It’s been a while since I wrote anything about horror games. Mostly I just haven’t had time to play them. But at some point last year I realized that there was more to it than that: I was tired of trying to maintain my 12-year-old custom blog software. I’ve been writing an occasional blog post over at Robot Invader, and I tweet about horror games from time to time. But I pretty much stopped writing for Chris’s Survival Horror Quest partially because the ancient software is a pain to use and the site design looked dumb in 2006.
Chris’s Survival Horror Quest first launched in August of 2003. It’s been through two major iterations since then. This is the third. Over the years my writing about horror games has gone from being focused on up-and-coming news, to reviews of video games, to a somewhat more meditative, analysis-heavy form about the construction of scary games and the functional components of fear itself.
The design of this incarnation of Chris’s Survival Horror Quest had three goals. I wanted to be able to present long-form analysis in a readable way, to preserve all of the content on the site, and to condense everything into a single, flat stream. Getting the content out of the database and into WordPress took some coding; I repurposed an old RSS serializer I wrote to generate a format importable by WordPress, then added a bunch of mapping hacks to fix all of the links and images on the site. There are some weird things: all of the old reviews had no date, so they’re all filed under August of 2003 (though they also each have a news item from the date they were published). Some links might be broken, though I’ve been pretty careful. A few places need layout tuning by hand. But generally, I’m happy with the result. Even the comments made it through!
This is not a promise to update this site more frequently, though I will try. Thanks for hanging around, especially those of you who’ve been here for more than a decade. If you’re interested in what I’ve been up to lately, you could watch my GDC 2015 talk about Dead Secret, the VR mystery game I’m making with my team at Robot Invader, read about that game on the Robot Invader Blog, or check out some of the technical blogging I’ve done for Oculus lately.
I’m still here. I still have a giant stack of horror games to play. There will be more posts here. Hang tight.
PS: Today is Chris’s Survival Horror Quest’s twelfth birthday. Hooray!
wow this is a surprise. but i like the change and I am glad you are hoping to keep at this, however sporadically. I check this site every day or so and it’s always usch an exciting moment when something new pops up. I’ll have to bookmark the other sites you mention so I can keep an eye on things.
Thanks for all your hard work!
been around since the early years and I’s always good to see any news regardless. Thanks for all your hard work.
Always a pleasure to see new content. With all the new games nd trends, it is an exciting time to be a survival horror fan, so I hope we see more posts, especially considering you are probably the wisest blogger on the subject.
I decided to post this under my old retired screen name from your old forum. I miss it.
I’ve been around nearly 10 years and LOVE the site – both the old and the new. i must say, i thought the old design sort of worked beautifully well, especially when you were reviewing obscure PS1 games (hell night…) or talking about the technical interest in recursive unlocking in RE1. I dunno… the whole retro brown feeling just worked for me.
That said, i do like the new front end!
Keep up the great work Chris and I look forward to reading more….
Hi Chris, I’m glad this site is not dead!
I still remember the old times on forums 🙂
Dead Secret seems really nice, it should be great on Wii playing through nunchaku (sic).
I bet it’ll be a great game 🙂
Keep it up and greetings for the anniversary!
Happy Birthday for anniversary !.
I really hope you can writing some review on evil within horror game.
Thank you for all of your time to write many interesting post.
Good to see an update. Maybe with this new format you can reopen the forums?
It’s good to see some Paranormal Activity over here after so long. I visit the site from time to time and am glad to find a pair of new entries.
What will happen when CSHQ reaches its 13th anniversary? I hope that by then you have achieved plenty of things and surprise us even with more.
Congratz Chris! 🙂
REDVWIN
Good to know you are still at it , regardless how often you are going to post here. Always good to know that some staples of our gaming enjoyment are still around :). I am following your adventures on twitter (PikosApikos_) and have enjoyed your games on Android. Keep up doing what you obviously love and wish you all the best in your future endeavours:).
Thanks for keeping it going!
A lot of great stuff here.
I haven’t been on this site in months since postings had become so erratic, but with Halloween around the corner, I’ve been thinking about digging out my old unfinished horror games and figured I would check out the blog. Glad to see you are still writing Chris. While I sometimes disagree with your game reviews, I find your insight into game design and the mechanics of horror media to be both fascinating and instructive. Thanks for all the hard work you do.