Survival Horror Explosion
With the breakthrough success ofResident Evil, the floodgates were opened, and the genre's conventions solidified. What was once an experiment now had a name and a creed. Everyone wanted a piece of the action, and Japan's publishing giants all started working on their own takes. What followed was a tidal wave of survival horror games from Japan lasting from 1997 through the end of the generation.
One of the first games to take advantage of the heightened interest in this new genre was not actually an attempt to follow
Resident Evil at all.
Clock Tower 2 (known simply as
Clock Tower in North America) was the 32-bit sequel to a Super Famicom game that had come out in Japan a year before, and kept true to the original's gameplay. Both games were point-and-click adventures with a major twist: a deadly stalker known as Scissorman that chased players throughout the game. This small element of true survival horror was enough that
ASCII Entertainment was able to position their title to take advantage of the audience's hunger for more
Resident Evil, and it proved to be a hit.
Capcom was not about to drop the ball, either, and a sequel was underway almost as soon as the first hit shelves.
Resident Evil 2 didn't come easy, however. Mikami wanted to tap into that classic notion of horror of "the ordinary made strange," so rather than setting his game in the kind of creepy mansion no one would ever visit, he wanted to use familiar urban settings, transformed by the chaos of the T-Virus outbreak. Unfortunately, the idea worked better on paper than it did in practice. Frustrated with the mundane environments and story problems that were plaguing the project, he made the hard decision to delay the game and remake it nearly from scratch.
Had the resultant game bombed, a decision like that would have ruined Mikami's career as a producer. Luckily the added experience really did benefit the project, and the dark, creepy vibe worked better than strict realism. The script was polished up considerably, and the characters' back stories rewritten. Released in January of 1998, the PlayStation version was no worse off for the delay, eventually selling over five million copies. The original's success was no fluke, and survival horror was here to stay. A third Resident Evil followed the next year.
In the interim between the first two Resident Evil games, another game changed the direction of the 32-bit generation:
Final Fantasy VII. Squaresoft went from a niche publisher to one of the hottest names in the industry, and they set out to develop a game that would capitalize on the success of both Final Fantasy and Resident Evil.
Had it been released today, Parasite Eve might not even be considered a survival horror game. The gameplay was a peculiar blend of RPG and survival horror, with random encounters, but a dark tone and realistic environments made scary by their monstrous inhabitants. Its timing was perfect and it picked up a sizable share of both audiences, and inspired a hit sequel not long after.
The golden age of survival horror came to a crescendo in 1999, when
Konami released their long overdue foray into the genre,
Silent Hill. Combining the shocking, visceral horror of Resident Evil with a bleak, foreboding, and mysterious atmosphere that echoed some of Steven King's work (particularly The Mist), it elevated the quality of writing in the genre to new heights, and created something genuinely disturbing beyond cheap scares.
The story took the genre in a more human direction, too. While survival horror had always avoided the super-soldiers typical of action games, most of them still starred some kind of policeman, detective, military officer, or another character sent into harm's way on a mission. Silent Hill's Harry Mason was different; a true everyman with no exceptional training. Harry finds his daughter missing after a car accident and wanders into the seemingly deserted suburb as a thick fog and flurries of snow roll in. He soon learns that
Silent Hill is not what it seems as it slowly descends into a horrific, otherworldly state. The story avoided some of the genre's usual clichés, and the fear of losing a child made a perfect motivator for an ordinary man to overcome the extraordinary.
It was also a step forward in terms of presentation. At the time, most games in the genre still used pre-rendered backgrounds like Resident Evil. While a few like The Note and Hellnight had real-time graphics with a first-person view, Silent Hill kept the classic Resident Evil view, but used real-time graphics as a tool to create fear. Strange, twisting camera angles lent an uneasy feeling to the already bleak atmosphere. The oppressive fog and darkness may have been used to mask the system's limitations, but once again survival horror plays by different rules. Where not being able to see would be considered a game-wrecking flaw otherwise, the fear of the unknown is a powerful tool of terror.
Silent Hill was a critical darling as soon as it was released, overcoming the obvious comparisons to Resident Evil as few others had been able to do. The title is now considered one of the genre's defining moments and one of the PlayStation's best games. Despite this, it never managed the same level of commercial success as Capcom's series. Nevertheless, it sold well enough to spawn a series that continues on to this day, and can still be seen as Resident Evil's strongest rival.
Capcom answered shortly thereafter with
Dino Crisis. Returning the futuristic science-fiction setting that the genre began with and subsequently forgot,
Dino Crisis fused the lessons learned by Resident Evil with Jurassic Park. Where zombies made for slow, lumbering, clumsy enemies, Velociraptors were fast, cunning killing machines. Like Silent Hill, the game boasted real-time 3D graphics with scripted camera angles but maintained many of the same gameplay principles while inching closer to the action genre.
Dino Crisis was a hit and spawned another sequel on PlayStation, but its moment in the sun was ending. The next generation was a challenge for the relatively new genre, and if it was to survive, it would have to grow and change.
