The Evolution of Survival Horror

Ahoy there, noble readers! It’s that time of year again. Black cats running wild, children knocking on your door demanding sugared treats, and all sorts of costumed freaks causing mayhem (no I’m not talking about Arkham Asylum). Halloween is coming up in a few short weeks. If you are anything like me, Halloween brings about the perfect time of year to break out the survival horror games. Although I enjoy these games year-round, there is just something about turning off the lights, cranking up the volume, and having the pewp scared out of me by a good survival horror that brings in the Halloween spirit. So click on, daring reader, for a brief rundown of how these games have evolved into what we know and love today.

The Early Days

Back in the 1980s, slasher films were at the peak of horror movie popularity. Video games of the time were still rather primitive and often drew inspiration from these motion pictures. If you think about it, it sounds like a pretty good idea: you already have a villain, you already have a dark and scary atmosphere, and you already have a setting. Game developers didn’t really even have to set up much of a plot because most people playing these games probably already saw the movie. Unfortunately, as us avid gamers have seen time and time again, a good movie doesn’t necessarily make a good game. This is essentially where survival horror started out. The earliest of the slasher games I could find was Texas Chainsaw Massacre, for the Atari 2600. This game came out in 1983. As you can see above, the only thing scary about this game was the horrid graphics. Yeah, that’s supposedly Leatherface holding a chainsaw. Accompany this with mediocre gameplay and nasty controls and you’ll see why survival horror had a rough start. At least you got to control Leatherface and chop people up though, right? Later in 1989, riding on the coattails of the success of on-screen killers Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, came Friday the 13^th and A Nightmare on Elm Street for the NES. Although these games looked significantly better, there were still a number of technological limitations. Any attempts to actually scare you failed horribly, and in the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street they even warned you when something scary was about to happen by flashing “FREDDY’S COMING!” on the screen. It seems like these were more focused on trying to cash in on a quick buck than actually trying to make a good game (heh, some things never change). I would like to point out a gem of a game though. You may have heard of it, it’s called Castlevania (1986). Technically this wasn’t a survival horror game. It was more of an action side-scroller with gothic undertones and badass theme music. It did have you fighting Dracula though, and that’s pretty damn epic. I guess you could still argue that Simon Belmont’s mullet on the box art was pretty scary.

The Birth of a New Genre

Once video game technology started to pick up in the 90s, we saw the beginnings of games that could actually scare you. Alone in the Dark (1992) and it’s various sequels pioneered what we see today as staples of a traditional survival horror: a protagonist (often alone) in an extremely dark and dangerous environment, trying to work their way out with limited resources. Alone in the Dark started out by allowing the player to take control of either a man or a woman who, through a series of events, ends up trapped in a giant scary mansion. Shortly after taking control of their character, they are attacked by monsters and must solve a number of puzzles, defeat hordes of zombies, and outsmart all sorts of booby traps in order to get out of the mansion alive. Wait a minute, does that sound ridiculously familiar to you? Am I talking about Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil? Yep, you guessed it, quite possibly the most influential survival horror game ever made drew a lot of it’s inspiration from Alone in the Dark. What Alone in the Dark pioneered, Resident Evil perfected. Released for the Playstation in 1996, this was the first game that actually made me scream. It is the game that coined the term “survival horror”. Yeah, Alone in the Dark was kinda creepy and had a good story, but Resident Evil was just plain scary. And you know exactly what part I’m talking about. All I have is three words for you: dog through window. Even when I was playing the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil and I knew it was coming, I ended up throwing my Wavebird across the room in fear when those canine bastards jumped into the hallway. Resident Evil was a great game. Despite it’s infamous cheesy dialogue (You were almost a Jill sandwich!) it told the world that video games could be scary too. Later, it’s sequels, as well as games such as Silent Hill (1999) and System Shock 2 (1999) showed that the survival horror genre was popular and well received. These were the games that paved the way for today’s scare games.

The Modern Era of Survival Horror

The early 00’s saw a number of new franchises in addition to a few sequels in the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series. Silent Hill 2 was released in 2001 for the PS2. Many believe this game to be the greatest survival horror ever made (Yo, Resident Evil, I’m happy for you and imma let you finish, but Silent Hill had one of the best survival horrors of all time. OF ALL TIME!). Fatal Frame also made it’s debut in 2001, arming you with only a camera to fight off all sorts of paranormal entities. Unfortunately I never played the Fatal Frame games, so I can’t go into too much detail. I can say, however, that they were well received and quite popular. In 2002, we saw a dark horse. Out of nowhere came Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem for the Gamecube. Now this was quite the sleeper hit. It didn’t receive much recognition but was a fantastic game. Not only did it scare the hell out of you, but it messed with your head. The game had an innovative “sanity meter”. When your sanity started to decrease, the game would actually do things to you, the player, not just the in-game character. At first it was small things… a spider might run across the screen or you might see a statue turn it’s head. You’d think to yourself “did that just happen?” As the sanity kept decreasing, it would just go nuts. You would try and load a game and it would tell you that your Gamecube memory card had been reformatted and you had lost all your saved data. It would disable certain buttons on your controller. The video would cut out every now and then to just static. And I loved every second of it! Any game that actually affects you outside of the game knows what it is doing. As the decade moved on, however, we saw a departure from what we would know as traditional survival horror. Games such as Doom 3 (2004), F.E.A.R. (2005), Bioshock (2007), and Resident Evil 4/5 (2005/2009) saw a shift towards more of an aggressive protagonist. Instead of relying on wits and luck, the player took control of notable badasses like Leon Kennedy, shooting all forms of evil with rocket launchers and hand cannons. What the games lacked in puzzles and survival, however, they more than made up for in tension and atmosphere. Or at least most of them did. Resident Evil 5 saw a complete departure from actually scaring the player and focused more on shooting, whereas the aforementioned Doom 3 and F.E.A.R. messed with every aspect of the player. To this day, Doom 3 remains the scariest game I have ever played. As much as I liked Doom 3 though, it was just lacking in the sense of urgency that the survival horrors of the 1990s had… you always had enough ammo/health packs and you could always just do a quick load if you died. Some games like to keep it real though. Dead Space (2008) has shown that not all modern survival horror games must resort to blood soaked bullet fests. With future games such as Alan Wake on the horizon we see that some titles are trying to hold on to what the definition of survival horror genre is. You could even go as far as to say that the survival horror genre has evolved into two individual sub-genres: the classic survival horror that we know and love and the horrific and scream induced run-and-gun shooter. Regardless, I’m an avid fan of both series and I eagerly await the next time a video game scares the pewp out of me.

Tags: Alan Wake Alone in the Dark atari Belmont Bioshock Castlevania Chainsaw dead space doom eternal darkness fatal frame fear Freddy Friday the 13th Halloween Jason Leatherface Leon Kennedy master of unlocking Nes Nightmare on Elm Street pewp ps1 PS3 Resident Evil silent hill survival horror System Shock Xbox 360