Some Updates

I haven’t posted about actual games on the horizon lately, so here’s some quick updates:

  • I could have sworn Silent Hill: 0rgins was on the fast-track to cancellation, but this new GameInformer article proves me wrong. It looks like this game might actually ship! Via Kotaku.
  • A Wii version of Resident Evil 4 has been announced. There’s some videos available, and it looks pretty cool (Wiimote aiming!).
  • A new Resident Evil rail-shooter called The Umbrella Chronicles is also headed for Wii. Check out the official site (contains video) to get an idea of what to expect.
  • Possession, the RTS-meets-zombie game from Blitz, is apparently on hold. That’s usually the mark of death in this industry, but hopefully that game eventually sees the light of day.
  • Sadness, another game that I expect to never be published, has switched developers. I wouldn’t hold your breath for this one.

Update: Here’s some interesting comments by Akira Yamaoka on how Silent Hill 5 will mostly resemble Silent Hill 2, rather than 3, 4, or 0rgins. Whoo-hoo!

Update #2: Whoa, all of a sudden the horror game frequency is abuzz with activity! First, there is a new Alone in the Dark 5 in-engine trailer over at Kotaku. Also, one of you guys posted this link to new Obscure screens. Thanks for the info!

Instant Horror, Just Add Special Effects

A couple of years ago I had a frightening experience. I was getting out of the shower one evening when from behind me I heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. The house was empty and I was standing there in the bathroom, naked and dripping wet, and in that instant I knew that I was about to die. Immediately I had a mental picture of my killer: a tall, stocky man with a black mustache and some sort of knife or hook in his right hand. From the location of the sound, I knew that he must be standing inside the shower that I had stepped out of moments before. For about a tenth of a second I was scared out of my wits. The next moment I heard the shampoo holder crash to the floor and realized that the sound I had heard was the holder sliding off the top of the metal shower head. I felt pretty dumb at the time, especially considering how blatantly impossible the entire scenario was, but looking back I find that moment of fear fascinating. In the time it took for my toiletries to fall six feet to the floor of the tub, my brain conjured up a detailed mental image of something scary to explain the metal scraping noise. It’s like my imagination had this scary idea prepped and ready to go, and when the right variables came together (a disturbing sound combined with the vulnerable feeling of being home alone and buck naked), it sprang to life.

Last week I saw a preview for 1408, a new horror movie based on Stephen King’s short story of the same name. I was at the theater to see Grindhouse, which was quite enjoyable (especially Tarantino’s film, Death Proof). The preview for 1408 made the film look pretty mediocre, but I found myself even more disappointed than usual by the ad. Most horror story film adaptations follow the same formula: superfluous plot and characters + contrived rationalization of mystery + special fx + special fx + special fx = profit, and it seems that 1408 is no exception. What disappointed me about the trailer for 1408 is that the filmmakers seem to have dramatically misunderstood what makes King’s short story so compelling.

1408 is a short story about a writer staying in a haunted room and getting far more than he bargained for. The thing is, most of the story doesn’t take place in the room; less than half of the pages are spent actually describing the room and the writer’s experience there. The rest is dialog between the hotel’s manager and the protagonist, annotated with the protagonist’s own thoughts and memories. And even inside the room, not much really happens to the writer: the horror he experiences is comprised mostly of a nameless, implicit threat that manifests in a few key events. Despite the brevity of this part of the story, the effect on the reader (at least, on me) is intense.

The reason the story is so effective is that King has masterfully created a structure for horror and then left most of the detail work up to our imagination. He’s provided a locale (the haunted room), a reason to be scared (various deaths and other strange occurrences that the hotel manager spends most of the story describing), and a few key events to start the reader’s mind down a path. But from there on out King becomes more of a bystander than a storyteller. The weird history of the room and the series of increasingly disturbing things that actually occur once the writer enters it are more than sufficient kindling for the reader’s imagination to catch fire. And as the story ends, King shows his real skill by just letting that fire burn: he provides no rationalization or justification for the events that take place in the story, and thereby requires his readers to decide upon some personal explanation. This personalization makes the story extremely effective; as my brain demonstrated to me on my way out of the shower, we are much better at scaring ourselves than anybody else.

The trailer for the film version


Hooray for Hollywood

of 1408 seems to suggest that most of the film will be spent in the room itself, depicting various scary things. If the filmmakers are real screwups, they’ll also try to tell the audience why all these events occur and what they should mean. Doing this completely destroys the horror that the original short story is able to induce, and reduces the film to a mere catalog of CG effects. Some might argue that film as a medium requires more explicit visual narration, but I would argue that plenty of films are able operate on the same mechanic as King’s story by suggesting a lot but showing very little. Another King story-turned-movie, The Shining, is an excellent example. The Shining continues to be an extremely effective horror film because it gives the audience just enough information to let their mind wander into whichever territory they find the most disturbing. The gamut of effects-based nightmare events that seem to comprise 1408 is a cop-out on the part of the filmmakers: it removes the need for the audience to think and consequently lessens the impact of the horror it is attempting to deliver.

I should mention as a caveat that 1408 has not yet been released and I’m judging it based entirely on a single preview, which isn’t really very fair. But though I may be picking on a trailer for an unreleased film, I think that the contrast between the content of King’s short story and the events depicted in the film preview are a good basis for my point. In my notes from GDC 2005, I described Akira Yamaoka’s approach to horror, which involves “stacking” of fragmented and convoluted information to “create space for the imagination.” I think this approach is very similar to the mechanic employed by King in 1408, and helps explain why Yamaoka’s Silent Hill series is so consistently effective.

Who ya gonna call? Ghosthunter!

This evening I finally finished playing Ghost Hunter and posted a review. I expected this game to be a pretty bland shooter and was surprised to find it to be a sometimes-inspired Ghostbusters knock-off. It actually was a lot more fun than I would have given it credit for, but it also suffers from some annoying sections and obfuscated puzzles. I see it as kind of an interesting counterpart to much more serious (but mechanically similar) games like The Suffering.

Feature: The Prehistory of Survival Horror

I have posted a new feature article: The Prehistory of Survival Horror. This article examines some early horror games and how they influenced the genre that we know and love today. Here’s an excerpt:

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.

This article ended up being way more interesting to write than I expected. As I got into looking at the similarities between popular modern games and their predecessors, I realized that the relationship between these games on several game design axes is quite clear. Check it out and let me know what you think.

April First

Ah, April Fools. What better way to get back into the habit of regular updates? My work life has just gone back to semi-normal, I’ve got some vacation coming up, and a bunch of updates to the site planned. A new feature is in the works, plus I have a lot of info to report on recent horror games. Sorry for being away for so long, but I think updates should be much more regular starting now.

Update: Now that the day is done, I’ve archived this year’s fake page.

Penumbra: Overture demo available

Thomas over at Frictional Games wrote me this morning about the new demo of their game, Prenumbra: Overture. Prenumbra is an indy horror game, and the team is using physics to create interactions that are pretty different than what we’ve seen before. They had a teaser demo a while back that was pretty impressive, and I’m looking forward to trying this new release. Though this is a PC game, it’s definitely worth checking out.

The Darkness

Kotaku.com has some video footage of the upcoming Xbox360/PS3 horror game The Darkness. I’ve held off talking about this game because it hasn’t been clear if it’s really a horror game or just another first person shooter with a lot of monsters. The footage seems to clear that up: though you play the antagonist, it seems like it is clearly designed to make the player quiver in their boots. I’ll post more about this game once I learn a little more.

Silent Hill Arcade Shooter

I’m sorry, I can’t not post this. Kotaku.com has a bunch of images from the new Silent Hill arcade game. You read that right. It’s a shooter, set in the Silent Hill universe, with lots of fog and film grain. And zombies. That’s like Silent Hill, right? Fog + film grain + zombies = winning formula, right? It even has Pyramid Head, whom you can apparently shoot, despite his blatant invulnerability to guns in Silent Hill 2. But hey, it’s got the Silent Hill logo on it, so it must be great, right guys?

Making a shooter out of a horror game is probably pretty tough. I’ve not really been impressed with the Resident Evil Gaiden / Dead Aim series (though I should play both more to be fair). But for a game like Silent Hill, where shooting is infrequent and often actively discouraged, this kind of thing seems like quite a stretch. Though it is clearly an attempt to cash in on a popular license, I suppose I’m not as irked by this game as I could be: the arcade scene is a really tough market, and I can actually see that arcade games might not even be made unless they are insulated by some brand or license. Still, this looks pretty terrible. Maybe next time I am in Japan I can try it out.

This is Crunch


hard work by Luis Becerril

I wake up at 6:45. Brush my teeth, drink my coffee, realize I have to brush my teeth again. Check my work e-mail from home, read through the 30-odd messages that have already arrived, and respond as coherently as possible to a few. I try to get out of the house by 7:30, and I have a 30 minute commute down the peninsula to work. The drive isn’t bad; I take the old highway to avoid the traffic jams and huge trucks.

At 8:00 I’m sitting in front of my computer reading yet more e-mail and downloading the latest changes to our project. I spend most of the next ten hours tracking down an annoyingly difficult crash bug and trying to keep up with the constant flurry of e-mails. I’m drinking coffee like a maniac, four or five cups a day at this point, and even skipping lunch I don’t have enough time in the day to get everything done.

This is crunch. This is the dark underbelly of the game industry, when the plans have failed and now a hardcore push to the finish is all that can be done. Nose, meet grindstone. Whether or not this level of effort is required is hard to say: there’s a lot to be done, but it’s unclear if working 70 hour weeks will really result in a perceptibly better game in the end. I sure hope it does–it would suck if we all killed ourselves for nothing.

This is part of the reason that bad games get made. Nobody sets out to make a bad game, but when time gets tight and people are working their fingers to the bone, a lot of stuff ends up on the cutting room floor. Sometimes it is stuff that nobody will ever miss, like an extra level that was never any fun, or cut scene that didn’t impact the story. Sometimes it’s a more dramatic cut, like something that is required for the game to be enjoyable. But usually, these cuts are made because at the end of the day, the choice between shipping a bad game and shipping nothing at all isn’t even a choice. By the time crunch mode sets in, the money has already been invested and there must be some sort of return. Will our project turn out well? Right now it is hard to say if we’ll pull it off or just start in with the scalpel.

I get home and completely exhausted. Even as I type this my eyelids are heavy. Tomorrow is Saturday, and I’m getting up at 8 to go in again. Soon we will ship and I’ll be able to write more coherently. Soon we will ship and I’ll be able to think straight again.