Before Sweet Home in 1989 horror within games didn’t follow
any specific rules. One of the main reasons for this was the technology, while
there was no real licensing within games to stop anything horror related making
it into games, the technology was not powerful enough to be able to create
anything that could actually scare anyone. Haunted house was an extremely
simple game on the Atari that used the player as a pair of eyes running from
ghosts. (below, left)
Only with the arrival of games such as Splatter House in
1988 (above, right) did gore really begin to start showing within games where
people could actually relate to something looking scary or gory. With Technology
reaching ranging from 8 bit to 16bit over the next few years horror began to
spring up now that things could be depicted visually. Sweet home by Capcom in
1989 became the inspiration to what was to become to true defining game of
Survival Horror within the industry.
On the Nintendo Entertainment System Sweet home was done on
an 8 bit machine, and while not particularity gory, Sweet home was set with a
group of friends each with their own special ability, the player could switch
between them to use whenever they saw fit. However the objective was to try and
escape with as many alive as possible but if some died it was possible to still
finish the game with members lost. But weapons were in the few, and avoiding
monsters was mainly done by running past rather than actually killing them, while
other rooms were full of puzzles that the player had to solve to progress.
These main features became the base for Survival Horror
games, which many were set to follow in the future. These basics even made a
show in other games such as Alone in the Dark 1992 and Project Firestart 1989. Other’s strayed from the gameplay that was to
become Survival Horror, Castlevania spawned a series of games but became more
of an adventure game with different elements to that of survival horror, and
DOOM which became heavily popular through its first person perspective.
Yet it wasn’t just the improvement on the technology that
helped make these games popular. Doom was scary because of its surprise nature,
the fact that monsters would spawn around you, out of secret doors and walls,
the fact that these were demons from hell and they could come from anywhere,
could scare a good imagination again and again.
