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.'"

This was quite a challenge for the aging Commodore 64, already looking quite dated compared to the newer Atari ST and Amiga computers. The graphics were limited, so Dynamix was forced to make the most of them, as well as find other ways to inspire fear. "It's funny, you think you start top-down with the story and then you try to make it into a game," Tunnell purports, "but the more you have to think about what kind of gameplay experience you want, the more you have to try to make a story around that."

The inspiration for Project Firestart was fairly obvious. "We just took some of the ideas that were in Aliens," Jeff admits. "It's not like we were great writers or anything, we just tried to make a sci-fi game that would be scary." The story centered around a man on a mission to investigate a space station that has gone quiet, find any survivors, and figure out what happened. He soon learns that the attempts to genetically engineer a docile creature to work in space have gone horribly wrong, and the powerful monsters grow more numerous and more deadly.

The principles were completely in line with later survival horror titles like Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. In the opening conversation the player is told that big guns are off limits in the cramped space station, leaving him with an underpowered hand gun and very limited ammo. Enemies were strong, lumbering beasts that may have been slow and predictable but kept trudging forward as rounds were being pumped into their chests. The pressure of killing these enemies before they got too close was terrifying. The music, triggered whenever an enemy drew near, soon became enough to inspire panic even before the monster appeared on screen.

This wasn't a shooter like other Aliens-inspired games of the time. Project Firestart was a careful, considered game, with open exploration, non-linear progression, and major adventure elements. Enemies didn't even make their presence known until 15 or so minutes into the game. "I didn't want it to be that much of an action game," Tunnell explains. "If you gave the guy a whole bunch of guns it would just turn it into a platformer and that's just not what we wanted it to be."

There was no template to follow. While earlier games had attempted horror, Tunnell had never paid attention to the horror genre. "We went absolutely from scratch," he claims. "I didn't look at any other games." Some of its methods were obvious, some less so. Dynamix pushed the primitive machine as hard as they could with large animated cut scenes that showcased bloody aftermath and brief glimpses of nasty monsters. "A lot of stuff was kind of gimmicky, trying to surprise people," Tunnell admits modestly. "You have to go for cheap tricks first before you can be subtle."

Other devices were less obvious. Rather than relying entirely on dialog and jeopardizing the feeling of aloneness, there were computer terminals throughout the station with logs of the ship's crew. Coupled with grisly images of their remains, these logs helped to slowly expose the back story through more passive means – a device later employed in almost the exact same manner by Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, and even newer games like Doom 3.

It was a long, difficult project for the small company. To this day, Tunnell seldom talks about it, neglecting to comment on it on his gameography on Great Games Experiment. "It was, without a doubt, the hardest game I've ever worked on," he laments. The grueling development process dragged on for two and a half years until the end of 1988, as the developers tried their hardest to squeeze everything they could out of the limited hardware. "We really had no business trying to make that game on Commodore 64," Tunnell sighs, "It was way too ambitious for the platform."

The long, arduous development tainted the project's release. By the time it was done, Dynamix had inked a new deal with Activision and had started work on independent projects. Neither Electronic Arts nor Dynamix were invested in Project Firestart anymore. The game was released with minimal hype and advertising, and failed to make much of a splash. In Europe, where the computer game market was much larger, the game was met warmly by critics, with Zzap!64 giving it a 91, and The Games Machine awarding it an 87, but mainstream success was still out of reach.

Jeff Tunnell and Dynamix never revisited the genre they created. "I don't even like horror," he admits with a laugh. "Honestly, this game was so hard that once we moved on and finished it I hardly paid any attention to that genre afterward." With the deal between them and EA severed, there was never any attempt to port Project Firestart to a newer platform, nor to make a sequel.

It's a sad reality that being an innovative, acclaimed game is not enough to be an influential or popular one. Project Firestart may have pioneered the survival horror formula, but it did not inspire imitators, and it wasn't until years later that the lone game would become part of a genre, and others would make the same discoveries that Dynamix did. Alone in the Dark is forever remembered as the game that brought the genre to a mass audience and inspired countless imitators, and Project Firestart is one of many similar stories of games that were simply too far ahead of their time.

Breakthrough Success

Survival horror's biggest breakthrough indirectly grew from another game that pioneered a genre before the world was ready. Cristophe de Dinechin's Alpha Waves was the first true 3D platform game, arriving on the Atari ST in 1990. Not long after, a young programmer named Frederick Raynal found himself tasked with bringing the uniquely abstract game to MS-DOS. Alpha Waves' approach to 3D game design intrigued Raynal, and he wondered about all of the unexplored possibilities of the third dimension. In particular, he wanted to see if a horror game with animated human characters could be done in 3D.

It was an ambitious idea for the limited technology of the day. He wanted to blend animated 3D characters with bitmapped backgrounds with all the detail of the graphical adventures of the day. His bosses were not convinced that it was possible. Working in his spare time, he coded an engine using wireframe characters and digitized photographs for backgrounds. The project attracted his coworkers who chipped in artwork. Yael Barroz and Jean-Marc Toroella encouraged Raynal to switch over to hand-drawn backgrounds, lending a more cohesive look. Before long, they had an impressive one room proof-of-concept demo with detailed, animated characters that could bend and flex, and Infogrames agreed to go ahead with production.

Although he had more to work with than Dynamix had on the Commodore 64, Raynal found himself with very similar challenges. Technology was barely at the point where animated human characters could be done in 3D, let alone zombies that were frightening to look at, so the team had to use gameplay to get their message across. Although Raynal never played Project Firestart – in fact, he had never even owned a Commodore 64 – the conclusions he arrived at were similar. This is best attributed to the thoughtful approach to game design that Raynal and Tunnell both share.

The title of his creation, Alone in the Dark, reveals much about his approach to horror. "Almost 20 years ago, graphics couldn't make monsters scary, so I used several methods," Raynal says. "First the player should be more scared of what he doesn't see than what he sees. That was a goal of having texts to read, that could tell a story you can't display." This device allowed the game to slowly reveal a story without compromising the oppressive isolation needed for the game's story. Large amounts of dialog were simply not an option if the player was to feel like he was alone in the dark.

Gameplay was just as important. At its core, this was an action-adventure game, loaded with inventory puzzles and exploration, and only sparing amounts of combat, but the constant threat kept the tension high. Raynal explains, "By setting some unavoidable death trap like the floor that felt down in the first corridor, you instill a fear with what the player is doing the most: walking." The developer identified that feeling of vulnerability as one of the key components of effective horror, and it permeated into all aspects of the design. "Then you put a monster behind the first door, so the player will be scared when opening a door, make a weapon break at its first use, or limit drastically the amount of ammunition." All of these elements kept players from ever feeling safe.

Theme was just as important. Like many of the key figures in horror games, Raynal's inspirations came more from movies than other games. His father owned a video rental shop when he was young, so Raynal grew up an avid watcher of horror movies throughout the '80s. George Romero's Living Dead movies were a major source of inspiration, but it was the haunted house aspect of Amityville Horror that showed itself prominently in his creation.

Alone in the Dark's spooky story is deeply rooted in the works of H. P. Lovecraft. It tells the story of the Derceto mansion, an old plantation house in Louisiana whose owner, Jeremy Hartwood, has recently killed himself under suspicious circumstances. The story can be played from one of two perspectives: paranormal investigator Edward Carnby, or Emily Hartwood, niece of the deceased. Shortly after entering the mansion it becomes clear that there is an evil presence, and as the story unfolds, the long, sordid history of the home reveals itself a little at a time. The story played perfectly to fears of the supernatural, the occult, blood and guts, and undead monsters.

A top-notch presentation helped to sell the tale. In addition to strong writing and technically impressive graphics, the game used a lot of dramatic, unusual camera angles, far bolder than those in other adventure games at the time. This lent an uneasy feeling to some of the locations, and also allowed the designer to better control where the player's attention was focused. To cope with the unique combination of 3D gameplay and scripted camera angles, a character-relative control scheme (now colloquially called "tank controls") was employed. This scheme would later find its way into many survival horror games, as well as a few of Raynal's later works.

Music was equally important. Like Jeff Tunnell, Raynal had music triggered by the presence of enemies, but Alone in the Dark took it a step further. Noticing the sense of dread the music inspired, Raynal recalls composer Philippe Vachey's breakthrough: "He said 'Why not launch it randomly sometimes? That was very efficient!" The occasional false alarm kept players fearing what lurked around the corner.

Alone in the Dark was released in Europe in late 1992 and around the world not long after. An immediate hit with critics and fans, it became a major commercial breakthrough for Infogrames, still a fairly small company at the time. Alone in the Dark was a polished, mature vision of the horror genre, a technical marvel, and remains an enduring classic, still able to frighten, even with its ancient graphics. It was a wake up call to the industry to start approaching game design from new angles.

Infogrames had their biggest hit yet, but they didn't have much appreciation for the craftsmanship that went into it. Early in the planning of Alone in the Dark 2, Frederick Raynal left the company to form Adeline Software International, taking most of the Alone in the Dark team with him. Infogrames still had the rights to the engine and the resources to put behind the game, but they overestimated their ability to recreate the original vision.

"I didn't write any design documents, as I was the main programmer, the creator, and the integrator," Raynal explains. "I did exactly what I wanted in it without written explanations." With the core team gone they had the machine but not the operator's manual. A new team carried on their work, preserving the same core gameplay, but losing the ethic that made the original so frightening. Alone in the Dark 2's story of zombie mobsters and ghost pirates was more campy than scary, and the greater focus on shooting not only diminished the sense of fear in the combat, but it proved to be a very poor match for the controls. Although it was still a commercial success, it was almost universally regarded as a major step down. A third Alone in the Dark was released in 1994, avoiding some of the pitfalls of its predecessor, but still failing to recapture the original's greatness.

Horror Defined

Alone in the Dark's success was too much to ignore. It was a hit in America and Europe, and it made its way to Japan thanks to ports on FM TOWNS computers and 3DO. It was there that it inspired the next generation of survival horror. Capcom's Shinji Mikami, much like Frederick Raynal, was motivated by new technology and wanted to create the kind of game that would never have been possible a few years earlier. Alone in the Dark seemed like the perfect first step, and Mikami wanted to see how far he could advance this new form. In 1994 he started work on a project called Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan), designing, directing, and scripting the game himself.

A proud Japanese developer, Mikami is quiet about the extent to which he was influenced by a French computer game. When asked about his inspirations, he is quick to volunteer Sweet Home – a game conveniently made by his employer. For this reason, Sweet Home is often considered a progenitor of the genre – and indeed it was a relevant game – but the Alone in the Dark influence was far more obvious. Even before Resident Evil's release, the comparisons were frequent.

Despite borrowing its controls, gameplay foundations, and the signature blend of pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D characters, Mikami didn't seem to have a great deal of reverence for Alone in the Dark. Just as Shigeru Miyamoto downplays the impact of Pac-Land on Super Mario Bros by explaining all of the ways he improved upon it, Mikami was similarly quick to point out how much his game diverged in terms of tone and visual style. "I wanted to create a really scary game," Mikami said in a 1996 interview with EGM's Ed Semrad, "no ghosts or crap like that, but real monsters you could see that would come and attack." When asked specifically how his game would differ from Alone in the Dark, he remarked simply, "The graphics kick ass."

Still, Mikami's vision was not entirely the same. His interest was not so much in the cerebral horror, but in a bloody, visceral sort of terror. His monsters were gruesome and gory and the story rooted in the revisionist sci-fi subgenre of zombie fiction. Movies like Alien, Jaws, and Night of the Living Dead were sources of inspiration – flesh and blood monsters that seemed unstoppable.

Mikami understood what made the Alone in the Dark formula work far better than the teams at Infogrames working on its sequels. Despite his obvious cinematic influences, he recognized the unique ways that interactivity could add to a player's fear, rather than just aping non-interactive horror. "I was aiming for the type of horror entertainment that is not possible in a movie," he explained. This meant forcing players to make tough fight-or-flight decisions on the fly. The main characters' abilities were kept conservative and resources limited to ramp up the pressure. This wasn't an action game. The combat served a purpose and was used sparingly enough that it didn't lose its effect.

As one of their premiere 32-bit games, Resident Evil was one of the most ambitious and expensive games Capcom had ever done, and a major change from anything Mikami had worked on previously. The combination of lush, pre-rendered backgrounds and detailed 3D characters emphasized both the graphical power of Sony's new system and the mass storage of CD-ROM media. In a time when many developers were still coming to grips with how to use these new tools, it was something that simply couldn't have been done on the last generation of consoles.

Resident Evil was a breakthrough hit. It would eventually sell over 2.7 million copies, and while it was later ported to a variety of different platforms (including the competing Saturn), its time of exclusivity proved to be a major boon to the Sony PlayStation. During a time when the outcome of the console war was still very uncertain, Resident Evil tipped the scales in Sony's favor, and sealed its fate as the market leader.

One of the more subtle and important contributions Capcom made was the term "survival horror" itself. In Japan, it's actually a very common practice to coin a new genre for a game as a marketing term; over there, Phoenix Wright is billed as a "Courtroom Battle" game, and Tales of Symphonia marketed as a "To Resonate With You RPG." But the budding genre that Resident Evil belonged to sorely needed a name, and the term stuck. Lasting genre labels have almost always been coined by fans or media, but Capcom's marketing answered the question before anyone asked. It's a good thing, too, since survival horror was about to become bigger than anyone could have imagined.

Survival Horror Explosion

With the breakthrough success of Resident Evil, the floodgates were opened, and the genre's conventions solidified. What was once an experiment now had a name and a creed. Everyone wanted a piece of the action, and Japan's publishing giants all started working on their own takes. What followed was a tidal wave of survival horror games from Japan lasting from 1997 through the end of the generation.

One of the first games to take advantage of the heightened interest in this new genre was not actually an attempt to follow Resident Evil at all. Clock Tower 2 (known simply as Clock Tower in North America) was the 32-bit sequel to a Super Famicom game that had come out in Japan a year before, and kept true to the original's gameplay. Both games were point-and-click adventures with a major twist: a deadly stalker known as Scissorman that chased players throughout the game. This small element of true survival horror was enough that ASCII Entertainment was able to position their title to take advantage of the audience's hunger for more Resident Evil, and it proved to be a hit.

Capcom was not about to drop the ball, either, and a sequel was underway almost as soon as the first hit shelves. Resident Evil 2 didn't come easy, however. Mikami wanted to tap into that classic notion of horror of "the ordinary made strange," so rather than setting his game in the kind of creepy mansion no one would ever visit, he wanted to use familiar urban settings, transformed by the chaos of the T-Virus outbreak. Unfortunately, the idea worked better on paper than it did in practice. Frustrated with the mundane environments and story problems that were plaguing the project, he made the hard decision to delay the game and remake it nearly from scratch.

Had the resultant game bombed, a decision like that would have ruined Mikami's career as a producer. Luckily the added experience really did benefit the project, and the dark, creepy vibe worked better than strict realism. The script was polished up considerably, and the characters' back stories rewritten. Released in January of 1998, the PlayStation version was no worse off for the delay, eventually selling over five million copies. The original's success was no fluke, and survival horror was here to stay. A third Resident Evil followed the next year.

In the interim between the first two Resident Evil games, another game changed the direction of the 32-bit generation: Final Fantasy VII. Squaresoft went from a niche publisher to one of the hottest names in the industry, and they set out to develop a game that would capitalize on the success of both Final Fantasy and Resident Evil.

Had it been released today, Parasite Eve might not even be considered a survival horror game. The gameplay was a peculiar blend of RPG and survival horror, with random encounters, but a dark tone and realistic environments made scary by their monstrous inhabitants. Its timing was perfect and it picked up a sizable share of both audiences, and inspired a hit sequel not long after.

The golden age of survival horror came to a crescendo in 1999, when Konami released their long overdue foray into the genre, Silent Hill. Combining the shocking, visceral horror of Resident Evil with a bleak, foreboding, and mysterious atmosphere that echoed some of Steven King's work (particularly The Mist), it elevated the quality of writing in the genre to new heights, and created something genuinely disturbing beyond cheap scares.

The story took the genre in a more human direction, too. While survival horror had always avoided the super-soldiers typical of action games, most of them still starred some kind of policeman, detective, military officer, or another character sent into harm's way on a mission. Silent Hill's Harry Mason was different; a true everyman with no exceptional training. Harry finds his daughter missing after a car accident and wanders into the seemingly deserted suburb as a thick fog and flurries of snow roll in. He soon learns that Silent Hill is not what it seems as it slowly descends into a horrific, otherworldly state. The story avoided some of the genre's usual clichés, and the fear of losing a child made a perfect motivator for an ordinary man to overcome the extraordinary.

It was also a step forward in terms of presentation. At the time, most games in the genre still used pre-rendered backgrounds like Resident Evil. While a few like The Note and Hellnight had real-time graphics with a first-person view, Silent Hill kept the classic Resident Evil view, but used real-time graphics as a tool to create fear. Strange, twisting camera angles lent an uneasy feeling to the already bleak atmosphere. The oppressive fog and darkness may have been used to mask the system's limitations, but once again survival horror plays by different rules. Where not being able to see would be considered a game-wrecking flaw otherwise, the fear of the unknown is a powerful tool of terror.

Silent Hill was a critical darling as soon as it was released, overcoming the obvious comparisons to Resident Evil as few others had been able to do. The title is now considered one of the genre's defining moments and one of the PlayStation's best games. Despite this, it never managed the same level of commercial success as Capcom's series. Nevertheless, it sold well enough to spawn a series that continues on to this day, and can still be seen as Resident Evil's strongest rival.

Capcom answered shortly thereafter with Dino Crisis. Returning the futuristic science-fiction setting that the genre began with and subsequently forgot, Dino Crisis fused the lessons learned by Resident Evil with Jurassic Park. Where zombies made for slow, lumbering, clumsy enemies, Velociraptors were fast, cunning killing machines. Like Silent Hill, the game boasted real-time 3D graphics with scripted camera angles but maintained many of the same gameplay principles while inching closer to the action genre.

Dino Crisis was a hit and spawned another sequel on PlayStation, but its moment in the sun was ending. The next generation was a challenge for the relatively new genre, and if it was to survive, it would have to grow and change.

Survival Horror in Decline

Resident Evil was the perfect game for its moment. It was fresh, exciting, and perfectly showcased its hardware. Early on, the games that followed formed a cohesive genre, with similar ideas about gameplay, design, and control, and some of these even leaked into games outside of the horror realm, like Time Gate: Knight's Chase and Time Commando. But by the end of the 32-bit genre, many of these conventions were on their way out. Once Mario 64 showed that a dynamic, "intelligent" camera could work with analog, screen-relative control in a 3D world, the industry slowly caught wise, and before long, solutions like "tank controls" and scripted cameras were considered passé.

This took its toll on the survival horror genre once the new generation of hardware emerged, but in the absence of a compelling new direction, survival horror games stuck to their dated ways. There's a great argument to be made that these conventions worked for the genre and that strange camera angles and limited control were perfect for creating fear, but this school of design fought a difficult battle that it would eventually lose.

Resident Evil pressed on in the new generation with Code Veronica on the SEGA Dreamcast. It managed to pack an incredible cinematic presentation and a detailed real-time graphics that were arguably more effective than the pre-rendered games that preceded them. The deeper, more involved story and heightened realism were enough to overcome the aging gameplay, and it was met warmly by critics and fans alike. Sales were weak compared to its predecessors but strong compared to other games on the struggling platform. Although other survival horrors on the Dreamcast like Carrier, D2, and Illbleed were not so lucky, the future still seemed bright.

When the PlayStation 2 arrived, Capcom was eager to see if the new technology could help even a game rooted in pre-rendered backgrounds. They moved Onimusha, their latest game based on Resident Evil technology, to the PlayStation 2 and showed how lighting masks and higher polygon counts could make for a more cohesive look. The game itself, however, strayed from the survival horror genre, leaning more towards action-adventure.

These ideas reared their heads soon after in the long overdue revival of one of the genre's greats. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare was a complete series reboot, set in the present day, and starring a younger, long-haired version of Edward Carnby. It lifted gameplay ideas from Resident Evil with little guilt, considering how much Resident Evil had purloined from the series, and moved the focus away from Lovecraftian influences, while still focusing on otherworldly demons. Even though it appeared on the PlayStation (among other ports), it was able to pull off some incredible lighting tricks, and the use of the flashlight would prove influential. Despite this, The New Nightmare failed to reinvigorate the series.

Fatal Frame, on the other hand, gave the sagging genre a much needed shot in the arm. Borrowing some of its tone from the burgeoning J-Horror genre, it abandoned zombies and monsters for eerie visions of ghosts. Harkening back to Clock Tower, it cast players as a vulnerable young girl and armed her with only a camera capable of capturing spirits for defense. While much of the gameplay was true to form, the eerie J-Horror tone was something audiences hadn't seen yet. When the horror film The Ring was released in America later that year, it would further fuel interest in Fatal Frame and its sequels.

Silent Hill 2 also helped spark a short-lived period of renewed interest in horror games. The gritty, grainy imagery was some of the most effective yet in a horror game, and Konami was able to position it to release a month before Halloween, 2002. Despite preserving many of the previous game's conventions, it had bigger, more complex environments, and added a "stalker" element similar to Clock Tower and Resident Evil 3. To this day, Pyramid Head is remembered as one of gaming's most frightening villains.

Perhaps the last hurrah of the classic survival horror era came from the last place anyone would expect: Nintendo. Their newly acquired second party, Silicon Knights, wanted to make a true horror game to win over the mature audience that had always eluded the kid-friendly publisher. Culling elements of Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, and some new ideas about psychological horror, Eternal Darkness scared people in traditional and novel ways .

Its most memorable contribution was the "sanity meter." When this gauge was depleted, the game would play tricks on the player at random moments. These ranged from flashes of disturbing imagery to M. C. Escher-like perspective tricks, and even tampering with the game's volume and picture to make players feel like they were genuinely losing it. It may have been a gimmicky hook, but it worked, and it remains a cult-classic for horror fans.

Alas, by 2003, it was quickly becoming apparent that the genre was in trouble. Resident Evil: Zero arrived at the end of 2002 with disappointing sales and some of the series' weakest review scores. Most of the criticism centered on the controls, camera, and other tried and true conventions most associated the series. Dino Crisis 3 followed not long after with poor reviews and even weaker sales. It seemed like survival horror's moment was ending.

Finding a New Voice

Survival horror was never about specific gameplay conventions. There were games outside of the genre that controlled and played exactly the same, and those within that played completely differently. Despite this, survival horror had gotten itself into a rut, and by 2003 it was a shadow of its former self. There was a need to modernize the way these games played while preserving the design philosophy that made them scary in the first place.

One of the first and most important games of the revisionist survival horror movement arrived before the genre was in crisis. In fact, System Shock 2 wasn't even considered a survival horror game at all when it was released. The clever hybrid game managed to completely avoid the usual sort of survival horror gameplay seen in so many PlayStation games, while still tapping into the same core principles that make them so scary.

System Shock 2 was not really big on labels to begin with. It looked and controlled like a first-person shooter, but it had the character growth and customization of an RPG and a developed inventory system. Underneath all these elements, there was a sense of horror and tragedy that permeated everything. Like many games before it, the story of lives ruined or ended unfolded through the logs and journals of those left behind.

The team at Irrational Games wasn't looking at Resident Evil or Alone in the Dark for guidelines, but when faced with the challenge of making a truly scary game, they came to the same conclusion. They identified two main elements, isolation and vulnerability, as being the key themes in the story and gameplay that contribute to fear. Trapped on a space station and surrounded by corpses, the player felt helplessly alone, and with minimal resources and abilities, death was always looming. Immersive and sometimes deceptive use of sound and lighting helped to reinforce the sense of dread with a strong audiovisual component.

System Shock 2 was only moderately successful and not terribly influential in its time. The survival horror genre didn't need to change yet, and companies were making money just fine with their Resident Evil clones. As the years advanced, horror games slowly decreased in sales, and gamers stopped responding to the same tricks. Only then would more progressive games have a chance to change the direction of the genre.

Around the same time that Infogrames was preparing their revival of the Alone in the Dark franchise, series' creator Frederick Raynal was finally returning to the genre he helped to create with an original survival horror game called Agartha. In addition to the detailed 3D environments and impressive flashlight effects, Raynal brought with him some fresh ideas about how to disturb the player in ways only a game can.

The bond a gamer shares with his on-screen avatar is different than a viewer watching a character in a movie. The player owns the avatar's decisions, and this can be a powerful tool. Raynal and his team at No Cliché decided to play with this by weaving in and out of parallel story threads based on the moral choices made by the player. There was one central narrative that told a very personal story, and the good and evil threads would progress according to the player's decisions. Some of these actions were disturbing, forcing the player to acts of murder and betrayal. "The goal was to scare the player with what he thinks he will have to do to achieve his goals even before doing it," Raynal explains.

Unfortunately, Agartha would never see a release. In the wake of SEGA's troubles with the Dreamcast, they shut down No Cliché and terminated the project deep into its development. The ideas about morality as a device for horror games weren't lost entirely, though. Bioshock would later make these kinds of decisions a prominent theme.

During the years that followed, the line between action and survival horror gradually blurred, as horror games abandoned the slow movement and stiff controls long associated with the genre. One of the first to throw down the gauntlet was id Software. Long known for their cutting edge action games, id was no stranger to horror. Despite falling outside of the "survival horror" criteria, the original Doom and Quake were gritty action games with hellish imagery, known to scare the crap out of more than a few players. When it came time to reinvent Doom for a new generation, horror was moved to the front and action took a backseat.

Doom 3 made a conscious effort to be more narrative and less abstract than its '90s predecessors. Once again, the designers found themselves returning to Project Firestart's technique of telling a story through messages left behind by others, but there were also bits of dialog and other first-person storytelling reminiscent of Half-Life. The environments were made to be a believable space station, different from the labyrinthine and purposeless levels of the original Doom.

The cutting edge engine lent itself perfectly to the change of pace. In cramped, indoor environments, the Doom 3 engine was capable of incredible feats of dynamic lighting. Everything could cast shadows in real-time and lights could move and flicker. In a move similar to Alone in the Dark 4, players were given a flashlight to pierce the darkness, forcing them to balance firepower with a good view of their surroundings – quite counter to anything id had designed before.

The move to survival horror left some fans cold, but most critics recognized it as a conscious decision to do something different and applauded its effectiveness. Controversy aside, Doom 3 was a huge hit, selling more than 3.5 million – enough to make others think twice about their approach to horror games.

For its entire development, Resident Evil 4 lived at the crux of this controversy. Early on, Shinji Mikami's team toyed with the idea of Leon Kennedy becoming infected and slowly losing his humanity, as well as with the idea of following in Silent Hill 2's footsteps and adding nightmarish visions and an otherworldly stalker. Even after some promising prototypes and strong early buzz, Mikami realized that the only way to really bring the series back would be to rebuild nearly from scratch.

The zombies that were the series' hallmark were given the boot, replaced with infected (or infested) that could run, speak, and work together. The camera was moved to an over-the-shoulder view, completely changing the dynamic of the shooting and allowing for more precise aiming. The claustrophobic interiors the series was known for were traded for a number of larger, more open areas, and the enemy count was ramped up to match.

There's no denying that Resident Evil 4 was a major breakthrough for third-person shooters. What isn't as clear is if it was the right direction for survival horror. At the time, Resident Evil 4 received nearly universal praise, and is still considered one of the best games of the generation, but something was lost along the way. "By going more toward an action game," Frederick Raynal explains, "you give that power to the player so each time he sees a monster he says 'Come on, I'll kick your ass' instead of running away."

Resident Evil 4 was fine for the time it was released, but in the years that followed, many third-person shooters built on the ground it had broken, and Capcom found that they were no longer at the top of the heap. In an effort to keep up with games like Gears of War, they released Resident Evil 5 as a two-player cooperative game, abandoning the isolation element after already sacrificing the feeling of vulnerability in the previous game. They released their game to a market already crowded with third person shooters, and this time critics were left wondering what happened to the horror.

Monolith Software began their careers working on the horror-themed shooter Blood, and as the current generation of consoles approached, they wanted to return in a big way. Shortly before Halloween of 2005, they released F.E.A.R. an action-horror first-person shooter that owed much to the frightening films of Japan. It was followed shortly by the more experimental Condemned: Criminal Origins, a "first-person bludgeoner" that proved to be one of the most terrifying games ever made.

Condemned didn't need zombies, or even monsters in any conventional sense. Inspired by the movie Se7en, it offered a dark, disturbing glimpse into a world of serial killers and violent thugs through the eyes of criminal investigator Ethan Thomas. At first, it avoids the paranormal entirely, and only as Ethan falls deeper into insanity does the game begin to break with reality.

Resources are always limited in survival horror games, but Condemned offers no ammunition pick-ups at all, rendering guns all but useless once they've been spent. Instead, players are forced into face-to-face melee conflicts. This up-close and personal approach made for an intense, visceral experience that firearms couldn't match.

Unlike most horror games, Condemned is not about escape, nor is it about being trapped in a small area. It's a slow, downward spiral that forces the player into a world where survival means acts of savage violence, as Ethan slowly becomes the very things he fights. The journey takes him through decaying versions of familiar environments like a department store, a library, and an apple orchard. The further he gets, the more the unsettling locations reflect Ethan's mental state.

As an Xbox 360 launch title, Condemned set the pace for survival horror in the new gen, but it wasn't long before others followed suit. Capcom answered with Dead Rising, an entirely new take on the genre that carved out an identity for itself despite boasting the zombie theme they rode so hard with the Resident Evil series.

Along with Lost Planet, it was part of the publisher's attempts to incorporate American gaming trends into their design, and hopefully avoid sinking into the same kind of decline other Japanese developers were facing. In Dead Rising's case, this meant a more open-ended "sandbox" structure that focused on survival by any means and side-missions rather than puzzles and adventure game elements. The combat also allowed for a great deal of improvisation, as just about everything that wasn't nailed down could become a weapon.

Dead Rising was a unique, fresh take on the genre that could never be mistaken for Resident Evil. The new hardware allowed Capcom to flood the screen with swarms of shambling undead, and the shopping mall location (blatantly lifted from Dawn of the Dead) was large and had a ton to explore. It remains to be seen if any of these ideas will stick, but Capcom has a sequel on the way.

If System Shock 2 kicked off the revisionist survival horror movement, then its spiritual successor Bioshock elevated it to an art form. Across all media, horror is often derided (fairly or otherwise) as artistically cheap or base, but Irrational's take was intellectual and provocative, tackling politics and philosophy as it terrified. Conceived as an ideological antipode to Atlas Shrugged, it told the story of Rapture, an elite hyper-capitalist society for the world's most brilliant minds, built under the ocean, away from the crippling mediocrity of the masses. When scientists discover Adam, a limited resource that allows them to genetically modify themselves, the society based on greed breaks down, and its inhabitants slowly lose their humanity as they struggle to control this genetic currency.

It works not only as a fable about unchecked greed and unbalanced ideals, but as a truly chilling world. What makes Rapture's inhabitants so scary is not how monstrous they are, but rather how human. Once great artists and scientists, they talk, laugh and cry through their madness, still clinging to strands of their former lives. Like Rapture itself, their nightmarish visages are constant reminders of the beauty and idealism that were once there.

This is accented by the journey of Bioshock's unnamed protagonist. In order to survive in this perverted ecosystem, he must take the same path as everyone else, killing and genetically modifying himself to become ever more adapted to life in Rapture. Slowly, he realizes that he is no different than any of them, even as he struggles to hold on to what moral center he has left. Bioshock elevated horror to new level of credibility and was met as one of gaming's artistic high points.

Proving to be the genre's longest survivor, Alone in the Dark reared its head once more in 2008 with a game that eschewed the shift to more action, but still sought to move the genre forward. Effectively the second consecutive reboot for the series (although it did incorporate some of the story of the original trilogy), Eden Games' take was an ambitious and experimental take on survival horror that took a philosophical approach to its gameplay, perhaps to the detriment of its mass appeal.

Its developers noted that in horror films, the tensest moments are when a character is fumbling with a lock or trying to start a car while a killer rapidly approached. They thought they could replicate and heighten this by forcing players perform fine tasks under pressure. Its monsters could only be killed with fire, and creating flaming bullets meant constantly dousing your ammunition with lighter fluid or alcohol every time you reloaded. Many other items, such as Molotov cocktails, had to be cobbled together from multiple inventory items. All of this had to be done without freezing the action – even in the heat of battle.

It also introduced a rare vehicular component to the genre. Set in New York City's Central Park, it gave players a large stomping ground to drive around. Abandoned cars could be commandeered, but most needed to be hotwired – again, without pausing the game. These sorts of situations could indeed be very intense, but others found them awkward and frustrating.

Early in this article, we pointed out that good survival horror design could often be considered bad game design in any other context. Critics were sharply divided as to which best described Alone in the Dark. It was an innovative, ambitious game with some very original ideas about horror, but some of these ideas worked and some of them simply didn't. A poor storyline may have undermined the effectiveness of the scares, leaving these mechanics without a chance to show their potential.

The commercial and critical failure of Alone in the Dark seemed like a blow to survival horror purists. Since Resident Evil 4, action-horror was slowly encroaching on the survival horror niche, and it seemed like the notion of high difficulty and vulnerable characters were just incompatible with where the industry was going. Luckily, EA's Redwood Shores studio met the challenge with a true survival horror that could please both purists and critics.

Dead Space returned to the cold, lonely realm of outer space so underplayed in the genre. In classic horror fashion, an untrained everyman – in this case engineer Isaac Clarke – finds himself stranded aboard a mining vessel filled with carnage and powerful alien monsters. In many ways, it echoes the genre's beginnings with Project Firestart, as well as their mutual inspiration, Alien.

This setting was played up to better effect than it had been before. It featured the dark, moody lighting of Doom 3 but also played up the lack of atmosphere and gravity for chilling effect. Sections without air heightened the tension here, just as they had in Deep Fear. Zero gravity areas made for an eerie and unnatural setting that complimented the tone so well, you have to wonder why we hadn't seen it more.

EA's team proved that brilliant survival horror design and intuitive, effective controls were not mutually exclusive. Their ideas about horror were not that far removed from the makers of the recent Alone in the Dark, but they had a better understanding of how to do it with an immediacy that wouldn't frustrate players. Trying to perform small, precise tasks under pressure is scary and intense, but rather than forcing players to fumble through their inventory, it forced them to carefully shoot off the limbs of their foes. This "strategic dismemberment" mechanic made the monsters feel more powerful and threatening and the player feel more helpless without drawing them away from the action.

Dead Space was a progressive take on survival horror that succeeded in a way few others had. The warm reviews that greeted its release were proof that the genre could still work without drifting further into shooter territory. Unfortunately, sales were not what EA had hoped they would be, but it was still a modest success, selling over a million copies by the year's end.

None of these newer takes on survival horror have managed to become the kind of archetypes that Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark were in their time. Many have been searching for a new vision of the genre, and none of them ever catch on. At a glance, this might look like a death spiral, but it's really a testament to just what a unique genre survival horror is.

Survival horror doesn't need a template, a rigid format for designers to follow. It's an idea, an ethic, and a concept. It's a game that pulls no punches, and uses every tool at its disposal – graphics, sound effects, music, narrative and gameplay – to manipulate our emotions and make us feel dread. It may not have a clearly defined set of mechanics, but this is just a testament to not only the genre's breadth and depth, but the versatility of gaming as an artistic medium. Things will only get more interesting from here.