Developed by James Andreasen for Atari 2600, Haunted House is remembered as a cult game as the first exponent of the survival horror genre. A perfect story to rediscover on Halloween.
Two eyes advance in the darkness. They desperately search for a way out of a haunted house. This is the concept of Haunted Housethe precursor to survival horror video games. It was published in 1982 on Atari 2600the first home console to have mass success among the public. We are talking about an era in which video games were far from the technical and graphic prowess of today’s products, but they still knew how to immerse you in their atmospheres thanks to a mix of genius and simplicity, dictated by the limits of the time. Haunted House is an incredible demonstration of this.
Because Haunted House managed to scare
The game opens on a multi-story house seen from above. There are no details because everything is black, completely shrouded in darkness. The only thing that emerges are the white eyes of the unknown protagonist. They are large and barred. And upon closer inspection: suddenly ghosts, spiders and bats appear. You must avoid them, otherwise you will lose one of the 9 lives available. When you are hit, an animation starts where your eyes roll wildly, as a sign of madness Lovecraftian memory. The only possibility of escape is to find the three pieces of urn hidden in the dark.
Every now and then you can collect keys to open hidden doors and a scepter to ward off enemies. If you want, you can also use matches that barely illuminate the area around the protagonist. Be careful though, you can only use one item at a time. Then there is no soundtrack, but only 8bit audio effectswhich recreate in a disturbing way the heavy steps of the protagonist, the random appearance of enemies and above all their uncontrolled movements during chases. An intelligent sound design, which still manages to convey today a sense of anguish and restlessness.
Chiara Ferragni, the bondage-style look for Halloween 2024 between lace bustier and transparencies
It is thanks to this original mix of reduced visibility, labyrinthine structure, sudden arrival of the monsters and careful sound design that Haunted House is remembered with nostalgia and terror from older generations of gamers. “I’m 50 years old. I still remember being very scared playing this game at night, when I was 8 years old,” reads one of the comments under a gameplay video of Haunted House. “This game scared me so much as a child!”, says another. Examples that testify well to the ability of video games of the 80s to be able to involve by exploiting the technical limits of the time.
What happened after Haunted House
The most fascinating thing is that Haunted House paved the way for a key genre in the gaming panorama, namely that of survival horror. From this first experiment, based on the few resources available, the suspense and the monstrosities, a trail developed over the years that sees milestones such as Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Dead Space, titles considered iconic today, whose creatures and atmospheres have entered the collective gaming imagination.
Not only that, they are video games that have become immortal thanks also to technical limitations, such as fixed camera of the first Resident Evil or the fog of the first Silent Hillelements that proved functional to generate suspense but were born from purely technical needs. For this reason today Haunted House is considered a cult classic among fans of the genre. Subsequently, remakes of the game developed by James Andreasen were made, to be precise in 2010, in 2014 and, finally, in 2023.
