IGN Presents the History of Survival Horror

Around this time of year, we all like firing up our favorite slasher flick or scary game in the spirit of the season, but it's also a good time to give pause to think about one of gaming's most unique genres. Survival horror is one of the only genres defined not by gameplay mechanics, but by theme, atmosphere, subject matter, and design philosophy. It's also one that runs completely against the grain of the conventional wisdom about game design. If these experiences weren't scary, their gameplay decisions might be considered poor design, but coupled with effective atmosphere those same conventions serve to amplify fear. Survival horror games were some of the first to approach game design in terms of emotion, and as such, they're some of the most important titles in bridging the gap between art and games.

The Dark Age

The first games to attempt to creep out players were mostly adventure games. Roberta Williams' first game, Mystery House, was a macabre Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery, as well as one of the very first graphical adventure games. The Count followed the next year and the similarly themed Transylvania arrived in 1982, boasting colored graphics. Adventure games have always interpreted literary genres fairly directly, and none of these needed to alter the genre's foundations in order to work. They may have been genuinely creepy, but they weren't using the medium to frighten in a new way.

Atari's Haunted House changed that. Unlike previous attempts, it was designed from the ground up with fright in mind. The Atari 2600 made for a crude canvas, unable to lend much in the way of sights and sounds. Cleverly, James Andreasen put the emphasis on what the player couldn't see, rather than what he could. Only the eyes of the on-screen character were visible , and he could only pierce through the darkness with a lit match, which would be snuffed out by a breeze as a monster entered the room.

True to the philosophy of later survival horror games, your avatar was weak and forced to run from monsters. In fact, he had no combat ability at all. Instead, he had to find items and look for new passages between the house's floors, all while avoiding the things that go bump in the night. This put enough pressure on the player and cast enough doubt that it created a tense game that could genuinely make you jump, despite the primitive blobs and boxes that made up its graphics. It should have been the start of a promising run for Andreasen, but alas, he was one of the casualties of the videogame crash that followed shortly thereafter, and his promising career was cut short.


During the dark age of the Atari 2600, the market was notoriously flooded with games based on popular TV shows and films of the day, including some of the first attempts to interpret the classic horror movie formula of the '70s and '80 as videogames. Wizard Video's adaptation of Texas Chainsaw Massacre cast players as the homicidal Leatherface, but their interpretation of Halloween was far more interesting.

Mike Meyers was the lone villain, and the game was devoid of real combat as players struggled to survive. The gory decapitation deaths were unusually graphic for the time, and the unpredictable gameplay always surprising as Myers jumped out from behind doors. Unfortunately, Halloween arrived at the worst possible time for the Atari market, and Wizard Video was on their last leg. Before long, they were stretched so thin that carts were shipped with no label, and "Halloween" written on them by hand. The game's programmer, Tim Martin, may not have had his moment of glory for his contribution to the horror genre, but he was soon vindicated when he released the seminal Spelunker, one of the first scrolling platform games, in 1983.

As the next generation picked up steam, games developed a larger toolset to convey frightening sights and sounds. Exidy, which had already started the first controversy over violence in games with 1976's Death Race, took another crack at it a decade later in 1986. Chiller was a pretty straightforward light gun shooter, but its graphic depiction of torture and violence was unlike anything yet in gaming, as were the blood-curdling screams emitted by victims as their flesh was ripped from their bodies. That Chiller never inspired much controversy can be largely owed to the fact that it wasn't popular (or presentable) enough to ever catch on in arcades.


Other games attempting to pair horror themes with classic gameplay followed. Castlevania, Kenseiden and Splatterhouse were all released in the second half of the '80s. Despite the macabre imagery, these games didn't diverge much from their more brightly colored cousins. SEGA's Ghost House was one of the more interesting games from this period, for actually having the gameplay designed around the theme. Although outwardly a side-scrolling platformer, the haunted house stages were full of traps and secrets, and the enemies were fast, powerful and intimidating, forcing players to learn the intricacies of the house and rely on their wits.

Toward the end of the decade, Capcom released Sweet Home to tie in with the Japanese horror film of the same name. Although this was, like other games mentioned here, a genre game (in this case an RPG) with horror themes applied, it made a real effort to pay more than lip service to its cinematic brethren. Characters that died could not be resurrected, and there weren't large havens of safety like the towns in a normal RPG. While it may not have been true survival horror, it was an important step in the right direction, and a major influence on Shinji Mikami when he created Resident Evil.

The Dawn of Survival Horror

All of these early games we've mentioned attempted to bring horror to gaming, and some of them even came close to tapping into themes of isolation and vulnerability that define the genre, but none of them had achieved the kind of fully formed vision of survival horror as we know it today. It wasn't until 1986 that Jeff Tunnell began the journey that would make him the unwitting father of the modern survival horror game – an achievement that has gone widely overlooked in the years since. As the co-founder of Dynamix, Tunnell is better known for classics like The Incredible Machine and The Adventures of Willy Beamish, but it was Project Firestart on the Commodore 64 that would prove to be one of his most difficult and most significant accomplishments.

If art is a work that communicates human emotion, then survival horror is perhaps the first movement to effectively bridge the gap between art and games in a uniquely interactive way. In fact, it was this challenge that led to the birth of the genre. "At Dynamix, we were working with Electronic Arts," Tunnell recalls, "and if you remember back in the day, Trip Hawkins asked 'Can a computer make you cry?' We thought, 'Well, that might be kind of hard, but maybe it could make you feel fear.'"