The West has been awash in Japanese popular culture every since manga and anime began to take root with young people in the early 1990s. Within a decade, the import of Japanese media has gone from a tiny niche market to a full-blown pop culture phenomenon. Japanese comics are now available in translation at major bookstore chains, Hollywood is remaking Japanese films like mad (such as Shall We Dance, remade in 2004 based on the 1996 Japanese movie), and some networks are devoting their prime time slots to animation from the Far East. The appeal of Japanese media has taken root in Western culture and has turned into a thriving import industry.

However, Western audiences often experience long-distance culture shock when faced with media created by the Japanese for the Japanese. Despite efforts to tailor Japanese works for the American market, we are often confronted with cultural signals that are uniquely Japanese and have no direct equivalent Western culture. This has lead to a lot of head-scratching on this side of the Pacific, and has given rise to the internet stereotype that the Japanese must be insane. This incomprehensibility has kept some forms of Japanese pop culture from gaining traction with with mainstream Western audiences.

An exception is Japanese horror, which has done particularly well in the West. Movies like The Ring (1998) and Juon (2003) have struck a chord with Western audiences, and have sparked a renewed interest in foreign movies and horror in general. Japanese literature like Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is starting to gain a solid readership in the West (though still only a very select group of authors are available in translation), and horrific video games of Japanese origin such as Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, and Resident Evil are consistently popular. It seems that Japanese horror has successfully avoided the mire of culture clash and has made a significant impact on mainstream Western society.

So what is it about Japanese horror that we find so attractive? What has kept it comprehensible and accessible to mainstream Western audiences? What is with all the freaky women wearing white with their hair covering their face? In this article, I will attempt to explain how Japanese horror works within the context of Japanese culture and how this approach is differs from the type of horror that Americans are used to.

Laying the Groundwork

Before we get into how Japanese horror works and why we find it so affecting, I need to define a couple of example tales that I will refer to over and over again in this article. I have selected these stories because I think that they represent a fairly wide spectrum of Japanese horror, not because they are particularly unique to Japan; though I will eventually compare and contrast Western and Japanese horror, this initial treatment is designed to give you some idea of what the cultural landscape of Japan is like when it comes to scary stories. Please note that I am trying to present a general overview of Japanese horror, and consequently this article is full of generalizations; not all horror media from Japan will fit the characteristics that I describe, nor should you consider this article the definitive work on Japanese horror.

The stories I have selected are as follows: The Ring (1998 film version), Toire No Hanako, Banchou Sarayashiki, and Yuki-Onna. Note that the next few paragraphs contain major spoilers, especially for The Ring. If you haven’t seen The Ring yet, do yourself a favor and go watch it right now. If you are familiar with these stories, you can skip this part and jump right to the next section.

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  Sadako crawls out of the TV in The Ring
  

  The Ring (リング) is a 1998 film that was directed by Hideo Nakata and based on a novel by Koji Suzuki. The film was released in America under the terrible name Ringu because some marketing executive decided that the remake-starring-white-people took precedence over the Ring name. In The Ring (I am always referring to the original version, not the remake), a news reporter named Asakawa (played by Nanako Matsushima) stumbles upon the story of a cursed video tape while collecting information for an article on urban legends. According to the rumor, a video tape exists that will kill the viewer seven days after it is watched. The only escape from the curse is to make a copy of the tape and show it to someone else, who must then copy it and show it again to save themselves. Asakawa tracks the tape down and watches it only to realize that the curse is real and that she has seven days to live. She spends the rest of the film searching for the force behind the tape, a psychic girl named Sadako who was killed by her father and dumped in a well years ago. As we see at the end of the film, Sadako climbs out of her well and through the TV of her next victim, manifesting her wrath in the physical realm from beyond the grave.

• Toire No Hanakosan (トイレの花子さん, “Hanako-in-the-Toilet”) is another contemporary macabre tale. The story behind Hanako-in-the-Toilet is this: if you knock three times on a particular stall in a particular school’s girl’s bathroom while calling Hanako’s name, you will hear her reply from within the empty stall. This story appeared in the early 1980s and enjoyed wide popularity among school children, spawning numerous books and a few films. Different versions of the tale describe various reasons that Hanako’s ghost sticks around (in some versions she was murdered in the bathroom; in others, she was a girl who committed suicide in one of the stalls), and her response differs widely as well. But the main crux of the Hanako-in-the-Toilet tale is the bathroom stall mechanic: by knocking on a particular stall and calling Hanako in a particular way, you can get her to answer you.
• Banchou Sarayashiki (番町皿屋敷, “The Story of Okiku”) is a classic Japanese ghost story about a maid named Okiku who is falsely accused of breaking a ceramic plate. The dish is part of a collection of ten plates, and is extremely valuable to her employers, a samurai family. Enraged by her mistake, the samurai kills Okiku and throws her in an old well. Every night thereafter, Okiku’s ghost rises from the well, counts to nine, and then breaks into sobs. Eventually her presence is so maddening that the samurai goes insane.
• Yuki-Onna (雪女, “The Snow Woman”) is another Japanese classic. In this story, a young man and his mentor are caught in a terrible blizzard while collecting firewood in a forest. They take refuge in a small hut and decide to stay there for the night. In the middle of the night, the young man wakes up to find a strange woman dressed entirely in white standing over the older man, blowing her breath upon him. The woman turns to the young man and tells him that she had intended to kill him along with his mentor, but because he is such a hansom lad she has decided to let him live. However, she tells him never to speak of this event to anybody, or she will kill him. The man is saved the following morning but tells nobody about his encounter with the snow woman. The following year, the man meets and marries a beautiful girl. They live happily and have several children. Then one evening the man relates his encounter with the snow woman to his wife. In a rage, his wife reveals that she is in-fact the snow woman he met, and were it not for their children she would kill him on the spot. With that, she melts away into the wind.

Belief Systems

It would not be difficult to write an entire book about the cultural origins of Japanese ghosts, but for the purposes of this article I will try to keep this section short. The two main religions of Japan are Buddhism and Shinto. Buddhism was brought by Korean scholars to Japan from China around 500 AD, but Shinto is indigenous to the country. Interestingly, most Japanese people today practice both Shinto and Buddhism depending on the circumstance; for example, weddings are often Shinto, while funerals are typically Buddhist. Neither religion requires strict membership, and for most people, religious rituals are performed because they are traditional, not because they imply some strong religious alignment.
Thanks to this religious flexibility, Japanese culture has a wealth of legends and beliefs to draw upon from two different religions. Buddhism teaches that life is a facade and that the never-ending cycle of death and rebirth can only be avoided by convincing oneself of this deception. Many Buddhist ghost stories are designed to reinforce that idea (see Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of Fragment[1], in which a Buddhist monk climbs a mountain only to find that it is comprised entirely of the bones of his former lives). Shinto, on the other hand, teaches that any dead person can be prayed to, and otherwise has very little to say about life after death[2]. The Shinto creation myth[3] describes Yomi (黄泉), the land of the dead, but with the introduction of Buddhism Yomi was adapted to fit the Buddhist concept of multiple hells. In practice, Shinto teachings rarely deal with death directly, and only suggest that each person has a soul (called a reikon; 霊魂) that can become stuck among the living if the person dies while feeling burdened with excess emotion or is not given a proper funeral.
This concept of “excess emotion” is something we will come back to, as it provides the underpinnings for most contemporary Japanese horror. The most important point here is that the Japanese typically do not align themselves rigidly to either Buddhism or Shinto, and the reconciliation of these two religions requires the society to accept that most of the universe is fundamentally beyond human understanding. Thus there is a level of ambiguity among beliefs that gives horror a strong basis to operate upon. But I am getting ahead of myself; before we can compare Japanese horror with Western horror, we need to know a little bit more about what we are dealing with. Rest assured that we will return to these points in a bit.

Classic Apparitions and Monsters

Otherworldly Japanese creatures can be broken down into two categories: youkai (妖怪) and yuurei (幽霊)[4].

Youkai are weird beings that are as often bizarre as they are scary. Typically physical (as opposed to the more ethereal yuurei), youkai are similar to Western monsters: they are animal-like and often dim-witted, and though they may be malicious they seldom maintain any long-term goals or plan. This class of monsters includes goblins and ogres and the like, as well as neutral or benevolent creatures such as the tanuki (a shape-shifting prankster that looks like a large raccoon) and tsuchinoko (a snake-like creature that is wide around the center and can jump long distances). There are a great many types of youkai, and they pop up all over the place in Japanese cartoons and comics[5]. However, these creatures are generally not very scary, and they have yet to make much of an impact in the West outside of video games (e.g. Mario’s raccoon suit is in fact a tanuki suit) and comics, where they are seldom depicted as fearsome creatures.

Yuurei, on the other hand, are the heart of Japanese horror. Yuurei are ghosts or spirits that have been stranded on this world because they have some unfinished business or because they died while in the throes of intense emotion. Unlike youkai, yuurei have a singular purpose or mission, and they are very often malicious. A person who becomes a ghost is said to forget everything else about their life and focus only on that which is preventing them from resting. There are scores of stories[6] (like The Story of Okiku) that depict ghosts who come back to haunt their murderers, or to express the anguish that lead to their suicide, or to reward those who fulfill their dying wish.
The underlying concept behind Japanese yuurei is onnen (怨念), the idea that some emotions are so strong that their power can extend from beyond the grave. Almost all classic and contemporary ghost stories from Japan operate on onnen: in addition to the obvious case of Okiku, witness Sadako’s character in The Ring, the antagonist in Juon, or even the explanations given for Hanako’s origin in the Hanako-in-the-Toilet story. Onnen is the central concept behind yuurei, and as we will see, it differentiates Japanese horror from works in the West pretty dramatically.
The Japanese often portray yuurei as people dressed in white funeral garb with long dark hair. Originally, yuurei were portrayed in art and theater as indistinguishable from regular people, but in the 18th century the style changed: since then, the legs of ghosts seem to fade into thin air[7], and they are often shown to have their arms outstretched and hands limp. For some reason, yuurei seem to very frequently female. Perhaps this is because women are thought to hold grudges longer and more powerfully than men.
Japanese yuurei tend to haunt a specific person or place. Since yuurei have an explicit reason for sticking around in the mortal plane, they do not often waste their time attacking people who have no relationship to them. In The Story of Okiku, for example, Okiku’s despair over her false accusation is so great that she is unable to rest, even though she was not at fault. Though her appearance eventually causes her murderer to take his own life, her behavior as a ghost indicates that it was this mistake, not her murder, that brings her up the well every night. We can thus assume that the death of her killer does not put her to rest; she might instead be appeased if the plate were replaced, or if a set of ten plates were placed by her well, thus correcting a problem for which she has been blamed.
This example also reveals another interesting mechanic used in many Japanese ghost stories: the idea that the troubles of spirits can be solved using an effigy or proxy. In Of a Mirror and a Bell (see [6]), a woman kills herself after being publicly humiliated during the construction of a brass bell. In her suicide note, she declares that any person who is able to break the bell by ringing it will be generously rewarded. When the bell is lost, an enterprising farmer is able to conjure up the ghost of the deceased woman by destroying a model of the bell made of mud. This mechanic reenforces the idea that Japanese spirits have a singular purpose in the human world, and that they need not always be malicious to achieve their goals.

Other Characteristics

There are a few other important characteristics of Japanese horror that we should cover before we move on. I discussed the mutability of Japanese religious beliefs above, and suggested that reconciling Shinto and Buddhist beliefs has required the Japanese to accept a level of ambiguity when it comes to explaining the universe. This leads us to our first major characteristic of Japanese horror:

• The universe is governed by rules. This is a central theme in Japanese horror; we can almost always see some sort of logical progression based on some implied set of rules that govern the way all things work. We have already talked about onnen and some of the rules associated with death, but this characteristic implies that there are rules for everything. This often manifests as a sequence of events that must occur before terror can be revealed, such as the Hanako-in-the-Toilet summoning procedure.
• The rules of the universe are beyond human understanding. An equally central theme is that the rules and the reasoning behind them may not be something that people can grasp, and thus one must accept that which he cannot explain. Why does Hanako require a certain stall of a certain bathroom at a certain school to be knocked upon a certain number of times? The answer can never be clear, but that does not stop the audience from believing the story. Another example is the Yuki-Onna story, which suggests that the snow woman has no choice but to reveal herself after her husband betrays his secret; it is as if the promise between them is all that binds her to the mortal plane.
• Modern society offers no protection from spirits and ghosts. Contemporary Japanese horror very often involves ghosts hijacking modern technology, even though the motives of most malicious spirits are not significantly different than they were a few hundred years ago. Perhaps this reflects some anxiety about the amazing speed with which Japan reinvented itself and rose to economic power after World War II. We can see this influence clearly in The Ring (the video tape as a curse), Juon (the characters are constantly confronted by appliances that are no longer trustworthy), and films like Tetsuo The Iron Man, where metal itself plagues the protagonist like a disease.
• Perseverance in the face of utter destruction. It is impossible to talk about modern Japanese culture without acknowledging the impact that the atomic bombs had on the Japanese psyche. A world that has been utterly destroyed and yet must still sustain life is a constantly recurring theme in modern Japanese media: it is a direct theme in works like Godzilla, Akira, and Dragon Head, and it manifests on a much more subtle level in all sorts of other aspects of the culture (consider, for example, Princess Mononoke’s finale).
• Damp Settings. While Western tales of the macabre tend to take place in dry, musty locations such as mansions, basements, or cemeteries, the Japanese tend to associate spirits with water and humidity. Perhaps this is because the Japanese summer months are characterized by intense humidity that persists even after nightfall. The art and culture magazine Kateigaho pointed this characteristic out in an interview with Koji Suzuki, the author of The Ring novel series.
  Dank, confined spaces, [Suzuki] believes, are the most conducive to the appearance of ghostly spirits. … It is damp settings rather than dry ones that the Japanese associate with spirits. In Western horror movies, the bathroom is a frequent backdrop to terror. J-horror too makes audiences recoil by suggesting that a disembodied spirit is about to creep into a damp space, a space so damp it’s hard to breathe.[8]

  Kateigaho also notes the association of water in some of Suzuki’s works, including Honogurai Mizu no Soko Kara (Dark Water, 2002) and The Ring.

Throughout the remainder of this article I will return to several of these characteristics. A few of them lie slightly outside the scope of this document, but I have included them because I think that they are relevant avenues of study to anybody interested in Japanese horror.

Modern Japanese Horror

Now that we have covered the cultural and historical background for scary Japanese stories, let us take a look at modern Japanese horror within this historical context. With the exception of the above-mentioned influence of technology and the effects of the atomic bombs, Japanese ideas about ghosts and fear have not changed dramatically in the modern era. The introduction of mass communication has certainly brought a great deal of Western influence to the Japanese, but the underpinnings of Japanese horror (such as the concept of onnen) run deep in the culture.

A good case study of classic Japanese horror concepts in a modern package is The Ring. Though there is a wide selection of Japanese horror movies produced before and after The Ring, this film remains significant because it its intense popularity in Japan and abroad. If we closely examine The Ring, we can see that it is in many ways a classic Japanese ghost story retold in modern context. Sadako, the films antagonist, almost perfectly fits the description of classic Japanese ghosts: she wears white, her hair is long and hangs over her face, and she exerts her power in the mortal plane because she died a horrible death. Though Sadako has feet, she’s otherwise very similar to both Okiku and Yuki-Onna. Like Okiku, her remains rest at the bottom of a well, and she must ascend out of the well before she can pursue her revenge. Like Yuki-Onna, Sadako is malicious and destructive, but she is still bound to the rules of the universe. If her victims do not watch her tape, or if they follow the correct procedure to free themselves from the curse, Sadako can have no power over them. The protagonists in The Ring spend most of the movie trying to locate Sadako’s body and put her to rest, but as we see at the end of the film, their efforts are trumped by the rules of the curse. Though the film’s core mechanic requires modern technology (the video tape) to operate, The Ring is very much a classic Japanese ghost story.
Sticking with this theme of traditional Japanese horror in a modern format, let us take a closer look at the Hanako-in-the-Toilet story. On the surface, we can see that it also bears some similarities to The Story of Okiku: the toilet is not all that far removed from an old well, as both are places associated with water, darkness, and filth. This story also adheres to the rules-of-the-universe characteristic, as an exact procedure is required to get Hanako to appear. But what I think is much more interesting about this story is the accessibility of it, especially to school children. As Hiroshi points out on his extremely informative site Gendai Kaidan[9] (現代奇談, “Modern Day Ghost Stories”), the Hanako-in-the-Toilet story is almost perfectly designed to allow school children to test their mettle. The elements required to reproduce the procedure described in the story (i.e. a school with a girls bathroom) are universally accessible, and the consequences of the story are non-threatening (in the original version, correctly calling out to Hanako is supposed to only cause her to verbally respond–there was no implied danger). Hiroshi suggests that the popularity of this story throughout the 1980s was fueled by its simple and easily-reproducible premise, as well as by persistent rumors of classmates who had performed the procedure and actually heard Hanako respond.

Both The Ring and the Hanako-in-the-Toilet story tap into the idea that technology and modern society in general provides no protection from spirits. In fact, The Ring and Juon both go a step further and suggest that technology may be exploited by malicious entities to wreak havoc on their victims. This theme is extremely common in modern Japanese horror. One interesting example is the rumor that was popular in the early 1990s during the pager boom. According to rumor, it was possible to get a page from a phone number that could not possibly exist. Even worse, this number (564219) sounds like the words “I am coming to kill you” when read phonetically (ごろくしにいく, “go roku shi ni i ku,” is transformed into 殺しに行く, “koroshi ni iku“).

Another very recent example of this theme is the Flash animation Red Room[10]. Red Room tells the story of mysterious internet popup ad that is rumored to exist. If you surf the web long enough, the rumor explains, eventually you will get a strange popup ad with a nonsensical message accompanied by a weird voice. The rumor holds that if this popup ad is ever closed, you will die. Red Room is a nice example because it embodies so many classic Japanese horror characteristics: in addition to the use of technology by some sort of malicious, otherworldly force, the rules governing the popup ad are both ironclad and difficult to rationalize.
Modern Japanese horror is clearly influenced by the events of the 20th century (especially the second World War, the rise of technology in every day life, and the influence of mass communication), but at its core it remains faithful to the characteristics that have defined Japanese macabre for several hundred years.

West of the Sun

Now that we’ve covered the elements and history of Japanese horror, let us take a look at how the West compares. Europe has a rich history of stories about ghosts and other monsters, and America has happily inherited much of that culture. In his book Danse Macabre[11], Stephen King identifies three archetypical stories that he believes have shaped modern American horror: Frankenstein, Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, the themes in these stories have become so ingrained in American culture that horror (especially horror cinema) has become defined by these clichés. Some American horror clichés have become so accepted that we actually have special terms to describe them, such as final girl[12]. It is perhaps our complacency with these themes that makes horror from other countries interesting; after all, horror cannot be very effective if the viewer has a comfortable idea of the outcome from the get-go.
So let us take a look at how contemporary Japanese horror differs dramatically from American contemporary horror. As an American, I have often been struck by the unconventional presentation of Japanese horror films and games. Over the last thirty years American horror film has become increasingly action-oriented; we are often treated to shoot outs, fights, and scenes of monsters mauling victims. Japanese film, on the other hand, has remained mostly understated, relying primarily on mood and pacing rather than blood and guts to achieve scares. Horror author Koji Suzuki points out that unlike most American horror cinema, many Japanese stories do not end in the destruction of the antagonist.

This understated tone actually helps Japanese horror be more effective, as even the results of the protagonists’ struggle are often ultimately in vain (as in The Ring).
Another common aspect of American horror is our burning need to explain away and rationalize the supernatural events that occur in the story. For example, the original script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho did not include the final scene where Norman Bates’ psychosis is hastily explained by a psychologist. The scene was added to quell fears held by the producers that audiences would not understand the film’s finale. Similarly, the American remake of Juon (called The Grudge, released in 2004) added several scenes to explain away the antagonist’s motivations and the way the universe works. Unlike the original Japanese version, very little was left up to the imagination. The American remake of The Ring sported similar features: entire sections about Samara’s (Sadako’s post-localization name) life were added to help explain various details of the plot. Almost all American horror films take pains to explain why events in the plot occur (though there are exceptions; see The Shining and The Birds).

In contrast, Japanese horror literature and cinema usually poses more questions than it answers. Why is Sadako so powerful? Why does she use a video tape to return from the grave? What is her long-term goal? How does the curse in Juon work? Why does Hanako respond from her toilet? How did she get there? In general, the is much left unexplained in Japanese horror, which helps lend it some of its power. As horror screenwriter Lucus Sussman points out, “Japanese horror operates on a much more dreamlike level … this actually works well for horror, because horror is about not being in control.”[14]
This comfortability with leaving some things unexplained may relate to Japan’s religious flexibility. As previously mentioned, reconciling both Buddhism and Shinto within the culture requires the Japanese to accept a level of ambiguity about how the universe works. This is almost diametrically opposed to the classic Christian perspective, which tends to break the world down into “good” and “evil” categories. The idea that the rules of the universe are beyond the scope of human understanding also allows horror authors more leeway in creating their stories because their target audience has less of an expectation that all will be made clear with time. This characteristic in turn often leads to more powerful horror stories, as much is left up to the viewer’s imagination.
There may also be another, secondary trait here; while American horror is often concerned with a decent into the unknown (Jonathan Harker’s trek to Dracula’s castle, the group of teenagers entering the haunted house cliché, the Bates Motel in Psycho, et cetera), Japanese tales often describe the unknown invading the known. Sadako comes out of the TV and directly into the homes of her victims, Hanako’s toilet is not a noteworthy location, and the samurai in The Story of Okiku cannot escape the ghost of Okiku because she refuses to stay in her well. This probably relates back to Suzuki’s conclusion that the Japanese accept a degree of otherworldliness all around them, while Americans like to concentrate our evil spirits in a specific location (witness our oft-employed “Ancient Indian Burial Ground” cliché). The American approach may be another side effect of Christianity’s tendency to separate everything into absolutes (in this case, defining explicit physical boundaries between “evil locations” and “normal locations”), but it also means our horror is often less effective; once a character or location is known to be “good” or “evil,” there is a certain degree of expectation we can rely upon to remove tension from the drama. The more vague and invasive approach often employed in Japanese horror can thus be far more affecting, as we do not have any comfortable story archetype to cling to.

Conclusion

Though we may sometimes be confused by the nuances of media from Japan, the country is home to a wealth of history, tradition, and culture. Japanese horror has piqued the interest of Western audiences with its understated tone and lack of easy answers, but outside of its cultural context even horror can be confounding. In this article I have attempted to explain some of the common mechanics of Japanese horror, as well as the belief systems, history, and modern context within which these mechanics exist. Though I have only scratched the surface of the culture of this complex and interesting country, I hope that this article has given you some insight into how Japanese horror works. The study of culture, even through pulp media such as horror film and games, is an intensely interesting and rewarding activity; I urge anybody interested in horror to spend some quality time with some of the amazing works from Japan. There is much more relevant information that could be covered here, but I will leave future investigation up to you. So curl up with your favorite horror movie, game, or book, and pay close attention; beyond the screams and the blood there is a whole culture hiding.

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Footnotes:
¹ Lafcadio Hearn. (1971). Fragment. In: In Ghostly Japan. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing. p3-7.
Read it online.
² Read more about it on Wikipedia
³ Which is itself pretty interesting. See this Wikipedia article.
⁴ I am borrowing heavily from Tim Screech’s (what an appropriate name, huh?) excellent article entitled Japanese Ghosts. It was first published in the magazine Mangajin (issue 40), but is now also available online. It is very well written and covers a lot more info than I have here.
⁵ There is an excellent library of youkai available in English at The Youkai Mura:
⁶ Try these, all from Lafcadio Hearn’s excellent KWAIDAN: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, now available online for free:

• Of a Mirror and a Bell
• The Dead Secret
• Diplomacy

⁷ Again, Tim Screech’s article has a lot more info than I am including here. See the “ATTRIBUTES OF YUREI” section of his article.
⁸ Source
⁹ Gendai Kaidan Note that this site is entirely in Japanese.
¹⁰ Wikipedia details Red Room
You can watch Red Room, but it isn’t very interesting if you cannot understand Japanese.
¹¹ Stephen King (1981). Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House. p49.
King has a lot more to say about horror in America that I am totally omitting here. You should read his book.
¹² Final Girl refers to the last surviving member of a group of victims in slasher or horror movies. Wikipedia has a nice page about the term

¹³ Source
¹⁴ Source

My parents purchased a computer when I was 11 years old. It was our first computer, a Macintosh SE, and it came with an amazingly noisy ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer. The Mac SE had an 8-inch screen, 2 mb of RAM, and ran Mac OS System 6.0.8 at a blistering 8 mhz. Its crisp black and white display was easy to read, the operating system rarely crashed, and the hard drive was large enough to hold a lot of games (“Dad, 20 megabytes means the hard drive can hold 20 high density disks–it’s huge!“).

This was long enough ago that there was no such thing as home internet access. Web pages hadn’t been invented yet, and while most schools had internet access, the most exciting protocol was Gopher. If you were a kid at home who wanted access to software, your options were dial-up private networks like America Online or Prodigy (insert 2400 baud modem connect sound here), local dial-up bulletin board systems, or mail-in software clubs.

The only other way to get games was to go to the store and buy them, but I didn’t do this very often. The reason was two-fold: first, I was 11 years old and flat broke; second, the shareware and freeware games that I was able to get through software clubs were quite entertaining, so I didn’t see the need (those of you who played Wolves in the Woods and The Big One know what I am talking about). There were, however, a few games that I purchased that were seriously worth the cash. One of these titles was Infocom’s The Lurking Horror.

The Lurking Horror takes place in a MIT-like college campus and tells a Lovecraftian tale of evil thriving in the school’s depths. It was a text-adventure game, and nowadays you can play it online. As far as I can tell, it was one of the first games ever to mix horror themes with text-adventure game mechanics.

If you have never played a text adventure game, you are missing out. As an aside, you should all go play Adam Cadre’s games right now (especially Photopia and Shrapnel). Anyway, in a text adventure game you walk around the world by typing commands into a console and reading the results. Most text adventure games require you to pick up items, explore large areas, and speak to other characters that you meet. The extremely powerful aspect of text adventure games that no other format has yet been able to reproduce is the variety and depth of commands accepted. You can set the cowbell on top of the bookshelf (and ring it), ask the hacker about the master key, unplug the drain in the bathtub, or rap on the wall to see if it is hollow. Not only can each game have unique commands, each room and each item can all have context-appropriate commands, and figuring out what sorts of interactions are possible is one of the main forms of challenge in text adventure games.

When personal computers switched from text interfaces to graphical interfaces in the mid 1980s, text adventure games were replaced by graphical adventure games (what we think of today as just “adventure games”). These games were pretty much the same as their text-only predecessors except that they focused on pointing and clicking rather than typing. Still, the same basic tenants of text adventure game design applied: items were to be collected, exploration was encouraged, and the pace was defined by the user rather than the game. Without direct text input, graphical adventures were limited to a much smaller set of commands, but most of them got by with a palette of verbs that could be performed on any object in the game world (buttons like “examine,” “eat,” “open,” “hit,” etc that could be applied to objects). Graphical adventure games maintained an iron grip on the computer game industry until the mid 1990s (the industry peaked with games like Myst and The Secret of Monkey Island), when DOOM came a long and made everybody focus on first person shooters.

The first graphical adventure game I ever played was a game called Shadowgate. The game was great, and when I finished it I sought out others by the same developers, ICOM Simulations. The next game of theirs I played was Uninvited, which is not only the first horror-adventure title I ever saw, it might be the first horror-adventure title ever (it predates The Lurking Horror by a year).

Though it’s about 20 years old now, Uninvited is still a great game. The adventure opens with your character regaining consciousness in a wrecked car. It seems that while traveling with your kid brother at night, a shadowy figure appeared on the road in front of you, causing you to swerve off the highway and crash your car. With your brother missing, you have no choice but to explore the mansion next door to find him. If you think this intro sounds suspiciously familiar (the kid brother was even changed to a kid sister in future versions), get used to it: throughout this article you will notice common events and themes that repeat throughout the history of horror games.

Like all of ICOM’s MacVenture games, Uninvited uses a very Mac-friendly interface. All operations are performed by clicking and dragging, the contents of boxes and drawers are shown as new windows, and saves are managed as regular files through regular Open and Save dialogs. Objects in the game can be interacted with using the palette of commands at the top of the screen, and the results of each action are either graphically displayed or printed in the message box at the bottom of the screen. Like most adventure games, Uninvited has no qualms about killing you off: there are no life bars, no heath power ups, and no continues; one wrong move and you are forced to restart from a save. As you move through the mysterious mansion looking for your brother, you are required to solve item puzzles (figuring out which items are required to progress) and exploration puzzles (actually finding items hidden in each room).

One of the key innovations in the MacVenture series is that almost every distinct object in each room can be clicked on and interacted with. Remember that a big part of text adventure game design relied on the idea that anything in the world can be interacted with, even if most things were not useful for progression. The reason for this design rule is utilitarian: when a player gets stuck in a game, they tend to try to progress by using whatever items or world objects are available. It might not make sense to combine the pink ribbon with the steering wheel, the player thinks to himself, but on the other hand, maybe it will produce a result. When you get really stuck, it is often easier to force a solution by randomly trying every possible variable combination than it is to actually think the problem through. This is called “brute forcing” a puzzle, and most game designers strive to prevent it. Puzzles that can be brute forced allow the player to breeze through the game without actually thinking about the problems that the designer has put together. The solution in text adventure games was to simply increase the number of variables that would need testing, making brute forced solutions tedious and boring to find. If every game object in the world responds to input, the player cannot simply try to interact with everything until they get a valid response; they are forced to think the problem through and attempt interactions that make sense.

This level of interactivity is much more difficult for designers of graphical adventure games to achieve because interacting with an object in the world usually has a visible impact on the scene. Each visual change requires artwork, and art takes a lot longer to generate than text; if you move a chair, the chair must appear to be in a different place than it was before, whereas in a text adventure game, the text could simply indicate that the chair had moved. Time could be saved by decreasing the number of objects that can be interacted with, but this would make it easer for the player to just brute force their way through the game by trying every possible combination.

The solution in Uninvited is elegant. First, each room in the game is a scene built from separate pieces of art. Each item in the scene can be clicked on and highlighted, and most items can be moved around. Sometimes moving an item is a required part of exploring the game, but since there are so many things that can move, the player can’t just go around shifting things around haphazardly. Since items can move, the player is able to pick almost anything in the game up and put it into his inventory, but since the inventory has limited space, the player is forced to think about which items he needs and which he does not. Finally, since the game allows each of the commands in the verb palette to be applied to any of the items in the game, the number of variables in each puzzle is huge, effectively removing brute force as a viable progression strategy. Beating Uninvited takes some degree of experimentation, but it also requires the player to solve problems in ways that make logical sense.

Uninvited was ported to just about every system known to man. The NES version came out in 1991, six years after the original Mac version. A Windows version followed that, and the game is still on the market for PocketPC and other handhelds (you can check it out at the official web site). Some of the versions (like the NES version) changed the interface to be more RPG-like, as that interface was simpler and easier to manage with a console pad.

But before Uninvited made it to the NES, Japanese gamers were playing a different horror game on that console: Sweet Home. Based on a horror movie of the same name, Sweet Home is a horror role playing game with clear ties to the adventure genre. In some respects it follows the Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy school of RPG design to the letter: you control a party of multiple characters, each character has a specific ‘class’, combat is turn-based and in a different view than regular game play, and building up stats is a requirement for progression. But at the same time, Sweet Home broke many RPG traditions and appropriated many ideas from adventure games. Characters who die in Sweet Home cannot be revived, and rather than telling the epic tale of globetrotting heros, the game takes place entirely within a single haunted mansion. The player must often examine objects to find hidden items and clues, and items must be used in particular situations to solve puzzles.

One of the main innovations of Sweet Home is that item space is severally limited. Each character can only carry one or two items, and since items must be used in puzzles to progress, managing items becomes a big part of the strategy. As in Uninvited, items can be dropped anywhere and picked up again later. The severe limit on inventory space, combined with the danger of back tracking in a game that has random monster encounters, creates an experience that forces the player to think carefully about which items to take, which to leave, and where best to leave them. The item management scheme is another way to prevent brute forcing of the game’s puzzles; rather than make the world highly interactive, the developers of Sweet Home have increased the importance of every item decision to encourage critical thought.

I never got to play Sweet Home when it first came out. The game was only released in Japan (it was far too violent for United States consideration), and at that time I was busy trying to figure out how to survive left turns in Apache Strike, aim rocks in Dark Castle, and kill my evil twin in Prince of Persia. A year later I had discovered HyperCard and thereby bound myself to a future in computer science. By 1992 Alone in the Dark had been released, arguably laying the foundation for contemporary survival horror. But before we get to Alone in the Dark, there is another game that must be discussed, as it represents an alternate branch of the horror family tree.

Clock Tower was released in Japan in 1995 for the Super Nintendo, right as that platform’s reign was coming to a close. The game is a side-scrolling adventure game produced by Human Entertainment. Though Clock Tower is a console game, it relies on a point-and-click interface taken directly from the PC adventure game mold. The game contains item puzzles, has a significant amount of text, and requires the player to progress by solving problems rather than fighting enemies. But despite being in many ways a classic PC adventure game, Clock Tower also introduced several ideas that persist today.

Clock Tower takes place it yet another giant Victorian mansion. The protagonist, Jennifer, is an orphan who goes to the mansion along with several other girls to be adopted by the owner, Mr. Barrows. But within minutes of their arrival one of her friends is dead and the others are missing, and a crazy kid with a giant pair of scissors is chasing Jennifer all over the house. After this introduction, the game branches and changes depending on how it is played. With nine separate endings, Clock Tower is one of the first games to offer the player multiple paths. Each branch of the story is similar, but puzzles change slightly and plot events unfold in different ways depending on which path is taken.

The key innovation in Clock Tower is also its main game mechanic: hiding. Throughout the game, Jennifer is pursued by Bobby the Scissorman, a maniacal child with huge shears. Since she cannot fight, her only recourse is to look for hiding places all around the mansion. When Jennifer runs from Bobby and hides, the player must wait while Bobby slowly inspects the area. If he finds her, Bobby can kill Jennifer easily, and the game is over. If Jennifer is able to successfully hide from Bobby, her hiding spot will not be safe to use again in the future. This mechanic is extremely effective at creating tension, and it makes Clock Tower one of the first truly frightening horror-adventure games ever made.

I wanted to cover Clock Tower before discussing Alone in the Dark because it represents a significant change in direction from earlier horror games. Like Uninvited and Sweet Home, Clock Tower is designed to prevent the player from brute forcing its puzzles, but unlike those other games its design also serves to dramatically increase the game’s fear factor. Instead of supplying a lot of interactive items or limiting inventory space, Clock Tower prevents the player from screwing around by employing unpredictability. The game keeps the player guessing at every turn: it is impossible to predict when Bobby will appear, if he will be able to find you when you hide, or even how the game might change depending on your actions. Many actions have unintended consequences that can change the course of the game, so the player must be careful with how they play. Again, the result is that brute forcing puzzles in the game is not a viable strategy because lingering in a single area is dangerous and because the puzzles themselves can change from play session to play session.

This approach makes the player feel like they are not in control, which is one if the first (and most important) steps to making a game scary. Clock Tower is the first horror game to get this right, and it has been emulated in much more well-known games since. I will return to this point at the end of the article.

About the same time that Clock Tower was hitting the shelves in Japan, my family decided to purchase a new computer. This time it was a Mac Centris 660av, an absolute powerhouse compared to the SE. Not only did it support a color monitor, it came with a 15″, 640×480 display and ran System 7. The Centris also came with an FPU (floating point unit), and while I didn’t know what that was at the time, I knew that it meant that I could play Alone in the Dark.

In many ways, Alone in the Dark was an experimental twist on a tried-and-true format for adventure games. Like most adventure games at the time, it relied on hand-drawn backgrounds upon which character and item graphics were overlaid. The player could interact with items using a small palette of verb actions (search, push, close, etc), and the game play revolved around solving puzzles and finding clues. But the developers at Atari Europe also made key changes to the formula that caused Alone in the Dark to be quite different from other adventure games.

Alone in the Dark‘s first major innovation was the application of 3D graphics. Up until that point, adventure games used hand-drawn sprites to represent the characters in the game world, and often adjusted the size of each sprite to simulate a 3D plane. But Alone in the Dark rendered its characters in real time, allowing them to pivot and move at any angle. This was not just a technical innovation: the change allowed the development team to get away from the flat 2D perspective commonly employed by games and instead set up shots with dramatic angles. This gave the game a much more cinematic feel than previous adventure titles, which helped the developers convey the game’s horror premise.

Another huge change to the genre introduced by Alone in the Dark is direct control over the character. Rather than clicking on points in the world and watching the character move, this game allowed you to drive the protagonist around using the arrow keys. This made the game faster-paced than previous adventure titles (though it was still quite slow by today’s standards), and allowed the developers to inject much more action into the experience (shooting now required aiming, etc). Since movement was based on the arrow keys on the keyboard, the protagonist moved like a tank: left and right would rotate the character, while up and down would move forward or backward in the direction the character was facing. This approach would prove to be incredibly influential throughout the 1990s.

Like every other game discussed so far, Alone in the Dark takes place in a haunted mansion. Though there are items to collect and rooms to search and Cthulhu’s minions waiting in the wings, the game took a new approach to preventing the player from forcing his way through the game’s puzzles. Rather than limiting inventory, providing a huge number of interactive objects, or adding unpredictability to the game, the developers chose to handicap the player. The player moves very slowly, much slower than characters in other adventure games at the time, probably to keep game play methodical and prevent the player from running away from enemies. Another major handicap that the game uses is the way it rations ammunition and health to the player. Fighting is quite difficult, and since your character cannot run away from fights, every shot begins to count. There is no way to breeze through this game because you simply cannot move very quickly, and even at max speed the chance that you will be killed is very high. The designers wanted the player to take their time and explore, and they force this play style on the player by limiting movement, ammunition, and health. This approach also helped raise tension in Alone in the Dark, as the player understood that the only way to progress is to face the monsters and puzzles head-on.

My Centris was indeed able to run Alone in the Dark as well as games like Marathon and Out of this World, some of my all-time favorites. But by 1996 I had purchased a PlayStation and a popular horror game called Resident Evil, and my computer use became limited to writing games rather than playing them.

Resident Evil introduced horror games to the mass market, effectively creating the survival horror genre as we know it today. But looking back at the titles that pre-dated it, we can see that the development team at Capcom was directly influenced by earlier horror games. Alone in the Dark in particular seems to be the direct parent of the Resident Evil game design: fixed cameras, static backgrounds, a character-centric control scheme, pivot-in-place combat mechanics, Victorian mansions, rationing of ammunition and health, and two playable characters (one male, one female), just to name a few obvious similarities. The direct line of influence on Resident Evil from Sweet Home is also clear: both Capcom games take a hard line approach to item management (though the blow was slightly softened in Resident Evil, as the player was granted more inventory space and inter-connected item boxes). Even Uninvited seems to have left its mark in the way that every area in Resident Evil must be throughly ransacked for items, clues, and notebooks. Both Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 employed a constantly re-appearing antagonist that can not be killed and may surprise the player at any time, much in the same way that Clock Tower used Bobby the Scissorman to induce fear. Resident Evil even has a version of the verb palette used by the first graphical adventure games, though it has been streamlined dramatically over the years (the player can shoot, examine, use items, and combine items).

Of course, this sort of influence was not limited to Resident Evil. Silent Hill also draws from lessons and themes from Uninvited, Alone in the Dark, and Clock Tower. Perhaps most importantly, Silent Hill shunned the approach taken by Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil to item rationing and management. Instead, it focused on narrative and puzzles, and relied on unpredictability and exploration to prevent the player from for breezing through the game. Like Clock Tower, Silent Hill also provides multiple endings to encourage the player to think about how they play. The Pyramid Head character in Silent Hill 2 is another version of Clock Tower’s Bobby. Even more recent games like Siren and Fatal Frame have drawn heavily on mechanics defined a decade earlier (consider Siren’s approach to sneaking, hiding, and combat as compared to Clock Tower and Alone in the Dark).

All modern video game genres are the result of years of evolution and iteration. You can look at any modern platformer, first person shooter, racing game, or horror game and follow a direct line of influence back to the very earliest video games. Looking back at earlier games to witness the gestation of now-common mechanics is interesting because it allows us to dissect and understand modern games more throughly. Though I did not realize it until many years later, my enthusiasm and enjoyment for games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill had a lot to do with those games providing mechanics that were comfortable and familiar. In fact, they fit me like a glove because they were modern incarnations of games that I had been playing for years. The developers of those titles clearly understood the genre that they were working in, and were able to innovate without abandoning tried-and-true mechanics.
Contemporary game developers would do well to study up on the history of their medium; with so much history to draw from, many of the mistakes that commonly plague video games today could be avoided. I suspect that the best game designers are those that are extremely well-played, and have a solid understanding of the games that have come before them.

If you keep up on the gaming press, you’ve probably read about various industry figures arguing about next gen costs and quality. There’s Midway marketing guy Steve Allison arguing that 93% of new IP games fail (followed by this retort), Blast Entertainment CEO Sean Brennan decrying next gen console development costs, and industry analysts divided over the amazing success of the Nintendo Wii in spite of its comparatively underpowered graphics hardware.
Developers and marketers alike are struggling with the idea that the costs associated with next generation game development may make it unprofitable, which I’ve ranted about before. Next gen is a high-risk environment right now, and as previously discussed, risk means a dearth of innovative or niche games.

Game companies have a few problems. First and foremost, developing games for Xbox360 and PS3 is way expensive. Secondly, developing for the Wii is easier and cheaper, but it means you have to compete with Nintendo’s first party games, which are always powerful market forces. Finally, since development of any next gen game will take several years, companies are having to place a bet on which consoles are the most likely to be the most profitable in 2009. Of course, it’s possible to do games in less time than that, but usually the quality suffers dramatically. So the real question here is how much can quality suffer without impacting sales? Some people believe that there’s no correlation between quality and sales, and thus think that the way to make money is to make things that are easily marketable (read: licenses). Game developers themselves usually argue that sales above a certain level require a game to be sufficient quality. I decided to see which of these perspectives was correct for the Playstation 2 era.

Quality vs Sales

It is time for some graphs. What I did is take sales data from December 2006 for every PS2 game released in North America and correlate it with the score for the same game from Metacritic.com. There are about 500 games that were thrown out because they were not released in North America or because they had no Metacritic ranking. I used the remaining 1281 games in the data set to look for some correlation between game quality (as defined by Metacritic’s score) and sales.

This graph shows the data as a whole, with number of units sold on the horizontal axis and Metacritic rating on the vertical axis. Most of the data is scrunched way over to the left side of the graph because most games sold an order of magnitude fewer units than games like Grand Theft Auto 3. You can see a curve in the data, though: as more units are sold, fewer and fewer games rank below 80%. This initial view is encouraging; it seems to suggest that there may be a correlation between sales and quality after all. To get more information we need to cut out the outliers. Capping our graph at two million units shows the curve a little more clearly.

There is clearly a trend in this data: no game that sold over 1 million units scored less than 60%. Though the distribution between 60% and 90% is fairly random, the lack of titles below the 60% range after the 1 million mark means that really bad games have an upper bound of sales regardless of the marketing or license applied to the title. This graph has some problems, however. Most of the data points are still clumped together on the left side of the graph, an area we can call the Problem Zone. It is a problem because the number of points is too dense to tell what is really going on in there. We need to zoom in further.

If we limit the view to 800,000 units, the Problem Zone gets a little clearer. We can still see the trend towards higher scores as the units increase, but the distribution also becomes more random, which means that some games with rankings in the 50% range are still able to sell around 500,000 units. This may be where marketing is flexing its muscles, though we can see from the overall shape of the graph that marketing alone can only take a game so far. Even at this resolution the Problem Zone is pretty noisy, which means that there are a lot of games that did not sell very well on PS2.

This is a close-up of the Problem Zone. We can see that at this range (between 0 and 300,000 units) the distribution of scores to units is almost random. All of the games in this range sold fairly poorly (though some may still have been profitable depending on how much was spent on development), and they represent the entire spectrum of scores. The randomness of this distribution means that within 300,000 units, the marketing people are absolutely right: there is no correlation between sales and quality. We see plenty of 90% and higher games that sold just as well (or as poorly) as games that scored below 50%. What this graph does not tell us is why bad games sold–it only shows that Metacritic rating was not a major factor.

The other interesting thing about this last graph is the number of data points. The graph is much, much denser than the ones before it, which means that most PS2 games fall within this range. In fact, even though we have zoomed way in to look at the Problem Zone, we can still see a cluster below the 100,000 mark. This means there are a whole lot of games that never even moved 100,000 units, making them almost certainly financial failures.

Analysis

So what does all of this information mean? Here are my conclusions:

• Any game can fail, regardless of its quality. There are a great many games at the low end of the graph, and some of them received extremely high scores. Making a high quality game is therefore not an automatic guarantee of financial success.
• However, bad games have a much more difficult time succeeding. While making a high-quality game does not assure that a lot of units will sell, making a low-quality game does guarantee that the maximum number of units sold will be limited.
• There are no bad games that sold over a million units.
• Of the 19 games that sold over two million units, only one received a score of less than 80%.
• If we assume that game scores are assigned independently of marketing budgets, we can see that there is an upper bound for marketing’s influence on sales; if there were no bound, we could expect to see many more bad games selling past the 500,000 units mark.
• However, I think we can also assume that even good games cannot succeed without excellent marketing. If sales were driven by quality alone, there would not be any high-scoring games in the Problem Zone portion of the graph.
• A huge number of PS2 games games (about 45%) failed to ship more than 100,000 units.

This means that there is a correlation between game quality and sales which can be stated thusly: bad games do not sell. This does not mean that good games always sell, just that bad games cannot be saved by marketing. The data also suggests that the games that sell the most have to not only be really good, they also have to be marketed heavily. The conclusion is not that marketing is irrelevant, only that its powers are limited without the help of high quality game play. Developers who want to sell units should be striving to make good games if only because quality will allow their marketing department to actually be effective.

Other Information

Since I went to all the trouble of compiling this data, I figured I can get a few more graphs out of it before this article is done.

Here is a comparison of unit sales. As stated in the previous section, a lot of games failed to ship over 100,000 units, and about 80% of titles released for PS2 shipped less than 300,000 units. Depending on the cost of development and the sticker price of the game in stores, these games likely generated very little profit, if any. By next generation budget standards, these games are all abysmal failures.

This graph compares the average number of units sold against score ranges. It suggests the same conclusion that we came to above, but it is a little less accurate because it deals with averages (especially in the 90th percentile, where the GTA games really bias the result). Still, the message to developers should be clear: good games have a much better chance of selling than bad games.

This last one is the distribution of rankings across all 1281 games. This is probably more of a commentary on game journalism than anything else. It shows that most games score in the 70% range in aggregate, and that there is almost a bell curve with 75% at the peak. Ratings lower than 60% are generally meaningless, as all the reviewer needs to communicate to the reader is that the game is not worth buying.

What I think is interesting about this graph is the drop off between the 70% percent range and the 80% percent range. Many game developers believe that game reviewers subconsciously abide by a rule called the “80% Divide,” which stipulates that a game must impress the reviewer in some way to achieve a rating of 80% or higher. If the game has no major flaws and yet fails to impress the reviewer because it is not “new” enough, it will often receive a score of 70%. Games that are broken in some way but have some impressive aspect or feature can still make it into the 80th percentile (like Indigo Prophecy, for example). This graph seems to suggest that this “80% Divide” represents a real bias amongst the game journalism community.

Conclusion

So there you have it. I hope that this article adds to the interesting debate between game industry pundits about how games should be created, marketed, and sold for the next generation. I do not claim a side in this argument, but this research suggests that neither marketing nor the developers are wholly responsible for driving sales. That said, it also suggests that it is in the best interests of game developers to make high quality games.

Resident Evil is often credited with inventing the survival horror genre. While that particular accolade may not be entirely factual, the game is worthy of recognition for cementing horror as a viable, mass-market console genre. Critics are quick to point out that Resident Evil’s basic game system, consisting of static backgrounds, 3D characters, and character-centric pivot-and-move controls, were lifted almost entirely from Alone in the Dark. Resident Evil, some will argue, might have taken the Dark formula and spruced it up for prime time, but it can hardly be credited with any great game design innovation.

Though it’s true that Resident Evil used Alone in the Dark as its template, I think that critics who write the game off as a copycat are not paying enough attention. There is a wealth of interesting game design ideas in Resident Evil, and in this article I want to tackle one of them in particular: the design of the mansion map.

It’s been a while since we all played Resident Evil, so let me refresh your memory. At the beginning of the game the protagonists find themselves locked in the sinister Spencer Mansion, which is also home to lots of zombies and (as we eventually find) a large underground secret laboratory. As the game starts there are only a few rooms that are accessible–access to most of the mansion is sealed behind locked doors, secret panels, and powered-down elevators. As the player progresses through the mansion he finds keys that unlock doors in areas he’s already visited, and must eventually return to those areas to find more keys to unlock new areas of the structure. Thus the player travels through the map in a very non-linear fashion, moving back and forth between rooms as items are collected and puzzles are solved, and eventually passing into areas with entirely new rooms. The map opens itself up like a spiral shell. I call this design Recursive Unlocking.

This approach has interested me for a long time. The genius part of the Resident Evil level design is that in the course of playing through the game two things happen: the player unlocks shortcuts and the player runs out of ammo. At some point the game becomes entirely about traversing efficiently through the mansion; it’s a run from the safe room (where we can save) through the shortest possible set of rooms until we reach another safe room or a new puzzle to solve. There’s simply not enough ammo to dispatch all of the zombies in the game, so route planning and deftly maneuvering through the Victorian building is eventually the key source of challenge.

Though the Recursive Unlocking pattern is interesting, I’ve struggled with how to study it. The actual order in which rooms are accessed has a lot to do with the player himself; most of the time there are two or three puzzles that are in the process of being solved simultaneously, and the level of traversal efficiency can depend on the order in which these puzzles are attempted. That said, there’s clearly a method behind the design of Spencer Mansion and its surrounding areas. The brains behind this game carefully architected the map so that the player’s traversal through the mansion would occur at a pace that they could control. To understand how the Recursive Unlocking methodology works, it would help to understand how the space was designed in the first place. Since we can’t just call up Shinji Mikami, Hideki Kamiya, and the rest of the (large) design team, I turned to the next best thing: data mining and visualization.

Methodology

When designing a game we can assume that the level designer thinks in terms of the fastest path through the space. If several goals must be completed before the next space is unlocked, the level designer knows the most efficient order in which to complete them. He’s likely to lay the main path out first, then go back and flesh it out with extra details, secondary goals, or side-paths. Therefore, if we look at a highly efficient traversal of the space that doesn’t rely on bugs or tricks, we should be able to get a rough approximation of how the level was put together originally.

What I did is take a video of a speed run of Resident Evil: Director’s Cut (using Jill, on Arrange Mode, with 100% completion) and trace the player’s path through the game. I recorded each room transition in order, along with a time stamp, to produce a mapping of the speed runner’s entire path through the game. Then I wrote some code to render this path over a 2D map of the whole game using Processing. Finally, I took all the data I had, threw it into a spreadsheet, and made some graphs.

The results are pretty interesting. The speed runner takes the most efficient path possible through the game; no time is wasted with story or items. The only rooms visited are those that are necessary to progress to the end of the game. Since this is Arrange Mode, the actual details of the traversal might differ slightly from the original Resident Evil, but even so the main arc of the game, the way that the player moves from one part of the mansion to another, is clearly visible and worthy of analysis.

Visualizing Recursive Unlocking

Here’s a visualization of the most efficient path through Resident Evil 1.

You can download a full-res movie file (Quicktime format, 30 MB) of this if you want. There’s also a Java applet version, but it doesn’t work well in some browsers and needs a lot of memory.

This speed run is by UltimateSpeedRuns. The maps were produced by Daniel Engel and posted on Gamefaqs. Resident Evil: Director’s Cut: Unauthorized Game Secrets had a useful numbering system for the rooms (which is unfortunately ignored by the actual walkthrough text) that I used to keep track of the speed run data.

What you are seeing here is the path from room to room that UltimateSpeedRuns took to finish the game in a little under an hour and a half (you should also check out his hilarious 44 second speed run of Clue). The game starts with Jill entering the dining room on the first floor of the mansion and ends with her running down a hall in the laboratory to catch an elevator to the helipad. There are 213 room transitions here, which I’ve sped up to show in about a minute (if you want to see them in real time, try the Java applet).

Analysis

So that looks pretty cool and all, but what does it really tell us? Let’s start with some of the raw data collected for this research.

There are 116 unique rooms in Resident Evil, split between four major areas: the mansion, the courtyard, the guardhouse, and the laboratory. A room is any space the player can occupy: a hallway, passage, closet, or room. To finish the game, UltimateSpeedRuns visited 213 rooms total, which means that most rooms were visited only twice. Does it strike you as odd that a game known for requiring a lot of backtracking can be completed without passing through most rooms more than two times? Remember, this includes all hallways and passages, as well as proper rooms, in the game.

In fact, the data shows that we can be far more efficient than that. Of the 116 rooms in the game, 19 of them were not visited at all in this run. These are rooms that contain story pieces, or access to guns or other items that are not strictly necessary for progression. The majority (44, 38%) of rooms were only visited once. The most visited room in the entire game is a small hallway in the upper-right part of the mansion’s first floor. This room connects the mansion to the courtyard, to the second floor, and it is also right in the middle of several shortcut paths. It was visited a total of eight times.

This means that while there is some backtracking involved in Resident Evil, the path is from beginning to end is mostly linear. In fact, looking at the video above, we can see that there is a common pattern to the traversal: the player enters an area and then spends a lot of time in that immediate vicinity, visiting adjacent rooms several times before moving forward or heading back the way they came. You can see how an area will light up with activity for a few seconds, then the player travels on to some other part of the mansion. There’s a little bit of micro-backtracking within these “hot” areas, but very little retracing of steps across the larger map. At a macro level, Resident Evil is pretty much a linear string of these hot spots.

The presence of these high-activity areas reveals a key trait of the level design in Resident Evil: items and puzzles are organized together spatially and on the game timeline. When a puzzle in a room becomes solvable, it’s likely that the next item required after it, or the previous item required to access it, is in an adjacent room. The hot spots we see in the video are areas where a bunch of related items are stored in close proximity, but the unlocking of these hot spots is sequenced, so we also know that related items are revealed to the player when they become relevant. The message to the player is this: the items you have now are useful soon, and you won’t have to travel far to use them. Looking at the fastest-path traversal of this game, we can see how a skilled player only collects items when they are relevant and close, which leads to hot areas of the map and helps him avoid back tracking. That he can schedule item collection and traversal like this at all indicates that the levels were designed with this sort of progression in mind.

Of course, regular players might not realize that there’s an optimal order to collecting items and solving puzzles. They may backtrack to previous areas unnecessarily, or miss a key item and be unable to progress. But because the items and puzzles are staged both spatially and on a timeline, the player who wanders around looking for the next step should find himself returning to the same areas over and over. If there’s something left to be done in one room, there’s probably an item or puzzle in a room close by as well. This design serves to shrink the search space for the player, to localize the area which requires extra focus. I’m sure many players do this unconsciously without realizing that they are being guided by the game design.

Recursive Unlocking in Practice

There’s one specific moment where the player suddenly makes a long arc back through the first floor of the mansion, revisiting the areas where the game began. You can see this in the video at about 35 seconds in, which puts it at roughly 60% of the way through the game (it occurs 51 minutes into the speed run). This is a great example of the Recursive Unlocking pattern because it shows how the designers use this map layout to control tension and pacing.

At this point in the game the player has been all over the mansion. Then they left the mansion and spent some significant time (about 15 minutes of speed run time; 16% of the total game time) in the guardhouse. They then returned to the mansion and fought a boss (the giant snake, second appearance). This lead to a new area of the mansion that the player has seen but been unable to access (the library on the second floor), and eventually deposits the player back in the long hall next to the dining room where the game begins. The next destination for the player is the courtyard, which is accessed from the top-right corner of the map, and to get there the player passes back through the main hall and a bunch of other rooms that appeared early in the game.

We can see in the traversal visualization that this is one of the few times the player actually has to cross the whole mansion map without doing anything on the way. This trip serves a couple of purposes. On some level, it is comforting for the player to revisit these early areas, as they are familiar and the location of nearby saves and health has been long since memorized. On the other hand, the passage also serves to ratchet tension up as the player approaches a new area (the courtyard basement): the zombies that the player originally faced in these halls have now been replaced with giant spiders and hunters, both of which are pretty hard to kill. And finally, this section serves as a reminder of where we are; it brings us back to the beginning of the game and reestablishes the mansion in our memory. This is the last time the player will see the mansion; after traveling through the courtyard basement the he continues to the laboratory, which is the last environment in the game. So the last bit of the mansion that we see is the area that introduced us to the mansion to begin with. It is these rooms that we’ll remember the best when the game is over.

Using Traversal to Fight Fatigue

Another interesting aspect of this visualization is the way that the player moves between the four main environments: the mansion, the courtyard, the guardhouse, and finally the laboratory. These areas all look very different; the mansion has huge ceilings, Victorian stylings, and lots of zombies. The courtyard is outdoors, and has zombie dogs, snakes, and eventually hunters. The guardhouse is a wooden structure, old and dilapidated compared to the mansion, and it’s overrun by spiders. The lab is all metal hallways and complex piping, with sliding doors and glowing screens–another big departure from the previous areas.

The mansion accounts for the biggest chunk of the game, but it’s less than half (43%). One fourth of the whole game takes place in the laboratory, and the guardhouse and courtyard combined account for the remaining 30%. In terms of rooms, the mansion itself is the most dense (59 rooms visited), followed by the lab (21 rooms), with the guardhouse and courtyard about tying for third (with 18 and 17 rooms respectively). These areas are not reused much; the player generally enters one of these areas, solves a bunch of puzzles (another hot spot in the traversal), and then leaves, never to return again (the courtyard is sort of an exception–it gets traversed twice).

The four major locations in Resident Evil look distinct and play differently to prevent player fatigue. After solving a bunch of statue puzzles and placing gems into stone eye sockets for a few hours, the player is ready for a change. Leaving the mansion gives the designers an opportunity to change up the pace of the game, introduce new enemies, and just give the player a break from the areas he’s already seen over and over again. Given that the entire design of the Resident Evil map is based on recursion over the same key areas, these secondary spots are an attempt to prevent monotony.

It’s also interesting to note that by looking at how much time the player spends in each room, we can sort of get a sense of how the design changes from area to area. The speed runner in our video goes through the mansion rooms at an average of 37 seconds per room. The mansion is primarily a traversal puzzle. Time spent examining the environment isn’t recorded by this data, as the speed runner did not bother. The guardhouse is similar: 36 seconds per room. But the courtyard and laboratory areas are much longer: 53 seconds per room and 59 seconds per room respectively. Perhaps the difference in speed is related to an intentional change of pace between these areas, or perhaps it is a side-effect of the development process. Either way, it seems clear that the rooms in the mansion and guardhouse feel different than those in the courtyard and laboratory because they are passed through so much more quickly.

Other Fun Facts

Here’s a couple of other interesting tidbits I gleaned from this data.

• The hunters are introduced almost exactly half-way through the game.
• The door opening animation, which plays between rooms to mask the room load time, takes about 5 seconds. In total, the accumulated cost of this load time is about 25% of the total play time of this speed run.
• Arrange Mode (used for this test) moves the locations of items around on the map, but doesn’t generally disrupt the order or point in progression in which they appear.

Conclusion

Visualization of player data can give us interesting insights into how games like Resident Evil work on the macro level. Using a speed run for this sort of visualization is ideal because it removes any bias and confusion that might stem from individual player sensibilities and shows us something close to the path that the level designers intended. In Resident Evil’s case, the Recursive Unlocking pattern is used to control the pace of the game, the flow of the narrative, the progression of enemies and weapons, and even to force a change of scenery on the player, all while maintaining a non-linear feel. This sort of analysis reveals how much thought actually went into the construction of the layout of this game. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find another Adventure game from the Resident Evil era that pulls off such a tight and formal traversal; this level design is clearly the product of serious planning. The data here shows that the layout of Spencer Mansion and its surrounding areas was probably the single most difficult part of the Resident Evil design, but the work that Capcom’s designers put into it made the game the masterpiece that it is.