Alone in the Dark
Preview
Carnby is back: Battered and beaten, but back!
by Marcus Mulkins
previewed on PC
A Facelift For A Classic Genre
What does it take to actually scare someone? Is it that the bogeyman jumps out of the shadows? No, that?s just startling. Is it graphic images of gore? No, that?s just nauseating. I believe that what really scares someone is being able to say, ?That could be me up there being sliced and diced!? Or falling to their death, or being hotly pursued by characters bent on blood and mayhem. And the more that the viewer identifies with the protagonist, the more visceral the fear will be. This is one of the main reasons that a game has the potential of being scarier than a book or movie. Games in the past occasionally instilled fear in the players, but most fell way short of making the players actually scared because the all-important connection between player and character just wasn?t ?tight? enough. What happened to the character on screen most was often a third-person experience, leaving the player shrugging and saying, ?Sorry, guy; missed my timing on that one. Oh, well. Time to load the last Save.?
Finally, a game is looming on the horizon that might actually scare the bejeezus out of anyone crazy enough to play it.
A Lexicon Of Horror ? A Path from Literature To The Arcade
Ever hear of ?The Fall Of The House Of Usher?? Written by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), it more or less spawned the Gothic Horror genre in literature that eventually gave us classics like ?Frankenstein? and ?Dracula?. Many years later, the writings of Poe inspired another author, H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937). [Notice that both of these notable writers died in their forties? I sometimes wonder if whatever it is that inspired their horror stories literally scared them to death at a relatively early age.] Lovecraft is best known for a series of stories that are collectively known as the Cthulhu Mythos. Those stories dealt with a pantheon of inter-dimensional eldritch gods and demi-gods that were so terrifying that if you saw them, you would most likely go insane. That is, if they didn?t eat you outright. Lovecraft?s works weren?t all that popular during his lifetime, but as they gained more exposure over the years, they developed their own cult status. They became much of the inspiration of current horror writers like Stephen King and others that specialize in ?things that go bump in the night? literature.
In 1981, a small company in California, Chaosium Inc., decided to branch out from its bread-and-butter RPG, Runequest, and create a RPG based on Lovecraft?s works. Thus was born Call Of Cthulhu, and it was, and still is, quite popular with gameplayers. After CoC had demonstrated its staying power, in the early ?90?s, several PC game companies decided to produce a number of titles that tied into the ?flavor? of horror evinced by Lovecraft. First and foremost was Alone in the Dark (published by Interplay and developed by Infogrames ), which released in France in 1992 and in the USA in 1993. AITD launched a whole new genre called ?survival horror?. It proved so successful, it was emulated by titles like Legacy, Realm of Terror (Microprose, 1993) and Phantasmagoria (Sierra, 1995). [Phantasmagoria was the first downright scary game in the genre, in my personal opinion. I?m surprised it wasn?t followed by many, many imitators.] Somewhat less terrifying, but still quite Gothic, was 7th Guest (Virgin Games, 1992) which was practically it?s own sub-genre which one might call ?puzzle-solving horror?.
Of the many different companies and titles to be launched, it seems like the only one worthy of a sequel was AITD. It was followed in 1994 by Alone in the Dark 2: Jack is Back, and in 1996 the series took a peculiar turn in Alone in the Dark 3: One-Eyed Jack?s Revenge, which removed the horror setting from creepy old Victorian houses and migrated to a Wild West ghost town, Slaughter Gulch. By then, consumers had demonstrated their enduring interest in ?survival horror?, so in 1996 Capcom released the first Resident Evil game. Similarly, in 1999, Konami released the first of the very successful Silent Hill games.
After the spotty performance of Alone in the Dark 3: One-Eyed Jack?s Revenge, Infogrames continued the series as the publisher, using Darkworks as the developer, and decided in 2001 to send the series back into the Victorian mansion in Alone in the Dark 4: The New Nightmare, which sold respectably well. In 2003, Infogrames (which over the years absorbed several sizeable gaming companies such as Microprose, Atari, and Hasbro Interactive), decided to spin off most of its North American gaming activities into a subsidiary labeled Atari, Inc. This is significant because after initial success, Atari had a disastrous fiscal year (April 2006 to March 2007) wherein they lost $67.1 million. Recognizing that they desperately need a surefire hit, Atari decided to postpone the PC release of Alone in the Dark 2007 (originally entitled, AITD 5: Near Death Investigations) in order to simultaneously release the game for Xbox360 and PS3. By doing so, that decision has made for some dramatically improved graphics all around, as the additional tweaking for the other formats has allowed some extraordinary graphic effects in all of the formats.
