Check out From Ants to Zombies: Six Decades of Video Game Horror, available now from Bitmap Books.
Long before the elusive ideal of the interactive movie emerged as the industry’s most persistent obsession, video games had been looking to Hollywood for inspiration. Aspiring to cinema’s status as the preeminent narrative art-form of the 20th century, gaming was transforming, from the late 1970s onwards, into a medium that could portray relatable characters and tell engrossing stories, a medium that -more than test your reflexes or puzzle-solving skills- could make you feel things. Namely, horror.
Movie monsters would pop up everywhere during gaming’s formative years. Numerous versions of H.R. Giger’s iconic xenomorph have been crafted with blocky pixels, both in official Alien tie-ins and unlicensed homages. Sharks roaming the inky depths of 8-bit oceans referenced Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. There were takes on folk horror, dinosaur movies, slasher films - it’s almost as if every subgenre of cinematic horror offered something uniquely translatable to the interactive experience.
Dozens of entries in From Ants to Zombies show clear signs of this all-pervasive influence. There’s an entire chapter devoted to interactive movies - a term that includes more than the 1990s schlocky FMVs we typically associate it with. Another chapter deals exclusively with games featuring creatures from the Universal Monster Cycle, either as villains or, occasionally, as protagonists. Virtually every entry in the Space Horror chapter riffs on the Alien franchise; the chapter on Relentless Pursuers takes its cues from teen slashers and Italian giallo films; and the terrifying beasts in Nature Unleashed draw from the B-movies of the 1950s.
Out of numerous games with a cinematic lineage featured in From Ants to Zombies we selected a handful of titles that demonstrate how far back the relationship between the two mediums goes. Six spooky 1980s games based on classic horror movies, to read about, discover, and play after trick-or-treating. Happy Halloween
13 Ghosts (1983)
The may haunt completely different environments, but hovering phantoms are the true stars of 13 Ghosts, both the movie and the game.
Other than the title (and the fact it features a significant number of vaguely threatening, floating phantoms), there’s little connection between this gorgeous rail shooter -one of the earliest in the genre to explore a horror theme- and William Castle’s haunted-house movie. In our interview, co-designer Bryan Eggers names the 1960 cult-classic both as a childhood favourite and an inspiration for the game but admits he tried “to avoid any copyright issues by making everything else different”. So, instead of the corridors of a creaky old mansion, he set 13 Ghosts in the environs of an old western town (the main thoroughfare; an old rail station; the local cemetery), creating one the TRS-80’s most visually impressive titles in the process. The game looked so good, in fact, that when he and collaborator Larry Payne took it to Tandy, “the marketing manager looked at it for about 5 seconds and said, ‘We’ll take it!’”
Forbidden Forest (1983)
Squaring off against a spear-wielding skeleton in Jason and the Argonauts (right) and Forbidden Forest (left).
Undoubtedly the goriest game of its era, Forbidden Forest’s grotesque inhabitants had their roots, ironically, in relatively tame cinematic fare. Creator Paul Norman, tasked with creating a bow-and-arrow action title as his first venture into coding, was inspired by his love of cinema and, especially, Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion monsters. The spear-wielding skeletons, stabbing you repeatedly as the blood gushes from your flailing body, are a clear nod to the legendary animator’s work in Jason and the Argonauts while the oversized creepy-crawlies emerging out of the foliage to gorge on your bodily fluids were inspired by the giant beasts in Mysterious Island. These gruesome deaths, combined with a moody soundtrack, an oppressive palette to obscure your claustrophobic surroundings, and some neat disempowerment tactics arguably make Forbidden Forest, the first “true” horror game in the history of the medium.
Where Time Stood Still (1988)
Different media, same predicament: the crew despairs over their wrecked vessels as prehistoric beasts take note of their presence.
More than simply reference a well-known movie, most games in this list strive to imbue the player experience with some sort of cinematic quality, from Project Firestart’s parallel editing to Forbidden Forest’s responsive soundtrack. But Denton Designs’ homage to stranded-crew classics like The Lost World and Lost Continent attempts a much trickier feat: to replicate those fantasy adventures’ complex multi-character dynamics. High atop Where Time Stood Still’s gorgeous Himalayan peaks our gang of four (Jarret, the pilot; Clive, the mogul; Gloria, the heiress; Dirk, her husband) must survive swooping pteranodons and prowling tyrannosauruses, their individual quirks often sabotaging your best efforts at teamwork. While awkward at times, this remains Denton Designs’ most ambitious work and a fascinating experiment at complex storytelling, elevated by some of the prettiest monochrome environments ever generated by a ZX Spectrum.
Wolfman (1988)
Whether it's a 1940s black-and-white movie, or a 1980s text adventure, discovery of the beast's latest victim is bound to upset the locals.
Though departing from the seminal 1941 movie with regard to certain plot details, Rod Pike’s final part of the CRL text-adventure trilogy based on the Universal Monster Cycle (Dracula and Frankenstein had preceded it in 1986 and 1987, respectively), retains the basic outlines of its story. A protagonist waking up with little recollection of the previous night’s transformation; a village up in arms to track down the killer of a brutally murdered young girl; a budding love that can function as the monster’s salvation or, possibly, his damnation. Rod Pike’s florid prose imbues proceedings with unusual pathos, most evident in the extra care he puts into the romantic subplot - in our interview, CRL founder Clem Chambers refers to the elusive writer as a “melancholy chap… a kind of cuddly Edgar Allan Poe”. But it was the animated pictures of the creature’s mangled victims that were Wolfman’s main selling point, as CRL finally secured their much-sought-after 18 BBFC rating on the third time of asking, prompting the usual wave of editorials on video game violence in the process.
Project Firestart (1989)
Rather than the original Alien, Project Firestart takes its cues from James Cameron's sequel, meaning plenty of xenomorphs to blast away at.
Cursory accounts of the medium’s history may proclaim otherwise but survival horror started neither in 1996 with Resident Evil, nor four years earlier with Alone in the Dark. Released for the Commodore 64 in 1989, Dynamix’s three-years-in-the-making homage to Aliens implausibly delivered a near-complete blueprint for the genre on a humble 8-bit computer. Dwindling resources hamper agent Jon Hawking’s foray into the labyrinthine Prometheus vessel. Alternating perspectives, from side-scrolling corridors to static, isometric cabins, disorient you while severely limiting your capacity for defensive manoeuvring. And the slow-burn reveal of the extraterrestrial threat aboard the seemingly lifeless research ship, blossoming into a multi-path narrative that unfolds in real-time, suggests an emphasis on storytelling unprecedented in an action-oriented title. According to director Jeff Tunnell, Project Firestart “should have never been attempted on the Commodore 64.” Players who caught a glimpse of video game horror’s future when they discovered it are, nonetheless, grateful that it was.
It Came from the Desert (1989)
A new apex predator hides beneath the sand in both Them! (right) and It Came from the Desert (left).
Like Project Firestart, Cinemaware’s masterpiece was a project of ludicrous ambition that, against all odds and technical limitations, miraculously paid off. Inspired by Them!, a Gordon Douglas B-movie channelling the nuclear anxieties of the Cold-War era, It Came from the Desert basically simulates the life of an entire desert community, as it slowly dawns on the populace they’re about to be besieged by an army of giant, irradiated ants. Following the discovery of some mutilated cattle in a nearby farm, visiting geologist Dr. Greg Bradley tries to convince authorities that something sinister is afoot and, in the process, the entire town of Lizard Breath comes to life, complete with a roaming greaser gang, a mysterious local cult, and the requisite love interest. Even with their million-dollar budgets, established Hollywood actors, and shiny new technologies, none of the overhyped 1990s FMVs got as close to delivering an engrossing, balanced blend of interactivity and cinematic storytelling as this.
Check out From Ants to Zombies: Six Decades of Video Game Horror, available now from Bitmap Books.
