quickly dwindled as their interactive limitations became increasingly apparent. Despite technological advances, it was a return to Alone in the Dark's earlier formula that kick-started the genre in earnest as Capcom emerged on the scene with
Resident Evil in 1996. Taking the mansion and survival elements from its earlier Sweet Home - introducing zombies and some hilariously bad dialogue in the process - the game became a North American bestseller and was responsible for coining the phrase 'survival horror'. Resident Evil also pioneered the 3D control scheme which clunkily operated characters like a lift truck and introduced some of the genre's more sadistic, and frustratingly persistent, mechanics - cruelly rationing player resources to the point where even saving required one of a limited number of ink ribbons. With Resident Evil's success indelibly marked in history, it was no surprise the franchise went on to spawn a number of sequels and spin-offs, the PlayStation era of horror also birthing imitators such as Dino Crisis and Nightmare Creatures.
However, it took a fairly seismic shift in survival horror's approach before Capcom's series would have a true contender. Where Resident Evil relied on B-movie schlock and jump scares to thrill the player, Konami's
Silent Hill took survival horror in a far more psychologically unsettling direction. A grotesque and gruesome journey into madness, the game placed protagonist Harry Mason in a derelict American lakeside town, besieged by intense fog and malformed apparitions as it slipped between warring realities. The 1999 title was praised for its cerebral approach to survival horror and would see three more sequels on the PlayStation 2, most notably
Silent Hill 2, still rightly seen as one of the finest examples of narrative construction in gaming to this day. Though later titles would see the franchise slip in terms of quality and critical acclaim, Silent Hill remains one of the most significant and influential entries in the horror genre, its games counting among the scariest of all time.
