Horror—on-purpose horror, leastways—was a late arrival to the world of video games. Sure, there were opening salvos (Infocom’s The Lurking Horror in 1987, Sweet Home on the Famicom in ’89, the first Clock Tower game on the Super Famicom a few years later). But devoting an entire video game just to scaring the pants off its players didn’t really become a viable marketing strategy until 1996, when Capcom’s Resident Evil became such a massive hit that the industry had to coin a whole new name—survival horror, a deliberate hybrid of fight and flight—to describe what it was seeing.
Which isn’t to say, for all the early absence of outright horror games, that video games weren’t already horrifying. Any medium that spends as much time as this one does trying to murder its consumer is going to hand out a few nightmares over the years—all the more visceral because they’re happening to “you,” not just some random character on the screen. And just like with TV and film, many of the most terrifying creatures in the pantheon of video game horror frighten specifically because they pop up in games where you could reasonably expect to be safe from eldritch abominations or the unquiet dead. You can reliably count on zombies to try to take a bite out of Jill Valentine or Frank West. But who would expect Ecco The Dolphin to have to deal with extraterrestrial demons, or Zelda’s Link to to fend off the shrieking, dead-eyed undead with no sense of personal space? There’s nothing scarier than a safe space defiled, the sudden lurching turn from sunlit meadow to instant nightmare.
And so we celebrate these, the scariest video game monsters born from games that had no real right scaring this much shit out of this many players. Giant eels, evil celestial bodies, the tormented demons of haunted minds, all lurking just inches from the sunshine. It’s never the ones you expect.
34 Comments
The drug induced nightmare in the first Max Payne shook me up the first time I played it.Trying to balance on a thin trail of blood through the darkness while being forced to listen to the screams of your dead wife and child is pretty horrifying.Theres also a fun little trick in those first Sherlock Holmes games from the past decade where they cut an insane corner in not giving Watson a walking animation. The result of which is that if you walk away from him while facing him he stays stock still but if you then turn 180 BAM! He’s right there in your face.Its creep-tastic.
Reminds me of Bioshock Infinite, where you are suddenly thrust into a future where your companion has been captured. Then you’re forced to listen to audio of her being tortured while a horde of men in masks chase you with clubs. The game wasn’t exactly a walk in the park before that point, but that scene was a hard pivot into outright horror.
That asylum part was unexpected yeah, the guys who alert everyone have a pretty fucked up design too. Up to that point Infinite was the brightest Bioshock game, then we get into that nightmarish sequence. I don’t like horror games or movies, but I really loved it
sometimes the scariest nightmares are real life. Like a guest for interview with Tucker Carlson or Stephen Colbert. thankfully, we wake up and deal with this stuff. Bam, right in their face.
when I was little we had a Commodore 64, one of the first really good family computers. Most of the games were early precursors to Mario, run and jump and fire stuff. Except for this one point and click. It was made in France and had been translated in to English, set in a house where a murder had taken place. Julia, your friend, had disappeared under mysterious circumstances and you were the gumshoe detective stuck in a classic snowed in house whodunnit. But you really weren’t sure what had been done. You wander for hours picking up stuff, going through the guests’ belongings, hiding behind curtains. It was actually a fun game with puzzles and tension and lots to do.
And then there was the well. At some point, the game took a turn from snowed in house mystery to now you need to climb down a well *bared teeth emoji*. The problem was that for every second you where down there, there was a chance that someone’d cut the rope and you’d receive this message basically saying ‘you’re trapped down the well forever’. So you’re studying the symbols carved in to the walls of the well trying to ignore this slow-creeping dread that some unknown figure up above was about to cut your lifeline. The second surprise option was that you’d be wandering through the cold corridors of the manor figuring out what the hell was going on (the translations were all wrong so this game was unwinnable) and then out of nowhere you’d get the news ‘someone has knifed you in the back and you’re dead’. And then the music would play, this haunting, dread-filled dum dum duuum. And there was no way of knowing what would trigger it or when and where it’d happen. So after about half an hour of safe gameplay you’d be constantly on your seat’s edge expecting that you were about to be knifed and you’d need to start the entire adventure all over again.
We played this game on and off for a few years, and at night I’d lay in bed terrified that someone would come into the room and stab me, and then the music would play. I don’t scare easily, but it was a lot for a little kid.
Hah. I thought that the text-to-speech of Mortvielle Manor would be traumatic enough by itself.Profond-et-inquiétant-le-progrès-a-du-bon.*Owl call, ticking clock, dun dun dun dun*
that’s it. That’s the music. *duuuuuuuun*
Not sure if Vampires: Bloodline was supposed to be scary, as its vampires are more gothic superheroes than nightmare monsters (also when you play as the monster, it defuses it a bit). But that haunted house really felt like a different game within the game. A suddenly different tone. And the real monster, a merely invisible abstract force, is much more terrifying than the fanged undead warriors you’ve been playing as and against.
the redeads actually scared the shit of 8 year old me in ocarina of time. playing it alone with just my siblings in the house after school was pure nightmare fuel that night.
also since I can’t edit anymore, hugo whodunit 2 really freaked me out when I was little.
I remember those games being more difficult than they looked. In the third one, you’re locked in a cage with a piece of clay and a needle, and the solution is basically ‘mold clay into voodoo doll’ ‘stab voodoo doll with sewing needle’. Sure, it’s the Witch Doctor’s house, but Jesus.
I know you guys probably don’t want to repeat games too much, but I’m sure the piano from Big Boo’s Haunt in Mario 64 put the fear of God in many a kid in the day.
That piano was indeed terrifying and one of the first jump scares in videogames I experienced back in 1996. Later on I was pleasantly surprised while watching the insanely surreal Japanese horror film Hausu (House) to see the inspiration for the piano. You should watch it! There is no other film like it.
I was once surrounded by ReDeads. I used Din’s Fire, figuring that would take care of them or at least give them pause.A bunch of on-fire ReDeads jumped on me and I died.
Also, I once had a confused character give Kraken Soup (full health restoration, one of only two items in Earthbound that does this, I think) give the soup to Giygas.
Basically, the whole of the bottom of the well/Hyrule crypt/Shadow Temple levels were scary as a kid. I didn’t necessarily scare easy, but I was always a little uneasy playing those levels.
Even before the Vortex reveal, the initial shock of the mysterious abduction in Ecco’s introductory level is a classic in sound design and auditory jumpscare-age.
“How high can you jump?”
(Jumps) BBBWBWWWAARRRRRRRRRRRHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!(Sad music, all your dolphin friends are gone)
The Giant Bubble and the Giant Slime in the Great Palace in Zelda 2 terrified me as a kid.
Drugon in Jedi Knights Dark Forces 2. There was a recent post about the terror of looking behind walls that you weren’t supposed to look behind in video games and seeing emptiness. This game has so much of that. Flying into endless sky (with cheats on) or swimming through seemingly endless water. The scary thing about the water is sometimes there are drugons in it.
The Coocoo’s are far scarier then the re-deds in Zelda.
Commodore 64. Dino Eggs. Devolving into a spider, i cant even watch it on youtube without being irrationally agitated and uncomfortable with the noise.
There’s a segment in the Tex Murphy game The Pandora Directive where you have to skulk around an abandoned military base in Roswell in the aftermath of an event involving some kind of alien creature. The Pandora Directive obviously isn’t a horror game, but it’s an effectively scary sequence, forcing the player to examine some grotesque corpses, and ramping up the tension by putting the player in the same room as the alien creature from time to time. The limits of mid-90’s PC gaming technology helped, too.
Cazadors from Fallout: New Vegas. Mutated butterflies that don’t even look terrifying but after the first time they wreck your day you learn to fear the hell out of them. They’re the main reason I’m glad Fallout 4 added a sprint button.
The shadow creatures in ICO always gave me a chill when they crawled from the ground.
Even when I was a kid I never found the Moon in Majora’s Mask to be scary. The danger of it looming is eerie, but the face itself wasn’t that scary to me. I think at this point it’s just another thing to agree with so people will give you “relatable gamer-cred” like saying “Navi is annoying” in OOT (another thing I disagree with).
Diagonas, from all Star Wars games ever, but specifically the ones in Shadows of the Empire.Those heart stopping few seconds as you try to leap back out of the water you’ve fallen into, knowing that tentacled horrors are speeding towards you, will remain with me forever.
Thank you! I was going to post the same.
Adventure from 1979 on the Atari. The dragons chase you once they spot you. When you hit the mazes, they can move through the walls, while you have to keep to the path. You only salvation is the sword and it better be between you and the dragon…
Jesus f..Christ there were loads of proper horror games with jumpscares before RE with Alone in the Dark (the game the first RE copies) being the most important in the genre. What’s next, there were no proper horror movies until The Exorcist because that is the one the author knows?Having said that my favourite horrific enemy in a non horror game is the telepathic monster in Stalker. I don’t quite like the game (it’s respawn party) but the first time you I saw that guy I shat my underwear.
How is the Flood from Halo CE not on here? Poor form
The true scariest enemy in non-horror games are birds from NES games. They are always dive bombing you or dropping stuff on you and they’re usually out of range or hard to hit so you can’t do anything about it. The two worst ones are the dive bombing hawks in Ninja Gaiden and the robotic birds in the Mega Man 2 that drop eggs with dozens of little birds that home in on you.
He’s always there, quietly creeping up on you. ….The problem is when you turn around and they’re right there, being a creep. LOL YES! Only the sound of Winston’s clanging tea cups let you know he’s coming.
Thief wasn’t exactly a scary game, but it had such a variety of strangeness to it that every level seemed to have some degree of unease. There’s a haunted cathedral you have to sneak through at one point, and it probably remains the scariest (or at least most scary well-done) level of any video game I’ve played. Thief is played in a large part by not being heard, and the developers wisely have the section contain no music at all. In dead silence, you sneak around hearing every footstep you make while these skeleton ghosts quietly hover around with swords and Templar gear. If one of them sees or hears you, they all come at you. You can try and fight them, but you’re basically fucked, and there are plenty of opportunities for that.The thing, though, is that when you finally get out – sometimes with these things chasing you out the door – the very first thing you have to do is go back inside and look for something. Twisted, brilliant fucks.