Video game horror—that is, really effective, interactive horror—comes in all forms. Maybe good horror stems from easy, visceral jump scares, or from the anxiety of a timer, steadily counting down to zero. Maybe it owes to the dread of a moody atmosphere—eerie music, a creepy setting. Perhaps real feelings of fear come from an impotent or nonexistent combat system.
The Famicom game Sweet Home is often acknowledged by hobbyist historians as one of the first examples of the survival horror genre, and it may well be. But those of you with longer gaming histories know the truth—you might remember that unsettling adventure into the depths of a mountain, stealing treasure that ought never have been disturbed, and trying to escape with your life. This is the tale of Mountain King.
Mountain King was a multiplatform release primarily by CBS Electronics in 1983—with versions appearing on the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Colecovision, Commodore 64, VIC-20, and the Atari 8-bit computer line—though much of my personal experience came from the Atari 2600 port.
E.F. Dreyer Inc. is credited as the copyright owner for all these iterations, with Robert Matson generally credited as the program’s creator. Another programmer, Ed Salvo, put together the 2600 version in a mind-boggling six weeks as a contractor through VSS. (“I had an 800 version of the game, which I was to emulate,” Salvo told Digital Press’s Scott Stilphen.)
The game’s objectives are rather complex; without an instruction manual, however, they are downright arcane. As a child, I only knew that I had to collect these diamonds lying around the silent mountain corridors, the sole sound being the “ding” as the explorer treads across clusters of those gleaming gems.
In Mountain King your explorer is armed with nothing but a flashlight which, when its beam is trained on the darkness ahead, can sometimes reveal a shadowy chest full of treasure. Traveling the bottom floor of the cavern puts you in the domain of the giant spider, which will encase you in webbing as it skitters past. If you mash the joystick back and forth you might escape, but should the spider return while you are still trapped, you will be sucked dry as a spider meal.
Via GameSetWatch. Matthew Gallant has compiled a few quotes in which writers liken (and contrast) indie game development to 1970s punk rock. Very thoughtful.
I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. Late last week, XSEED confirmed their plans to localize Takashi Shimizu’s ‘Feel’ for Wii as a legitimate, North American, English-language release. Tiny Cartridge’s JC Fletcher with the scoop over at Joystiq.
Specifically, Kubota—who heads up Japan’s copyright enforcement—likens DS piracy to, and I quote, a "form of information terrorism." So while the GamePolitics’ headline seems extreme and a little sensationalist, I am reading his quote more like "Damn those hackers."
Look, I get it. The Grudge remakes were awful, and not everyone liked the (four!) Japanese movies, either. Fine! That’s fine! Obviously, the story about a young wife bound in a plastic bag, who crawls around on her hands and knees in her time-warpy haunted house, isn’t for everyone! That’s just great!
In a perfect world, the Grudge game will come to North American Wiis, maybe in a special J-horror two-pack, bundled along with Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse. I just made myself cry.
The last time I played Cosmology of Kyoto, my whole apartment began shaking. I remember thinking, at first, that the sensation of the room bending and lurching was a product of my own imagination, of too much time spent dying at the hands of evil Japanese ghosts, being reborn, dying again, trying to figure out what the game was all about. But then I heard a crash upstairs—something like dishes and silverware smashing onto my ceiling—and so I ran (still cradling my laptop!) into a doorway for cover. Verdict? Memorably frightening game.
But, writes blogger Akela Talamasca, “none of these games [Cosmology of Kyoto, Phantasmagoria, Silent Hill] left me with that nearly indefinable feeling of having experienced true horror, the kind that calls into question your perceptions and expectations of what it means to truly be alive, and how tenuous your existence might be. In fact, what these games trade on is their ability to startle, not scare.”
Your mother was right: those games will rot your brain.
Here are ten (?!) horror movies for gamers. Thanks to the combined efforts of reader comments and my own loathsome late-night cable TV habit, catalogued below are, count ‘em, ten—not seven—horrific parables about videogames and those who have the misfortune to play them.
Note: To everyone who linked to TV episodes, those were also great.
These movies are, almost uniformly and without rival, the absolute shittiest the horror genre has to offer. Enjoy.
How to Make a Monster, 2001
A made-for-TV movie based, however loosely, on the 1958 horror flick of the same name. In it, a team of game developers are pulling all-nighters, attempting to finish their next survival horror title. But when lightning strikes an AI chip…
Yeah, I can’t really recommend this movie. At all.
Verdict: No.
“Bishop of Battle,” Nightmares, 1983
Emilio Estevez stars as a teenaged arcade rat whose game obsession results in inevitable, supernatural comeuppance. This is pretty much the greatest, most archetypical videogame horror story ever written, set in that remote era back when Berzerk could kill a man.
Verdict: Perfection, crammed into 26 perfect minutes.
Stay Alive, 2006
For a movie that nobody watched, Stay Alive is weirdly watchable. And although the movie title is supposed to sound ominous, I’ve always been reminded instead of a popular disco tune.
Anyway, the plot. A bunch of twentysomethings get a preview copy of a PS2 game. Then they start dying. Honestly? I remember being surprised by how much I liked the cinematographer’s use of color.
Verdict: It isn’t Shakespeare, but it might be free on cable.
St. John’s Wort (Otogiriso), 2001
A videogame artist (J-horror staple Megumi Okina) and her producer decide, inexplicably, to explore a creepy old mansion. The plot unfolds like a survival horror adventure game—think Silent Hill or Fatal Frame—but without the scares.
In short, it’s the Japanese version of Stay Alive.
Verdict: A stylized clunker with a weird, tacked-on twist ending, but one that I own on DVD anyway.
Just when you thought it was safe for CD-ROM gaming to finally take off, Eddie Furlong and his post-grunge bowl-cut go on a murder spree from inside the game. And this was well before anyone ever thought to call videogames “murder simulators”!
My favorite part of the trailer is when the puddle of computer-generated blood pools into the shape of a compact disc.
“And then there’s the movie Ghost in the Machine, once again from the the early 90’s, and starring Karen Allen. Brainscan and Ghost in the Machine are at least watchable.” —SpatulaOfDoom
I just realized this entry isn’t technically about gaming, but because of its thematic strength I’ll give it a pass.
Verdict: Thanks to its comparatively high recommendations, this might be one to add to the ol’ Netflix queue.
“There was a movie in the early 90’s called Arcade. It starred A Christmas Story’s Peter Billingsley.
“Arcade looks about as childish as Spy Kids [3-D], but it did have enough violence and language to earn an R rating. It’s an awful fucking movie nonetheless. David S. Goyer (Dark City, Blade, Batman Begins) wrote the abomination.” —SpatulaOfDoom
In spite of Spatula’s derision, this movie trailer is, for me, pretty effective—probably because I am still infatuated with the VR machine they had in the mall movie theater in 1993.
Verdict: Peter Billingsley…!
HALLOWEEN BONUS: Thanks to Zort in the comments, as well as three belated recommendations from Chris Person, I am adding three more movies to the list—bringing the list from its initial seven to a nice, round TEN.
Which brings me to a brief editorial note: in our collective strain to think of ten whole movies, the genre definition of ‘horror,’ at this juncture, becomes rather lenient. Does sci-fi/dark fantasy/suspense/action/thriller count as Halloween horror? Sure!
Does eXistenZ count as straight-up horror? It sure counts as bizarre.
I actually don’t remember this movie very well, but here’s what I can type from memory: Jude Law is in it. Christopher Eccleston is in it. Cronenberg directed it. And, uh, to play the game inside the collective dream, they put their hands into an alien vagina. That’s how it went, right?
Just seeing the trailer makes me want to go screaming to a psychotherapist.
Notoriously bad fantasy flick with a cult following. In it, a computer gamer with muscular legs wakes up to find himself… See? You don’t even need me to continue.
In keeping with the established format of this blog, I should really post a trailer. But this pebble-in-the-rough is so obscure, it doesn’t seem to have a trailer. So, in lieu of a grainy VHS dub, here is crisp footage of a young man earnestly synopsizing The Dungeonmaster instead:
Verdict: Why do people love this movie so much? So you don’t have to.
Game Box 1.0 is styled after some of the earlier entries on this list, and it is a glorious mess. In it, a heroic game tester (the guy from “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”) fights to avenge his dead girlfriend (the girl from “Boy Meets World”). Um. Here’s a trailer.
Verdict: Brain Scan 2.0.
There you have it: seven cautionary tales for gamers and three honorable mentions, each a story about the game becoming real; every one, a misguided masterpiece.
If you think of any more (and I’ll be pretty annoyed if you do), leave ‘em in the comments.
This summer, my friend Chris and I went, along with our friend A.J., to Video Games New York. I browsed the glass case full of Virtual Boy games, then beelined to the counter to ask, in a breathy stage whisper, “Hey, hi. Do you have that Japanese Virtual Boy game? The first-person shooter that is based on Lovecraft? The one where you shoot fish-people?” No, they did not have that game.
I immediately called bullshit on her, since things that awesome just don’t exist, ever.
Then I googled it.
Turns out she was totally not making it up. It’s called “Insmouse no Yakata” (Innsmouth Mansion) and was a first person shooter.
So now you know: the legend is true. The ill-fated Virtual Boy did, indeed, have exactly one 3D first-person shooter, and it took place in Innsmouth, and in it, you actually shot freaky fish people. Except for the time I insisted Mary Tyler Moore had briefly served in the Senate, I have never lost a bet.
I filched one of said downloadables and, since none of us may ever pony up the US$80 Insmouse goes for, I have embedded two whole minutes of spoilers, below:
When I was a fiction writing undergrad, our class was visited by the great Lee K. Abbott. I felt at odds with him, I remember. He told my class that it was wrong to write a story with certain facts concealed. He told us that when the facts of the full story are only gradually uncovered, the process is, to the readers, unfair.
Annoyingly, Lee K. Abbott was not wrong. There are stories we tell that are very deliberately ‘unfair’; it is now obvious to me that Abbott is not a fan of horror.
In the horror genre, and especially in Japanese horror, real fear comes from the thrill of discovery. And Japanese horror itself takes a cue from, not just the principles of Asian cinema and plotting, but also the very distinctly Japanese design philosophy. Japanese design is less about agency, and more about uncovering a plot. Lee K. Abbot would be furious with it.
Recently Leigh Alexander published this intriguing feature at Kotaku, about the history of survival horror. Apart from being an excellent overview of the genre, it wisely compares Western and Japanese game design philosophies. Most importantly, Alexander asks this question: does survival horror still exist? She writes,
Don’t Fight, Just Run!
Titles like these all have distinct differences, of course, but they all tend to have a few traits in common. First, they largely de-prioritize combat mechanics, favoring challenging the player through elements like on-location puzzles, mazelike game areas, using the environment itself against enemies, and even fleeing and hiding instead of direct combat.
It’s true. Alexander names Siren and Fatal Frame as two of the finest examples of using vulnerability to create horror and panic. In the Fatal Frame canon, you do not use weapons or ‘defeat’ anything, per se—rather, you are a young woman wielding a camera.
Hey, North America! Today’s the big day! Siren: Blood Curse is about to hit the Playstation Store. You can instantly download all twelve episodes of the survival horror game to your PS3 for a reasonable US$40. Instead, though, I’m thinking about splurging and getting the Japanese version on disc for $60 at play-asia.com.
To clarify, Siren: Blood Curse and Siren: New Translation are the same game. Much of Siren: New Translation, the Japanese version of the game, is in English, since its main characters are from the United States. The game is subtitled in Japanese.
The original Siren is easily the most frightening game I’ve ever tried to play. Originally released for the PlayStation 2, it had impressive graphics for the time. The face-mapping seems comically dated now—photo-realistic faces are grafted onto subpar models—but in 2004, the uncannily human adversaries were positively shit-yourself terrifying. Wikipedia explains:
Rather than employ traditional facial animation methods with polygons, images of real human faces were captured from eight different angles and superimposed on the character models. This eerie effect is similar to projecting film onto the blank face of a mannequin.
Siren was, above all, a stealth game—you had to slip past the zombie-like shibito undetected—and in that regard, its utter lack of combat broke the survival-horror mold. In terms of plot, the subsequent Capcom title Resident Evil 4 owes a lot of its essence to Siren: these villagers aren’t exactly zombies, and good luck with solving the village mystery! But Siren more closely resembles the original Silent Hill. No surprise there; the two games share the same director, after all.
Although it is remembered as arguably the scariest game for PS2, and although the game received generally favorable press, Siren never quite achieved commercial success here in the United States. It didn’t help that the game was notoriously difficult. Worse, the controls were fairly complicated, a bit much to master from the get-go. In some ways, the troublesome controls deepened the fear factor—a lot of survival horror, the Retronauts crew once agreed, relies on the sense of helpless panic only mushy controls and a crippled camera can bring. Siren’s gameplay innovations—and its unyielding commitment to those design choices—made it tough for anyone but a totally dedicated survival horror buff to play the game from start to finish.
Siren: Blood Curse is not a wholly unique work. Rather, it attempts to rework the original Siren plotline into a more navigable, accessible game experience. And although Blood Curse is being released to multiple markets, including Japan’s, I think it’s safe to say this revision largely targets gamers in North America. The original Siren lacked any real combat; in Blood Curse, you can creep up to the shibito and brutalize them from behind. Incorporating more action makes Blood Curse, well, not breakneck, exactly, but surely not as plodding and ponderous as its original incarnation was. But in playing through the demo, it’s clear that Blood Curse disposes of the very patient puzzle gameplay that made the original Siren (and its Japan-only sequel**) so frightening.
