How Do Games Keep Scaring You, Over and Over? What Happened to Horror Games in the Last 20 Years

Don't be afraid.

In mid-August 2014, nearly everyone who followed games was staring at the endless corridor on their screen with mixed feelings — either gripping a controller with sweaty palms and talking themselves into going on, or holding their breath while someone else played, thankful it wasn't them at the controls, since they could at least cover their eyes whenever they liked. Every door you opened was mental torture; every corner you turned brought the fear of seeing something you absolutely did not want to see. You were scared to death and you kept walking forward anyway (or kept watching a streamer walk forward). Even the firmest willpower was likely to dissolve into a scream of "I give up" the moment you glimpsed the tall ghost, Lisa.

P.T. (Playable Teaser) didn't even bother with a proper title — it was just a free download, an interactive teaser for Silent Hill — and it became the nightmare of countless players, then and since. That psychological torment also showed that horror games still had a great deal left to mine.

The road to P.T. was a long one. For a while, people thought no game could scare anyone anymore.

Top 2

The earliest survival horror games began with a pair of eyes in the dark.

In Haunted House, a 1982 Atari 2600 game, the player was nothing but a pair of eyes, hunting through pitch-dark rooms for the three pieces of a broken urn. Across three floors and a basement, they had to avoid a bat, a spider and the owner's ghost, striking matches to spot items. Nine hits meant failure; grabbing the urn and escaping meant success.

It is considered the earliest survival horror game, even though by today's standards it isn't frightening at all — it's almost cute. Still, the games magazine Electronic Games wrote at the time that "though the graphics are crude, the eerie atmosphere really comes through."

For nearly the next 15 years, few horror games were worth mentioning. Most borrowed the stock elements of B-movies, spelling out horror through blood and violence. Chiller (1986), which gave players the chance to torture victims; the 1989 game adapted from Friday the 13th; Sega's 1993 live-action interactive "movie" Night Trap — these are the kind of titles that land easily on lists of the worst games ever made. They looked cheap, as if they existed to satisfy a small audience with peculiar tastes.

Fortunately, that is not where horror games ended up. Looking back, everyone owes one Japanese man a heartfelt thank-you: Shinji Mikami.

Resident Evil, released in 1996, opened a new chapter for survival horror. Investigating a disappearance, being chased through a forest by a pack of vicious dogs, entering a mysterious mansion, solving puzzles to open doors with traps or monsters behind them, uncovering a conspiracy buried deeper still — for a lot of people born in the 1980s and '90s, huddling together to watch someone else play Resident Evil, for courage, is part of their childhood. It was also from this game onward that more and more people learned how frightening "zombies" could be.

The modern zombie film was the invention of an American, George A. Romero; as early as 1968, Night of the Living Dead set the framework for the whole genre. But B-movies travelled only so far, and audiences outside the United States were still nowhere near familiar with the idea. Besides, watching and controlling are entirely different experiences: living through a horror film, it turns out, is nothing like watching one.

Mikami poured his feelings about zombie films into a medium that required someone to take the controls. He had been badly disappointed by a 1979 film called Zombie, and wanted to fix the movie's mistakes inside a game instead. That decision ended up forcing players around the world to handle the living dead themselves, and left a great many of them with childhood scars.

One thing is certain: the moment that zombie lifted its head from a mangled corpse and turned to meet the player's eyes through the screen deserves a place among gaming history's treasured moments. And advancing technology made everything feel more real than any 2D pixel game before it — 3D-modelled characters and objects, pre-rendered backgrounds, terrifying close-ups of monsters, enemies creeping slowly closer. All of it gave players an intense sense of immersion. You weren't a bystander; you were the protagonist, the one dealing with the undead in a room full of danger. Your death hit harder than in any game before it.

Helped by the marketing push after it was localized for Europe and America, the original Resident Evil sold 2.7 million copies — Capcom's first game to pass a million, and the first PlayStation title to become a huge hit. Its various remakes went on to sell 8.5 million copies between them, still Capcom's best-selling title. That was the start of Capcom's 20-year dependence on Resident Evil.

Everyone agrees that Resident Evil redefined survival horror. Like the pioneering zombie film Night of the Living Dead, it set a basic framework for the category, and later games borrowed countless elements of its mechanics and design.

From then on, zombies held their central place in survival horror. In the hundreds and thousands of games that followed, these deadly undead worked diligently at scaring players or handing out experience points. When developers made a horror game, they would reach for it as a reference without thinking, asking themselves how to challenge players at each stage, how to build a frightening atmosphere, how to use exactly the right sound effects to set a mood, how to keep players on edge at all times.

Part of the answer took shape as dark, oppressive environments, sound effects that made your skin crawl, and — most important — never quite enough resources. The game gave you weapons to fight evil and herbs to heal yourself, but never enough of either; you had to ration them carefully. And the elite protagonists, who should have handled all this with ease, could only plant their feet and shoot, at a rate of fire that made you anxious. Someone on the Resident Evil team once questioned that design, and Shinji Mikami's answer was: "Everything has a reason. You can shoot a zombie once and it will still lunge at you — before you can pull the trigger a second time, it may already have bitten you. I wanted players to feel that fear."

In the Resident Evil games Mikami went on to oversee (1 through 4), these classic elements survived. Even as the settings grew grander — from the mansion to Raccoon City to a cross-border mission — the protagonists still ran short on supplies, and still had to arrange their (forever cramped) inventory to fit in more items, choosing endlessly between what to keep and what to leave behind.

Only about ten years later did Capcom itself begin to abandon those rules — but that comes later.

The other title named alongside Resident Evil as one of the "two most important horror games" is also Japanese, and it is the source of the P.T. this article opened with: Konami's Silent Hill, released in 1999.

Even now, the name alone is enough to make plenty of people who don't play games recall the shocking plot of the decent — some would say best — film adaptation, along with a few pieces of music everyone knows: "Promise" and "Room of Angel." That is probably one of the most memorable things about the Silent Hill series. It did not merely succeed at building a terrifying atmosphere, deeply artistic environments, distinctive mechanics and monsters; it also told one story after another that moved players and non-players alike, with a fully worked-out world and all sorts of strange metaphors attached.

In this series, the protagonists are basically ordinary people swept into events, without the powerful abilities of Resident Evil's cast. So rather than fighting their way out, as in the latter, the action here gives way to psychological horror and a twisting plot that unfolds step by step through exploration. It took its cues from David Lynch's hallucinatory, mystery-laden style and from the thriller Jacob's Ladder, using heavy fog and darkness to deepen the mystery, making people afraid of the unknown and of hidden threats.

The plots tend to expose the deepest evil and the darkest side of human nature, then wrap that in sorrowful, lingering emotion that matches the melancholy beauty of the soundtrack. So the series freezes players in tension one moment and, the next, stirs feelings that seem out of place in a horror work. The several endings in each installment also push players to try harder, to earn the characters a happy one.

Compared with Resident Evil, it holds a more universal artistic value, which is why it can pull in people who don't play games at all — sometimes a few tracks from the soundtrack are enough. It may be the only horror work that can do that.

When Survival Kept Getting Easier

With this top two as models, later development teams moved in quickly, making games that borrowed their classic elements. Few of them achieved real horror; most won players over with gore and sheer numbers of monsters instead.

Zombies stopped being new. It took about ten years for them to go from making you scream to serving as props in hack-and-slash games. In hugely popular titles like Left 4 Dead and Dead Rising, players got to torment zombies with style. With bullets, gadgets and teammates on hand, the fear of walking into danger alone was gone for good.

This was survival horror in miniature. Between 2000 and 2010, as the AAA production line matured, almost every game grew bigger: sweeping settings, stronger visual impact, more "fashionable" plots, flashier gear. None of that was much good for horror games, because none of it has anything to do with fear itself. And as the industry's ambitions swelled and action games rose, anything that brushed against horror tended to turn into a big-budget action title. In shooters like Doom and BioShock, the emphasis clearly fell on beating the enemy.

Another reason players stopped scaring easily, naturally, was that their threshold had risen. Developers could no longer frighten an audience with a single zombie or monster, and not every team was willing to do the work of building atmosphere. Under a mature production system, piling on more monsters and bigger disasters was the efficient way to guarantee output. But that also made the monsters feel less special, and players knew they could be killed — the game had already handed them powerful weapons. So after dying a few times, there was basically nothing left to fear.

The clearest example is Dead Space. When it first appeared in 2008, its sealed-in spaceship setting and bizarre monster designs scared players witless. In the two sequels, though, players who had grown used to the atmosphere quickly mastered it, turning the protagonist into a one-man army, the "strongest engineer in the universe."

Even Resident Evil changed shape. After Shinji Mikami left Capcom, he no longer supervised the fifth installment, released in 2009, and its style broke sharply from what came before. Resident Evil 4 already led with action, but it kept Mikami's marks — an oppressive atmosphere, scarce supplies, sound design that pressed down on you. Resident Evil 5 became an outright third-person shooter, with the protagonist gunning down infected crowds in the broad daylight of Africa, moving from grand ancient ruins to underground labs to an ocean liner, in a plot that was thoroughly "Hollywood." You could call it a compendium of everything wrong with action games at the time: mindless, overblown, built so players could sail through feeling good. That was already the opposite of what a horror game is for.

That decade wasn't all dark, though. Near the end of it, someone found a new path — or more precisely, a path back to basics: weaken the protagonist, and keep the screen dark.

In 2010's Alan Wake, the protagonist is a writer in poor physical shape who runs into a mysterious incident in a small town out of Twin Peaks. Every resident has been infected by the darkness and, under the villain's control, hunts him down; only light can drive the infected back, and only for a moment. Guiding him through pitch-black woods while dodging attacks from several directions, players found that this writer could sprint two steps before he had to slow down and gasp for breath, which made it nearly impossible to reach a safe streetlamp in one go — and sent the odds of being cut down along the way through the roof.

Better still, it merged Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Its action and its scarce supplies closely resembled the former under Mikami; its dark, malevolent atmosphere paid tribute to the latter, especially in the way the town wore two different faces by day and by night, as if flipping between two worlds — enough to wipe out a player's sense of safety in an instant. The game also had a story, and an ending theme, that left people applauding.

This game, which combined horror, action and storytelling perfectly, was named the best of 2010 by Time magazine.

Looking back now, you can see that many of today's popular horror games carry on these elements from Alan Wake. The fear they aim for fits in a single sentence: powerless humans have nowhere to run from the dark.

On that subject, we should mention another fine horror game from those years, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which may fit that sentence even better than Alan Wake does. This indie game, which keeps the player treading carefully from start to finish, tells a Lovecraftian story. You explore an old mansion; stay in the dark too long, or witness something inexplicable, and the character's san value (sanity) drops, bringing on hallucinations and drawing monsters' attention. So you have to keep the protagonist sane at all times. And once a monster spots you, he has no way to fight back — he can only run or hide in the dark, taking a sanity hit for it.

Reviewers wrote: "There are so many so-called horror games out there, but I'm telling you, this one is not joking around — you'll be wailing before long." In 2017, GamesRadar ranked it the third-best horror game ever made.

And that idea — stripping away the ability to fight back entirely — is one we have seen carried on in recent years.

Back to Basics, and Some New Ways to Scare

After 2010, the games calling themselves horror wised up. Developers grasped something sharply: in an age when every protagonist is an elite and everyone is a weapons expert, they knew what players would still fear, because their predecessors had already worked it out for them. Make the protagonist powerless.

Slender in 2012, Outlast in 2013, Alien: Isolation in 2014 — in games like these, most of the time all you can do is run or hide. Once developers take away the ability to fight back, the helplessness that follows tends to leave players at a loss. You may be unbeatable in other action games, but in these scenes you might still scream like a child and stay curled up in a hiding place, refusing to come out and keep playing.

Some inventive new mechanics, meanwhile, raised expectations for the genre. In 2014, Five Nights at Freddy's created the spectacle of the entire internet watching one game together. In this crudely made, mechanically simple game, the player works the night shift at a children's restaurant and has to keep watching the cameras to stop giant animatronic mascots from getting close. You can't hide and you can't run. All you can do, as your power drains, is check each camera in turn and time the closing of your doors well enough to make it to morning. It took the protagonist's powerlessness to a new level.

The industry also praised it for turning places and objects players knew from everyday life — a chain fast-food restaurant, animatronic animals — into nightmares. The mechanics were simple, but playing it still took skill. Its methods were understated, scaring you with suspense, and it kept you at a high pitch of tension throughout.

It may be the most influential horror game of the past five years. Much of the credit goes to the rise of social networks and game streamers. Pushed jointly by YouTube's three biggest gaming personalities — PewDiePie, Markiplier and Jacksepticeye — Five Nights at Freddy's built a staggeringly large fan base. They pressed developer Scott Cawthon into making four sequels within a single year, a pace fast enough to earn a Guinness World Record. It also showed the world how much potential horror games had.

It was only days after Five Nights at Freddy's came out that P.T. appeared, and with it the collective test of nerve this article began with.

P.T. was later canceled when producer Hideo Kojima left Konami, to the dismay of countless players; after it was pulled, consoles with P.T. still loaded on them went for astronomical prices on eBay. But that also handed other developers an opening — everyone wanted to see P.T. actually made, so they now had a direction to walk in.

Over the following months, gameplay videos for "corridor" exploration games like Allison Road, Visage and Ghost Theory appeared one after another, each claiming to be P.T.'s spiritual successor. On the matter of getting canceled, some of them genuinely carried on that spirit. As for the rest — let's admit it, no haunted-corridor game since has been as hair-raising as P.T. Still, we should thank those imitators so deeply marked by P.T.; they brought the genre back to the psychological horror that can actually frighten people.

The other back-to-basics game of that year was The Evil Within, made by Shinji Mikami, who swore it would show what the Resident Evil series should have looked like. It was the debut from Tango Gameworks, the studio Mikami founded, and it really did resemble Resident Evil — maybe too closely, with tributes to the series at every turn. In essence, it offered nothing new. The games world concluded that Mikami probably wanted to make a horror game so badly that he packed it with horror-movie clichés, which made it feel unusually superficial.

Inside Capcom, meanwhile, a plan was under way to take Resident Evil back to its origins. After the blockbuster-action Resident Evil 6, this year's Resident Evil 7 turned clearly toward P.T.-style exploration, back down the old classic road — a powerless protagonist, scarce supplies, run when you can't win — and drew a wave of praise from longtime fans.

VR, the industry's new toy, became another selling point for the genre. After VR headsets arrived, the games made for them did not dazzle anyone in particular; it was horror films that used VR for interactive audience promotions. Its sense of immersion needs no explaining, and for players it doubled the feeling of being right there in the middle of the fear.

What can't be ignored, though, is that VR headset sales are nowhere near even a fraction of console sales. As things stand, it remains a nice extra for core players to enjoy. It is not a future horror games can lean on.

Among the experiments in returning and innovating between 2010 and 2017, Until Dawn is also worth noting. Its earliest forerunner is the Night Trap mentioned above, a 1992 game whose gimmick was live-action performance and a thoroughly B-movie plot, in which the player plays a special agent using traps to protect girls in a dormitory from villains. Until Dawn likewise drew on Hollywood teen horror, dropping a group of teenagers into a snowed-in, closed-circle lodge. Mental illness, Native American legend, an abandoned sanatorium, a classic slasher — it is a grab bag of horror set pieces, with the player controlling a different character in each chapter and making choices that trigger different branches. Among the narrative games of recent years, this all-round horror title stands on its own.

Another game that came as a surprise is Perception. In this one, released in May of this year, the player again explores an abandoned house, but the protagonist is blind and has to see the world through echolocation.

In the foreseeable future, another idea we can expect is the "aesthetics of disgust." Agony and Scorn, which released trailers in the same year, show what that means: the first depicts hell in the flesh, the second takes players into space to explore an Alien-like civilization. Their visuals hit hard, and your first reaction is that they are disgusting — but you have to admit that these art designs carry a malevolent beauty too.

Why Be Afraid of Something Virtual? And Why Keep Playing While You're Afraid?

Teresa Lynch, a professor at Ohio State University, explains: "Because we're inside it, it feels more real. Even when the content is pixelated, or plainly doesn't look real, we don't have to think of it that way. In that moment the player has no thought of treating it as fake. In the moment, it's real."

And even when players understand perfectly well that what is on the screen is not real, their bodies still react — the product of a long evolution of the human brain. "From a psychological standpoint, that evolution doesn't fundamentally make us distinguish between what's on the screen and what's off it. As long as we feel we're inside it, exposed to that content, the brain treats it as real and produces an involuntary response."

From a developer's point of view, players feel fear because "these games drop the player straight into the victim's position." Bran Furminger, one of the makers of the 2002 horror classic Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, says this is what makes games so unusual next to other media. Books can manage a little of it through the reader's inner voice; films put a delay in the way, because the audience has to recognize the actor, which produces a kind of disconnect. Actually holding a controller makes the whole experience far more personal: "The character in the game hands you their life and trusts you to keep them safe. Even though it's only a virtual character, you still feel you're holding someone else's life in your hands."

Under those conditions, finishing the game at all — even if you were scared the whole way — is an achievement. According to Lynch, many people enjoy horror games for exactly that reason: "It makes them brave."

In one Reddit thread, people tied the feeling to the excitement of a roller coaster: tension, danger, a rush of adrenaline, with no real risk to the rider. In the end it all turns into fun. The more scientific name is "excitation transfer theory" — once a frightening experience ends, the body is physically aroused, and that arousal converts into a heightened sense of relief. What people enjoy, in other words, is not the fear itself but the strong positive feeling that follows it.

Koshi Nakanishi, director of Resident Evil 7, simply calls it addiction. "When we're afraid, the brain releases chemicals to help us survive. It's addictive. They say once you've tasted it, you want to taste it again. Fear is a legal high."

Cover image from P.T., Silent Hill