I noticed a link over on the Nihilistic message boards to an article (archive.org backup) posted up on GameSpot several days ago entitled “Ghouls, Ghosts, and Long-Legged Beasts: A Modern History of Horror Games Part I”. The article talks about the last several years of PC games and offers a look at the top horror games ever made, making a small mention to some of the games we cover, such as Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption and Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn.
All credits to GameSpot and the original authors!
By Brett Todd Designed by Katie Bush
June is not a good month for horror. While there’s no divine law preventing spirits of the dead from materializing on a hot summer night, such apparitions seem out of place. Far better that they should rattle their chains in the long shadows of an October evening, slink through the cold rains of November, or, like Jacob Marley, even lurk in the corners beyond December’s cheery firelight. Virtually any moment during those drawn-out, gloomy months would be more appropriate for a supernatural encounter than the sunny present.
Unless you’re a horror fan who loves computer games. If you belong to that not-so-rare breed, you’ve been knee-deep in ghouls, ghosts, and long-legged beasts since the release of Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare earlier this weekend. The long-awaited sequel to a game that established the grotesque as a theme to be reckoned with also rouses some feelings of nostalgia. Revisiting the series where it all began has also put us in a mood to examine the modern history of horror gaming on the PC. Over the course of the following two-part feature, we trace the background of all things eerie, beginning with the early exploits of Edward Carnby in 1993’s Alone in the Dark and concluding with the bloody carnage wreaked by Patrick Galloway in this year’s Clive Barker’s Undying.
The evolution of such games is fully detailed, from the introduction of horror motifs into traditional adventures in the early 1990s to the way that such characteristics began to creep into all gaming genres in the more immediate past. Expansion has been so pervasive that there is no longer any accurate single definition of a horror game. Fearful elements are now part of every gaming family, courtesy of such high-profile endeavors as third-person action-adventures like Nocturne, role-playing epics like Vampire: The Masquerade–Redemption, and first-person shooters like Blood and the aforementioned Undying. This subject matter is also present as ambience in such disparate titles as System Shock 2 (set on what can best be described as a haunted house in space), Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (which features a number of quests dealing with vampires and other undead), and even The Sims (where the dead can return as ghosts to scare the living).
Because horror has become so widespread, the ensuing pages cannot address all of the games that deserve to be looked at. For the sake of proper organization and brevity, we’ve singled out only touchstone games that represent some noteworthy achievement. In the same light, sequels are discussed under the heading of the original game, and games that closely followed (or copied) others are handled in the sections dedicated to their inspirations.
Now, if you’ve turned out all the lights and can’t quite see what may be lurking in the darkness beyond your monitor, you may read all chapters of this feature, Dead: Early Horror Gaming.
Dead: Early Horror Gaming
A General History (1993-1997)
Despite the groundbreaking commercial and critical success of Alone in the Dark, the early PC horror game is typically a traditional adventure. Even though the Infogrames classic demonstrates an alluring mixture of compelling story and quick-reflex action, most developers stuck to the gaming medium that was arguably closest to literature. This allowed them to reproduce the eerie essence of such masters of the macabre as H.P. Lovecraft. Stories were told in the old-fashioned way, with their authors relying largely on atmospheric prose, scary surroundings, and a ripping yarn to chill the gamer.
This tactic made a great deal of sense at the time. For one thing, it was the safest way to go. Adventure games were highly fashionable in the early 1990s, thanks to the enduring popularity of many Sierra On-Line series. King’s Quest, Police Quest, the Laura Bow mysteries, and the irrepressible Leisure Suit Larry games were what most designers aspired to emulate in those days. And when Alone in the Dark proved that Lovecraftian monsters could be as well received as the sleazy meandering of Larry Laffer, it was only a short time before horror became an established subject of adventure gaming.
Success at the cash register wasn’t the only reason why horror game creators chose to express themselves with adventures. Technology at the time was a serious limitation. With DOS 5.0, a 286, and a rudimentary VGA graphics board as the standard hardware in most PCs, there really wasn’t much that artists could do to draw suitably ominous settings and threatening monsters. Most fright-filled titles in this era relied on set pieces, screens that properly depicted strange locales–yet, at the same time, they limited player interaction. Alone in the Dark and its two sequels were actually the only games during this period that allowed complete freedom of movement. Some, including memorable efforts such as The 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria, were based upon canned film sequences, while others, such as Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, were merely updated looks at the old Sierra adventure gaming formula.
It wasn’t until Capcom entered the scene in 1996 with Resident Evil for the Sony PlayStation that things began to change. The Japanese console game developer picked up on many of the aspects that made Alone in the Dark so special and turned them into a new action-adventure subgenre called “survival horror.” As in the Infogrames model, the player takes on the role of a lone protagonist armed with just his or her wits and some high-caliber courage against hordes of monsters. Resident Evil soon grew into a global phenomenon, so popular that it even inspired the formation of parental advisory groups calling for it to be banned due to excessive gore. Needless to say, such added attention only contributed to the game’s allure, and sequels were soon on the way for the various console systems, as were computer ports of those titles.
Such unprecedented sales seemed to invigorate horror-themed gaming for all platforms, including the PC. This, plus the rapid technological advancement of computer hardware, made developers understand that they were limiting themselves by confining their efforts to variations on a decade-old adventure game template that was growing a little long in the tooth. Two games best marked this realization–Realms of the Haunting and Blood. The former was a revolutionary game that combined full-motion video, the visceral impact of first-person action, and difficult puzzles, while the latter was a Duke Nukem 3D-inspired shooter that replaced Duke’s aliens with fright-film archetypes. Both made it clear that horror should no longer be restricted to adventure games, a genre that had very much become a sales ghetto by this point.
But as much as these titles seemed to be leading the ghoulish in new directions, they also marked the end of an era. By the time that Blood was released in May of 1997, gamers were beginning to experiment with 3D video cards. The high-quality, fast-moving visuals that such equipment could provide would soon make it possible to create creepy settings and creatures that would allow gamers to suspend their disbelief. That era, however, is best left for the second part of this feature, Undead: Current Horror Gaming. For now, let’s delve into the games that defined this early era.
Alone in the Dark
Developer: I*Motion Publisher: Interplay
Nobody had ever seen anything like Alone in the Dark when it arrived in the spring of 1993. The Infogrames game casts you in the role of Edward Carnby, a detective from the 1920s who gets caught up in a web of supernatural intrigue while investigating the mysterious suicide of a wealthy recluse named Jeremy Hartwood. Nothing is what it seems to be, and you spend the majority of the game locked in Hartwood’s palatial Louisiana estate, Derceto, trying to stay alive and put an end to the evil forces that it possesses.
Meet Edward Carnby, well-armed private eye.
Although the plot isn’t much different from those of previous adventures, there are many distinctions, both subtle and obvious. Gameplay was, at the time, innovative in numerous ways. You play as either Carnby or Hartwood’s attractive young niece, Emily, ensuring that players of both genders feel at home. Alone in the Dark features lots of traditional adventure elements, from hidden keys to rather devious puzzles, but it also plays out as an action game. You can knock the restless dead back to the afterlife with a mean right hook or blast them back to kingdom come with old pistols and blunderbusses that you discover during your explorations. At the same time, you can also figure out ways to avoid combat. In the opening scene in the mansion’s attic, for example, you can choose to battle a zombie or block its entry by sliding a chest across a trapdoor.
Emily is just as tough as Edward.
The viewing perspective was also rather original for its time. Instead of the camera simply following Carnby or Emily from room to room in typical adventure game fashion, it is set up in odd spots to provide the most dramatic angle on the proceedings. In this way, Alone in the Dark was one of the first games to fully embrace cinematic conventions. It’s hard to imagine a Hollywood director staging the scenes any differently than Infogrames did. Another unique visual idea involved the graphics engine itself. Instead of drawing the characters with standard sprites, the designers used polygons to construct them. This made them less lifelike in appearance but allowed them to move realistically and quickly. Animations in the game were certainly ahead of their time, particularly the battle sequences.
Alone in the Dark drew on the Cthulhu mythos stories of H.P. Lovecraft in a more direct way than any developer since Infocom’s 1987 classic, The Lurking Horror. Sharp observers could find references to the peculiar mythology crafted by Lovecraft and associates like Robert Bloch in nearly every room of Derceto, with the library being the best repository of such arcane secrets. This lent the entire game an eerie atmosphere that has yet to be duplicated. It also emphasized the power of the threat inhabiting the old pile and afforded you a real sense of satisfaction when you walked out the doors of the mansion at the end of the game.
The hedge maze is a difficult part of Alone in the Dark 2.
Perhaps the only negative was Infogrames’ inability to deliver a good sequel and turn the great original into a popular series. Alone in the Dark II was extremely disappointing. Along with being almost absurdly difficult due to the prevalence of tough battles that couldn’t be avoided, the captivating Lovecraftian atmosphere of the first game was jettisoned for tripe about undead pirates becoming modern gangsters. Alone in the Dark III returned to a story- and puzzle-based design centered on a haunted town in the Wild West, though the engine was so dated by the time that the game was released in 1995 that few cared.
Still, the impact of Alone in the Dark reverberated for some time. One can’t forget its place as the father of Capcom’s survival-horror subgenre. Without Alone in the Dark to blaze a trail, the Sony PlayStation would have been left without the Resident Evil and Dino Crisis lines, two of the series that made the console system such a hot seller throughout much of the 1990s. Few PC developers picked up on this trend, though Psygnosis released two Ecstatica games (1995 and 1997) with the same quirky camera angles and a roughly similar graphical engine (that used spheres in place of polygons). A blend of horror and humor gave the games a very different feel from that of Alone in the Dark, though. Finally, the game has spawned a modern 3D sequel with an all-new engine in Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare.
Very different from Alone in the Dark–but no less original–was Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest, also released in 1993. This compact-disc-only adventure game was one of the year’s top sellers, a true phenomenon in the tradition of Myst and Rebel Assault. Sales figures climbed into the hundreds of thousands seemingly overnight and garnered the game a great deal of mainstream media coverage. Such attention even helped drive the sale of CD-ROM drives, which were still a frill for most computer users. Some manufacturers reported a surge in demand of more than 300 percent shortly after The 7th Guest arrived on store shelves. When the dust cleared, more than 2 million copies of the game had been sold worldwide, and Trilobyte was established as one of the industry’s top development houses.
A guest arrives at the Stauf mansion.
What caused so much commotion? High production values, first and foremost. Though many gamers were attracted to the spooky storyline concerning the haunted mansion once owned by an insane child-killing toy manufacturer (points for originality) named Stauf, more wanted a pretty showcase with which to justify the purchase of their expensive computers and CD-ROM drives. They couldn’t have made a better choice, for The 7th Guest was a stunning game by the standards of the time. Visuals were rendered in full SVGA, accompanied by numerous full-motion video cutscenes of ghostly occurrences and an original orchestral score. Even the menu system was packed with frills–the cursor was an animated skeletal hand, the puzzle icon was a skull complete with bulging eyes and throbbing brains, and even the save-game screen was dominated by a Ouija board. For the first time, a game was as entertaining to watch as it was to play.
The famous cake puzzle.
That wasn’t entirely an endorsement. Gameplay didn’t rate very high with the average buyer. Much like Myst, The 7th Guest consists of trooping from one static location to another and solving isolated puzzles as you go. And though some of these puzzles remain memorable–who could forget the possessed cake with skulls and gravestones topping the icing or having to close the coffin lids in the basement–all seem like hopelessly dated relics today. Like most games of the early 1990s, which relied on video sequences, The 7th Guest has not aged well. One aspect that still looks good, however, is the help system. If you’re stumped, all you need to do is walk to the library for a clue or direct instruction. It’s a shame that more adventure game designers didn’t pick up on this invaluable feature.
The 11th Hour failed to repeat its predecessor’s success.
Like all such phenomena, this one didn’t last. Still, The 7th Guest remained a top seller for a year while new CD-ROM-drive buyers were looking for something to show off. A sequel, The 11th Hour, was released after considerable delay (its video scenes were shot in early 1993 before the release of The 7th Guest) in late 1995. By that time, however, the magic had faded. Sales and reviews were respectable, but good presentation and the newness of the media were no longer enough to sell a game.
Trilobyte itself became a casualty of its runaway success with The 7th Guest. Financial issues and poor management forced the firm to close its doors in January of 1999 (for a detailed look at the history of Trilobyte, read Geoff Keighley’s thorough Behind the Games feature, Haunted Glory [archive.org backup]). The company’s place in history is assured, though. The 7th Guest was vital in the development of computer gaming, serving as concrete assurance that CD-ROM would be the publishing media of the future. It also demonstrated that full-motion video could be effectively used to tell a good story.
This lesson wasn’t lost with horror game developers–though some of the quality was–in cheap knockoffs such as Interplay’s Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster and Mummy: Tomb of the Pharaoh, Take 2’s Ripper, EA’s Psychic Detective, and so on. Thankfully, some design teams were still placing gameplay above the glitz…
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
Developer: Sierra Publisher: Sierra On-Line
While Trilobyte was experimenting with new technology, Sierra On-Line was sticking with the basics of adventure gaming. For the first time, however, the company ventured away from such proven franchises as King’s Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. The new subject matter was horror, and mature horror at that. Gabriel Knight: The Sins of the Fathers was arguably the most mature game ever released by Sierra…if you discount the dirty joke escapades of Larry Laffer.
What would a voodoo game be without zombies?
The story recounted was a true masterpiece of plot and pace capable of drawing in the most jaded adventure aficionado. Written by aspiring horror novelist Jane Jensen, Sins of the Fathers is the tale of 10 days in the life of Gabriel Knight, a New Orleans bookstore owner with more than a passing interest in the occult. Over the course of the game, Gabriel is drawn into a web of violence, sex, love, and family secrets surrounding a series of mysterious murders apparently related to a voodoo cult. With the help of his employee and girlfriend Grace Nakimura, Gabriel ventures to exotic locales in Germany, West Africa, and the French Quarter of his hometown in an effort to stop the escalating madness. All of these travels were incorporated into an adult graphic novel style of narration that was surprisingly adept for a computer game.
Further drawing you into the portentous saga is some of the finest voice acting ever committed to CD-ROM (there was also a floppy diskette version that didn’t feature the voice-overs). Tim Curry, Mark Hamill, and Michael Dorn portrayed their roles with great subtlety, choosing understatement over melodrama. Even the interface boasted the appropriately sultry tones of a Creole woman. Few games have been more appropriately acted.
Visiting a ritualistic murder scene.
But all wasn’t perfect. Some of the puzzles were more obtuse than they should have been. As with many adventure games, Sins of the Fathers had numerous head scratchers with solutions that couldn’t be reached by rational methods of deduction. For example, who could have guessed that a gift certificate taken from the bookstore’s cash register was supposed to be traded for a hot dog that was needed to enlist the help of a tap dancer? Some aspects of the game were about as convoluted as an M.C. Escher print. And if you were stuck, you were stuck, since you weren’t allowed to advance a day unless everything was solved. A built-in help system, akin to that offered in The 7th Guest, would have been a great addition.
Sins of the Fathers collected numerous critical accolades for 1993, including Computer Gaming World’s prestigious Game of the Year award. It served as the vanguard for numerous traditional adventure-horror games to be released in subsequent months, though none of its contemporaries were as good. I-Motion secured the license to Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu pen-and-paper role-playing game (perhaps explaining why the unlicensed Alone in the Dark series dropped allusions to that mythos after the first game) and produced two titles in the style of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction: Shadow of the Comet (late 1994) and Prisoner of Ice (mid-1995). Neither was particularly engaging. The first hampered a great story about Halley’s Comet and the return of the Great Old Ones to Earth with poor graphics and tedious exposition, while the second foolishly blended frozen Lovecraft-influenced monsters with insidious Nazis. Another adventure in the same mature vein was I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, an adaptation of a famous short story by acclaimed author Harlan Ellison. Although the game mechanics were nothing special, the subject matter addressed human frailties in an unflinching way.
Gabriel’s world never looked better than in the third adventure.
Two sequels have been produced in the Gabriel Knight line. The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery was produced at the same time as Phantasmagoria (see below) in 1995 and used the same full-motion video as that of its sister title. It was very successful at the time, though in hindsight, the move to real actors was a mistake that limited gameplay and made the entire affair seem much like a cheap B movie. Howeverm Jensen returned with an intriguing plot dealing with German werewolves: Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned came out in late 1999, with attractive 3D visuals replacing the videotape. It was a return to the style of the earlier game, complete with a haunting Jensen tale of vampires and the mystery of Rennes le Chateau. Although the game was a hit, there is still no word on whether another sequel will be produced.
Phantasmagoria
Developer: Sierra Publisher: Sierra On-Line
In some ways, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers was the last of Sierra On-Line’s traditional adventures. Immediately after it was completed, acclaimed designer Roberta Williams (King’s Quest) hopped on board the The 7th Guest bandwagon and began work on a full-motion video horror project called Phantasmagoria. When the game was finally released in mid-1995, it shocked many Sierra fans. Even though Sins of the Fathers addressed many adult themes, the distance provided by the comic book and bitmap graphic formats insulated people from the violence and sex. It was hard to be offended by something that was so obviously the creation of an artist.
Meet Adrienne Delaney.
No such distance separated the gamer from the protagonist in Phantasmagoria. You are right there throughout the travails of Adrienne Delaney, a young writer who has just moved into a haunted New England mansion (it’s always a mansion, isn’t it?) with her husband Don. The said mansion was once the home of a demented 19th-century illusionist named Carno, who was famous for the Phantasmagoria, a show where he simulated torture and murder for a paying audience. Guess you had to be there. Needless to say, the illusionist and his pals are still hanging around. Through the course of several days, Adrienne has become involved in the mystery of Carno’s estate and several supernatural happenings that have built to the possession of her husband by a supernatural being.
Adrienne encounters a ghost.
This routine story was spiced up with the inclusion of several graphic scenes that would likely have earned Phantasmagoria an R rating if it had been released theatrically. There were a number of bloody sequences, including a gruesome ax murder near the end of the game, along with an implied rape scene that garnered a lot of controversy in the mainstream media. Games like this one made the growth of the fledgling Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) a given.
Other than an enduring whiff of scandal, Phantasmagoria left no legacy to horror gaming. There was no sudden desire to depict graphic violence and sex with full-motion video; in fact, using full-motion video to present a game all but died out not long after the game’s release. Still, the game was successful enough to spawn a sequel, Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh, in late 1996. It hardly received a warm welcome. Sales were poor, and critics savaged the game for its ludicrous puzzles (which included having to get your wallet from under the couch with the assistance of your pet rat and a granola bar) and childish treatment of serious themes, such as repressed homosexuality and psychiatric illness. About the only good thing that came out of that debacle was the realization that Sierra needed to revisit Gabriel Knight.
Resident Evil and the Survival-Horror Boom
Developer: Capcom Publisher: Virgin Interactive
As already noted, the most important legacy of Alone in the Dark can be found on the Sony PlayStation. Japanese console game developer and publisher Capcom adopted most of the mood and mannerisms of the Infogrames game into Resident Evil, a work that took the entertainment industry by storm in 1996. Millions of copies of the original game, as well as its Director’s Cut (featuring more blood and guts), were sold. The evolving series helped Sony take over the console market by the close of 1996, with many people buying the PlayStation system just to play those games.
Gore is a big part of Resident Evil’s appeal.
Anyone familiar with Alone in the Dark would have immediately recognized the design of Resident Evil and its sequels. You always play a lone man or woman stranded in a particular area of Raccoon City at the mercy of zombies created by the corrupt Umbrella Corporation. Your goal is to slaughter monsters, solve simple puzzles, and foil the machinations of Umbrella…although the latter never seems to work very well, since it is soon up to more hideous misdeeds in the sequels. All action was portrayed with a third-person camera set up at eccentric angles to accentuate the suspenseful potential of each particular scene. The payoff was usually something like a zombie smashing through a broken window. These cheap thrills usually worked, contributing to a thrill-ride atmosphere.
Dino Crisis was also ported to the PC.
One major difference between the Resident Evil games and their sister series, Dino Crisis, is that you are never really “alone in the dark.” Where Edward Carnby is a simple private investigator in over his head, much of the time in these games, you are either working as part of a team or looking for someone who can assist you. Also, the heroes and heroines are romantically named (Valentine, Redfield, Kennedy, and so on) members of a paramilitary police unit called STARS. Gunning down zombies never seems like that big of a deal, since your whole life is about taking on bad guys with high-powered weaponry.
Despite these issues, Resident Evil soon found its way to the PC. Each of the three primary games–Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis–was ported to computers about a year after they made their PlayStation debuts. These efforts were never successful with either critics or consumers, though they certainly helped stimulate the production of horror games across all gaming platforms (as will be shown in the second part of this feature). They also managed to influence horror game design in that they further proved the viability of the Alone in the Dark model. The fact that this was occurring at the same time that Infogrames was doing all it could to discredit that good name by releasing two poor sequels made Capcom’s efforts even more important.
It isn’t a game for arachnophobes…
But perhaps the most important trend introduced by Resident Evil was that gamers would accept, and even flock to, cross-genre efforts. Blending elements of action and adventure had never been so captivating. Most such concepts were miserable failures, in fact, so you can’t blame publishers for coming to the conclusion that the average gamer was confused by those games. That’s still the case today, given the predominance of various cookie-cutter designs, though there is more cross-genre design than ever before.
Realms of the Haunting served as a fitting conclusion to the early development stage of PC horror gaming. The Gremlin-designed, Interplay-published game emerged with little fanfare at the tail end of 1996, yet managed to become a word-of-mouth sensation. And with good reason. Developers working on the game had obviously been doing their homework, as Realms of the Haunting managed to include the best snippets of all that had gone before. They combined the mature themes of Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers with the action elements popularized in Alone in the Dark and the full-motion video seen in The 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria into one stunning whole that entranced just about everyone.
FMV sequences were often disturbing in Realms of the Haunting.
The setting is present-day England. You portray Adam Randall, a young man coping with both the recent death of his minister father and strange dreams of a house. After discovering that this building actually exists, Randall journeys to the place…only to be locked in and forced to confront his father’s imprisoned soul and an occult secret that involves such horror standbys as the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, and other arcane organizations. Much of this story was established through good use of full-motion video that was limited to expository scenes that moved the plot. It was never allowed to take over the actual game, as in full-blown video efforts like The 7th Guest. This also permitted the scriptwriters to craft a freeform game in which tasks could be completed in just about any order that you desired.
Some skeletal opposition to gun down.
Gameplay is depicted from a first-person perspective. You control the protagonist with a standard mouse and keyboard interface that would have been familiar to shooter veterans. Some shooter conventions were retained as well, in that you needed to gun down a number of supernatural opponents to escape the house alive. The game plays out much like a first-person version of Alone in the Dark. Although you have to take a direct role in blasting baddies back to the grave, you also have to collect objects and solve puzzles between the gunplay. Gremlin crafted an intriguing mix of action and riddle in Realms of the Haunting. What’s more, it was accessible to all because of options that allowed the user to separately tweak the difficulty of the puzzles and the action. Traditional adventure buffs could just keep action at the easiest setting and concentrate the majority of their efforts on solving the many brainteasers.
The mansion is a foreboding place.
Of all the games discussed in the first part of this feature, none stands up today as well as Realms of the Haunting. Game mechanics are second-to-none, and the blend of action and adventure is perfect for modern sensibilities that seem to demand cross-genre titles. Even after almost five years, you can still find it in bargain bins. If you’re interested in a true horror classic, do yourself a favor and hunt a copy down.
In the same way as adventures were the staples of the computer gaming industry in the late 1980s, first-person shooters were the staples of the late 1990s. Yet, oddly enough, it took until mid-1997 before a development house brought horror themes to the genre. But at least when it finally happened, it happened in a big way. Monolith’s Blood was over-the-top in every possible fashion, the kind of bloody extravaganza that Roger Corman would have committed to film two decades ago if he’d ever had any sort of budget to work with.
For a hero, Caleb is awfully creepy looking.
You take on the role of Caleb, a one-time Wild West gunslinger who abandons his murderous ways for the love of a good woman named Ophelia. Unfortunately for his friends and neighbors, he abandons the old life for even worse predilections that involve the worship of a demon called Tchernobog. The object of Caleb’s affections turn out to be less than trustworthy, though, and during a ritual, it kills all of its worshippers and steals away the lovely Ophelia. Caleb rots in his grave for a century or so, mulling things over, before returning to the land of the living to wreak some vengeance on Tchernobog and friends.
“It burns! It burns!”
This revenge isn’t pretty. Caleb blasts his way through 42 blood-soaked levels, using a variety of interesting weapons such as a pitchfork, a tommygun, a voodoo cane, a flare gun, and even a Zippo lighter with an aerosol can. By the end of the game, you witness hundreds of gruesome deaths via decapitation, explosion, immolation, and so on, all accompanied by such cheeky touches as flaming victims screaming “It burns! It burns!” and feet-twitching corpses. Opponents to be eliminated include horror-movie denizens such as zombies and cowled cultists, as well as more esoteric fare, like disembodied hands, which start choking you before you can mutter “Stop that, Thing.” Levels are just as diverse. The design incorporates lots of horror traditions, such as the ever-present haunted house and even a spooky circus, and all of the maps are linked together in a logical fashion. Unlike many first-person shooters, Blood is a natural progression of places and events from start to finish.
Although Blood has been largely ignored in recent years as just another Build engine clone of Duke Nukem 3D (and there were seemingly hundreds of those in 1996 and 1997), it occupies an important position in the evolution of horror gaming. Before its release, the supernatural had been confined to adventure games (with perhaps one exception–SSI’s mostly forgotten late 1993 vampire role-player Veil of Darkness). After its release, developers and publishers became aware that ghoulies and ghosties could be successfully adapted to all genres.
Blood II looked better, but it lacked something.
Blood’s success led to the release of the Plasma Pack expansion in the fall of 1997 and a completely revamped sequel called Blood II: The Chosen at the end of 1998. The follow-up abandoned the archaic Build engine for the true 3D capabilities of Monolith’s own LithTech engine but failed to secure much of a following. As of this writing, there is no word about the development of further games in the series.
Warcraft Tavern
Warcraft DB
Diablo Tavern