Replay: The History of Video Games (46 page)
Read Replay: The History of Video Games Online
Authors: Tristan Donovan
Seven years after
The Rats
, French game designer Frédérick Raynal created the modern horror game with
Alone in the Dark
, a nerve-racking 3D horror game for the PC set in a mansion in 1920. Raynal hit on the idea while working on the PC version of the 1990 3D platform game
Alpha Waves
. “It made me think in 3D,” said Raynal. “While making it I was thinking about what could be the future of adventure games with 3D computed animation and skinned characters.”
Being a big fan of 1970s horror movies such as the zombie films directed by George A. Romero, Raynal decided to create a horror game: “I was very attractedthose movies. Almost all of them were survival horror movies with just one survivor at the end. I had wanted to do a game with that simple principle since I started using computers: your goal is to survive and exit the house.”
Aware that the primitive polygon 3D visuals available in 1992 were unlikely to scare players, Raynal focused on using the unexpected and the anticipation of danger to instil fear in the player. “The main idea was to implement inevitable death from what the player does all the time – playing and controlling the character,” he said. “When the floor of the first corridor fell out from under you, then you were always afraid of walking. One of the first doors you opened unveiled a monster just behind, so then you asked yourself what will happen with every door.”
Alone in the Dark
became a huge seller for its publisher Infogrames and turned Raynal into one of France’s foremost game designers, but it would take
Resident Evil
to really establish horror as a distinct type of video game. While it had many similarities with
Alone in the Dark
, the Japanese team that made
Resident Evil
was in fact trying to update
Sweet Home
, a 1989 role-playing game for the Nintendo Famicom based on a Japanese horror film of the same name. “It was more influenced by the basic structure of
Sweet Home
,” said Jun Takeuchi, who worked as an animator on
Resident Evil
before going on to produce later editions of the series. “The fact that a western-style house is where the game takes place, there are traps and problem-solving sections in the game and other such components.”
But while
Sweet Home
’s simple 2D visuals struggled to convey a sense of horror,
Resident Evil
’s tale of zombies created by a genetically engineered virus made fear and frights its raison d’etre. “Movies were a big influence in the area of creating the atmosphere of terror. We learned a lot from the skills and techniques that had been cultivated by the movie makers of yesteryear,” said Takeuchi. As well as absorbing horror film techniques, such as claustrophobic camera angles and surprise attacks, Capcom’s team made the need to avoid combat and a sense of vulnerability core to the experience by strictly rationing the amount of ammunition available for the player’s gun and only allowing the game to be saved at a few spread out locations. “The game was designed to create fear via movement within the game itself, therefore being able to save only at specific points in the game heightens the sense of fear,” said Takeuchi. “When a player is unable to invoke the special privilege of ‘continue’ the player is psychologically destabilised and therefore in a more vulnerable position and more susceptible to the feeling of fear. In other words, constraining the save option to certain parts of the game is one of the tools for enhancing the feeling of fear.”
Resident Evil
’s nail-biting action and global success encouraged the arrival of more horror games. Many stuck to the b-movie feel of
Resident Evil
Silent Hill
was a particularly significant development. Instead of taking its inspiration from the gory shock movies of the US, its Japanese developers absorbed ideas from the new wave of Japanese horror films, which tend to concentrate on psychological fear rather than shocking images and the crossover between natural and supernatural worlds.
Silent Hill
cast players as Harry Mason, a father searching for his adopted daughter in the fog-shrouded and abandoned Midwestern town of Silent Hill. The town itself reflected the emotional turmoil of the lead character with its decaying buildings, horrific scenes and disturbing monsters that echoed the unsettling visions of painter Francis Bacon. And while the player did have opportunities to fight monsters,
Silent Hill
was primarily a game where the horror manifested itself in the town’s oppressive and haunting atmosphere, which was enhanced by the screeching radio interference that warned players of approaching creatures.
From these two templates the horror game became an increasingly important and diverse genre on video game consoles. Japanese publisher Irem’s 2002 PlayStation 2 release
S.O.S.: The Final Escape
was an especially innovative take on the genre, swapping the threat of monsters for the dangers of natural disa
sters. “Since I grew up on the novel and movie
Japan Sinks
and the cartoon
Survival
, I wanted to make the game with a theme of disaster,” said Kazuma Kujo, producer of the game.
[4]
“Additionally, I had a chance to hear about the horror of disaster from my seniors and friends during the big 1995 earthquake at Kobe. A combination of those things inspired me to make a game about surviving a disaster.”
While fear remained paramount in the game, the earthquake theme meant that the monsters or enemies that were usually the causes of those fears were absent. “Since the disaster, especially the actual earthquake, is not visible, it required some creative thinking to express it through the screen,” said Kujo. “For example, we combined the small shakes and big shakes to express the approaching earthquake.”
While Irem explored the fear of acts of god, British game developers Rockstar North took the horror genre in a darker direction with 2003’s
Manhunt
, which put the player in the shoes of a convicted murderer who is forced to kill by the director of a snuff movie.
Manhunt
revolved around its murders, which ranged from suffocating people with plastic bags to clumsy beheadings with meat cleavers, and rewarded players for the brutality of the executions they carried out. The graphic deception of murder and the player’s complicity in the carnage made
Manhunt
the one of the most controversial game of the first decade of the 21st century, earning bans in Australia, Brazil, Germany and New Zealand. In the UK, national newspapers linked
Manhunt
to the 2004 murder of 14-year-old Stefan Pakeerah in a Leicester park by his 17-year-old friend Warren Leblanc. The police and the courts dismissed the link, not least because it was Pakeerah not Leblanc who owned the game. Leblanc was jailed for a minimum term of 13 years for the murder.
The biggest development in horror games during the first decade of the 2000s, however, was 2005’s
Resident Evil 4
.
Resident Evil 4
saw Capcom reassess the whole horror genre and take it in a more action-based direction. The lumbering zombies of the original games were replaced with fast-moving villagers under the control of a parasitic organism. “Familiarity is the enemy of evoking the sense of fear and terror,” said Takeuchi. “We need to keep reinventing the fear aspect of the game, so sometimes we need to go against the grain of the
Resident Evil
concept itself to keep this sense of the unknown, ergo fear, alive. I think
Resident Evil 4
has cleared many of these problematic issues of familiarity and loss of the sense of fear in very eloquent ways. We managed to destabilise the expectations of the players by changing the speed of the zombies, but were able to retain the essence of
Resident Evil
throughout.”
Resident Evil 4
re-energised the horror genre leading to a spate of more action-orientated games, such as 2006’s
Dead Rising
and 2008’s
Left 4 Dead
, a multiplayer-focused game where players work together to try and escape from an onslaught of fast-moving zombies.
Resident Evil 4
’s viewpoint, similar to having a camera perched over the right shoulder of the player’s character, was also influential, providing a way to include the player’s character on screen without blocking players’ view of the action. The camera angle quickly resurfaced in titles such as 2006’s
Gears of War
.
The idea of player vulnerability as a play mechanic was also explored in another genre that the PlayStation helped establish as part of the video game lexicon: the stealth game. Although early games such as 1981’s
Castle Wolfenstein
and submarine simulations such as
Silent Service
revolved around stealth, the emergence of the PC game
Thief: The Dark Project
and the PlayStation titles
Metal Gear Solid
and
Tenchu: Stealth Assassins
in 1998 developed the concept enough to cement it as a distinct genre. Although the feudal Japan-based
Tenchu: Stealth Assassins
was first to be released, it was Hideo Kojima’s
Metal Gear Solid
that really became the focal point for the genre.
Envisaged as a 3D updatehis late 1980s
Metal Gear
series of games,
Metal Gear Solid
drew on a cornucopia of influences ranging from childhood games of hide and seek to Hollywood movies such as
Escape from New York
, Cold War politics and tales of Tokyo in wartime. The player had to infiltrate a radioactive waste facility to prevent terrorists launching a nuclear weapon, armed with nothing more than a pair of binoculars, a radar that detects guard movement and a packet of cigarettes that could be smoked to help spot infrared trip wires. Kojima’s non-confrontational, anti-nuclear parable became a huge seller and would spawn numerous sequels. The first, 2001’s
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty,
saw Kojima bring his love of films to the fore through the inclusion of non-interactive story-telling scenes that could last up to 40 minutes. It was a divisive approach that repelled as many as it attracted.
Metal Gear Solid
became one of the five best-selling PlayStation games, but the biggest seller of all was 1997’s
Gran Turismo
, an ode to the joy of driving and car ownership. Created by Tokyo game developer Polyphony Digital,
Gran Turismo
was a petrolhead’s dream. It combined real-life car models with the opportunity to build up a virtual garage packed with cars to drive. More than 10 million copies were sold worldwide.
The likes of
Tomb Raider
,
WipEout
,
Metal Gear Solid
,
Gran Turismo
and
Silent Hill
were perfect reflections of the image Sony sought to give the PlayStation – that it was not a kids’ toy but a desirable piece of consumer electronics. Sega’s resistance crumbled fast and even Nintendo found the going tough when it finally came up with its follow-up to the Super NES, the Nintendo 64, in 1996. The Nintendo 64’s release had suffered numerous delays, partly because Nintendo was keen to give its leading game designer Shigeru Miyamoto the time he wanted to perfect
Super Mario 64
– the first 3D Mario game. While a number of games had tried to create platform games in 3D on PlayStation, not least Sony’s own
Crash Bandicoot
, they offered none of the freedom of movement that had once been the defining feature of platform games such as
Super Mario Bros
. Miyamoto was scathing about such attempts describing them as attempts to “fool people” into thinking it’s a 3D experience. He spent months figuring out how to bring Mario into a truly 3D environment, spending days working out how the virtual in-game camera should move around in response to the players’ actions. He also spent weeks perfecting the areas Mario would explore in his 3D masterpiece; it was a process he compared to designing a theme park. Even the Nintendo 64’s controller was built around the demands of Miyamoto’s game.
[5]
When the Nintendo 64 and
Super Mario 64
finally appeared in the shops in June 1996, Miyamoto’s game was hailed as a Mario’s best adventure yet and proof that the platform game could adapt to the 3D era. While Sony’s
Crash Bandicoot
steered players down tight paths,
Super Mario 64
provided an open 3D playground to explore and interact with.
