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What Scares Game Developers? 142

Posted by Zonk from the besides-crunch-time dept.
John Callaham writes "Gamecloud has a new feature this Halloween asking game developers from id, Epic, Gearbox (among others) about what games scared them and why." From the article: "Todd Hollenshead - id Software: 'DOOM 3! Of course.' John Romero - former id and Ion Storm designer: 'My personal second scariest game was probably the Ravenholm section of Half Life 2. Man, when those screaming, galloping zombies are tearing around on top of a building and coming at you or clawing their way up a drainpipe - it's INSANE!'"
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What Scares Game Developers? More

What Scares Game Developers?

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  • He his afraid... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by alexandreracine ( 859693 ) <alexandreracine@gmail.com> on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:35PM (#13917280) Homepage Journal
    ...of his own game! That's scary! :)

  • Really (Score:5, Funny)

    by Elranzer ( 851411 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:40PM (#13917310) Homepage
    Want to know what really [wikipedia.org] scares game developers??

  • Alone in the Dark (Score:3, Informative)

    by zhiwenchong ( 155773 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:41PM (#13917319)
    I thought Alone in the Dark (the first one) was pretty scary....

  • Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:48PM (#13917380)
    I can't believe nobody mentioned System Shock 2. Not for the "Holy Bajeezus" startle-the-crap-outta-you kind of scare, but for the unnerving, menacing, heebie-jeebies kind of scare that you get when a blood-covered guy with a parasite going out of his chest and onto his head runs at you with a steel pipe, saying, "I'm sooorrrrrrrryyyyy...." Or when a protocol droid steps gingerly toward you, saying, "That's the Tri-Optimum way," and you know you've got to beat feet before it explodes in your face. The game robs you of human* contact, constantly holding the possibility of finding someone else still alive on the ship just out of reach.

    (*Yeah, I know "human" contact is something of a stretch, since it's just a game, but I couldn't help thinking throughout the game that there's safety in numbers.)

    • Re:Huh? (Score:2)

      by Otter ( 3800 )
      Not for the "Holy Bajeezus" startle-the-crap-outta-you kind of scare...

      I'd say the first two Dooms have a lock on that crown.

      • Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Otter ( 3800 )
        BTW, am I the only one thinking that Halloween is getting overdone to the point where the fun has been driven out of it? It's not yet excruciating like April Fools Day, where I lock my office door and keep my web browser closed until it's over, but give it a few years...

        At least Talk Like A Pirate Day is still easygoing fun, but thanks to that interminable Flying Spaghetti business, the joy is being driven even out of pirates.

        • BTW, am I the only one thinking that Halloween is getting overdone to the point where the fun has been driven out of it?

          From your post it seems pretty clear that you're just getting more gloomy. Cheer up eh? It's all for fun! :-)
        • "BTW, am I the only one thinking that Halloween is getting overdone to the point where the fun has been driven out of it?"

          Moreso than most other holidays, Halloween is what you make of it.
      • I disagree. The original Quake was much better because of the lighting effects. I admit, though, that the times you turn around and see a brown guy shambling towards you spitting a fireball, with your stereo turned up to eleven, were pretty freaky.
        • Imho, Abuse topped Doom and Quake for outright terror. The game made the attacks much more sudden, and more significantly Abuse was not afraid to pit you against overwhelming odds. Very often the only thing to do in the game was to run like the dickens and spray ammunition at your pursuants, desperately hoping to find an exit from the carnage before your health ran out.

          I guess the advantage that Sprite games had was that they were able to throw hundreds of opponents at you without your computer screaming
          • Abuse is righteous but since it's a platformer it's nowhere near as immersive as a FPS. It was more exasperating than frightening (due to dealing with the huge waves of baddies.)
          • Dead on about the sprites.

            The flipside of that was that sprite games didn't have to clear away the corpses to make room for more bad guys, so you could leave bodies like a trail of breadcrumbs to remember where you've been.

            A surprising # of FPSes still follow an NES-like "blink blink blink, bye bye body".

            The first indie game jam [indiegamejam.com] took this idea to an extreme...they realized a modern machine could churn out 100,000 sprites without busting a sweat, and then gave some developers 4 days to see what they could do

    • Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dave-tx ( 684169 ) *
      ...I couldn't help thinking throughout the game that there's safety in numbers

      Nicely put. Thinking back, I can specifically remember the feeling of being completely alone and paranoid that System Shock 2 created. SS2 was far and away the creepiest game that I've ever played - it left me jittery even after I'd turned it off and left the computer.

    • Lets not forget hearing those monkeys wandering about....

      I need to hook up a new game of SS2, now (there's mod that updates all the graphics, too, btw!).

    • Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tim C ( 15259 )
      Doom 3 had me feeling reluctant to go on at times, but only System Shock 2 (so far) has actually, properly unnerved me.

      I was playing it late at night one time, and eventually gave in to the lateness of the hour. Before going to bed, I popped downstairs to grab a drink. Standing in the kitchen, looking out into the pitch dark of the wee small hours of the morning, I couldn't shake the feeling that any moment now, a hybrid was going to smash its way in through the glass door, muttering "Silence the discord...
      • They're actually making a "sequel in spirit" to SS2. It's going to be called BioShock. Looks like it should be pretty good. I know it's not SS3, but it's something.
      • I have the dubious pleasure of having a girlfriend that likes horror games.

        So much that she makes me swap my xbox with a friends Cube so she can play Resident Evil.

        Now the game that she likes/dislikes the most is Project Zero.

        The sound is quite evil sounding, picture is always darkish, very well made, your only weapon is a camera, and you can't run...you can really speak about ambiance ...8)
        and with 5.1, you really hear them coming at you from behind.

        I know that my girlfriend don't want to play it too late
    • The monkeys. Don't forget the monkeys!

      You're stuck in some dark loading bay with approximately three bullets left, and you can hear a monkey gasping and grunting, then as you cautiously creep forwards, it and another monkey start screaming and howling, and you're absolutely sure they're approaching and they're screaming and you know their skulls are sliced open and they're screaming ... They're looking for you and they're screaming ...

      Ahem!

      The last time I was anywhere near that terrified was in the latter p
    • I can't believe nobody mentioned System Shock 2.

      I can't believe that they mentioned Alone In The Dark. That and System Shock 2 often get missed in these sorts of articles although they were extremely scary games.
    • I can't believe nobody mentioned System Shock 2.

      I played through both SS1 and SS2 when they were relatively new, and I sort of wonder at the SS2 fans on slashdot- did they not play the first one or did they just forget about it?

      For instance:

      The game robs you of human* contact, constantly holding the possibility of finding someone else still alive on the ship just out of reach.

      Which is exactly what the first one did, so to me there was zero impact from retreading that concept. 'Oh, you say there's some huma

  • Oh gawd, I agree with Romero (Score:4, Insightful)

    by buffer-overflowed ( 588867 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:50PM (#13917394) Journal
    To a limited extent. The two most recent frightening experiences were the "We don't go to Ravenholm" level in Half-Life 2 and Resident Evil 4. Doom 3, not so much scary, I mean, it's doom, monster-in-a-closet is old hat, and it's cheap.

    Going back further though, we have System Shock 1&2, which were both excellent.

    System Shock 2 had me sitting wide-eyed the whole time.

    So, I'll have to go with System Shock 2.

  • Fatal Frame 2 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AdamWeeden ( 678591 )
    That game scared the living crap out of me. I walked around with the lights on for a week after that game. My wife sat with me while I was playing and after 2 minutes she walked out of the room since it scared her so much. It creates this environment that is just so suspenseful you nearly wet yourself when something jumps out at you.

    • Re:Fatal Frame 2 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
      I only played the first one but I got to say it's the only scary game I ever played. Sure, I missed out on System Shock but modern "scary" games like Doom 3, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil or FEAR don't even seem mildly creepy to me. I guess it's rather hard to be afraid when you are the one holding the BFG. Hearing noises and stuff isn't creepy, in a game it's normal to have a monster right around the corner and most of it is ambient noise anyway. Project Zero/Fatal Frame is the only game I know of that m
      • I guess it's rather hard to be afraid when you are the one holding the BFG.

        And I think that's one of the things that makes the Fatal Frame series so scary. You're not walking around with a gun, you are walking around with a CAMERA. You're not as confident with your abilities when you've taking on something scary with a polaroid instead of an M-16.
        • The camera is just like aiming a gun, the difference is that you have to keep aiming until the thing is charged and wait for the ghost to attack if you want to do as much damage as possible. It's almost a game of chicken.
      • Yep. Fatal Frame 2 was excellent stuff. I liked it so much, I made a card game out of it [fourhman.com].

  • I'll Tell You What Scares Game Developers (Score:5, Funny)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:53PM (#13917413) Homepage
    "...and we're releasing it next month."
    • "The publisher wants Multiplayer. Online. The ship date can't slip."

      "The design isn't finished, and the art won't be ready until next month. Could you code up the interface this week?"

      "Just make the code do whatever it is that it's supposed to do."

      "How hard could adding a story be?"

      "Don't worry, we won't crunch for long this time."

      "At the publisher's behest, we're going to have a focus test. With the publisher's kids."

      "Of course I put it in. That was a full system re-write. Besides, we have at least a
  • The scariest video game moments, a few come to mind.

    The last level of Zelda 1, that music was eery. In fact, the whole northwest corner of the map was scary. The second quest even moreso.

    Castlevania 2, all of it.

    There's one more that I immediately think of, though I think a few will disagree, Legacy of the Wizard. It wasn't supposed to be a scary game, but there was just something about it where I was scared to shit whenever I was deep in the dungeons.
    • but there was just something about it where I was scared to shit whenever I was deep in the dungeons.

      Yea, you don't want to be caught with your pants down at the lower level of a dungeon.

  • Back to basics (Score:4, Funny)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:55PM (#13917430) Journal
    "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue."

    Scarier words have never been written into a game. Never thought that text games would give my nephews nightmares... boy was I mistaken.

  • Alien Vs. Predator (Score:4, Informative)

    by luder ( 923306 ) <slashdot.lbras@net> on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:55PM (#13917433)
    I almost had an heart attack playing Alien Versus Predator with a 4 speaker system. Just remembering those "blips" on the radar gives me chills... System Shock 2 was also very scary: because of the constant respawn of zombies and other not so friendly beings, one never could feel safe, there was no "clear area". Also, the best hard science fiction game I ever played!
    • Yes. I can't believe no one mentioned this game. Playing AvP as a marine, with the lights off at night, is the scariest experience I have ever had playing a video game.
    • At first I thought you were going to say the movie. The game however, can be very scary. The first game I remember making me jump was Phantasmagoria.
    • I'll second (third?) AvP... Actually I think it was the sequal AvP2, there's one level I remember, wandering around in pitch dark, seeing blips on and off, thinking there's one alien, only to find out there's another 2 behind you just when your safe.

  • Perhaps (Score:5, Funny)

    by FidelCatsro ( 861135 ) * <fidelcatsro&gmail,com> on Monday October 31, 2005 @03:57PM (#13917448) Journal
    All those are fairly scary .. but what truly terrifies them is Working for EA

  • Thief: The Dark Project (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gollum2001 ( 514666 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @04:07PM (#13917508)
    Anyone that has played Thief sure remember the haunts mumbling "Flames, nothing but flames, burning my flesh..." in the cathedral level. Not only that, when you disturbed them, they started shouting "Join us!! Join us now!!!".

    Try to stand calm in a corner of a room with four of those haunts in "search-mode". Eric Brosius, the sound designer, did a fantastic job with Thief and System Shock 2, other of my favourites. Also very scary.

    Those two, Thief and System Shock 2, should definitely be topping the list of the scariest games ever made. Weird none of those designers even mention them.

    The craddle level in Thief 3 was "good" too...
    Just my two cents.
    • It's interesting to note that both Thief and System Shock 2 run on the same engine, called "Dark engine [wikipedia.org]".
    • The craddle level in Thief 3 was "good" too...

      That level freaked me out like crazy. It was bad enough to see the electrical "experiments" walking around, but to be in an empty building always expecting to have something around the next corner walking right at you then hear loud knocking near the spiral staircase, getting louder as you go up ... the faint audience clapping in the reception room ... reading about the various experiments that were carried out and the torments of the inmates/patients ...
    • God, the Cradle... a part of my soul will forever remain trapped on that level. I haven't felt the same since playing it. I guess it remembers me, and just doesn't want to let me go...

      Speaking of Thief, anyone with a copy of Thief 2 knocking around who hasn't yet downloaded T2x: Shadows of the Metal Age [thief2x.com] really should do so. It has some of the best levels I've yet seen in the series. The missions set in the City are fantastic, and the first undead-themed mission was immersive and unsettling enough to make m
      • Having just read Journey into the Cradle [cream.org], I simply have to share a choice quotation. It is haloween, after all. ;)

        PC Gamer: Any particular incidents stuck in your memory from your research?

        Jordan Thomas: One story involved a patient who managed to escape into the storage wings of the asylum, and because of her eroded state-of-mind, she became lost and succumbed to starvation. The
        place was such a teeming 'snake pit' that she wasn't missed, and the stain from her body seeped permanently into the wood.

        Another

  • Civ III - when the enemy discovers motorized transport and all you have are those stupid knights. Now that's scary!
  • Use to get scared in the dungeons especially when your torch was running out, then getting attacked by ghouls and skeletons.. also the destroyed city was creepy.

  • Silent Hill 2 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @04:15PM (#13917571) Homepage
    Not only did this game have a really good story, but it was damn scary. With positional audio, a mere walk through some woods was reduced to a white knuckled adventure because as you're walking, suddenly you hear a second set of footsteps - which stop the second you quit moving.

    Or being in a hotel at night and walking into a room with some... THING... in there, that's covered in rusty metal and dried blood that just turns and tries to kill you mindlessly. Don't even get me started on the nurses.

    Anyway, the SH series of games has always been great for scares. They're my favorites.
    • They did a good job mixing both creepy and "boo" scary. And the nurses, with their flailing heads, was rather disturbing.

      The worst was entering a hospital room: hearing their sound and only having time to brace yourself for the attack. For those who haven't played the game, passing through closed doors loads a new scene and resets the camera perspective making it hard to acclimate to the new environment and harder to aim. Entering a new scene also allows for the possibility of an enemy character to sudde

  • Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DoctaWatson ( 38667 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @04:15PM (#13917576)
    Play the Ocean House part with headphones and the lights turned off. IF YOU DARE!

    My favorite part was when you fall into the basement laundry room and read a newspaper article about the decapitated child that was found there years ago. Then suddenly the washing machine turns on. THUNK-THUNK, THUNK-THUNK

    "He's right behind you!"
    • Heh, my wife always made me do that part for her. "It makes me too jumpy!" she'd say, cuz of the lightbulbs popping and so forth.

      It's funny how something like a little toy car rolling out into the hallway can give you a chill. It was quite well done.

      I enjoyed the thing-that-is-not-quite-a-vampire who was snacking on the reality TV show crew too.
    • Indeed, that was a very creepy level. For me, the scariest bits were were things flitted from one corridor to the other, but weren't there when you arrived at the corridor itself. I think F.E.A.R. may have gotten some of its ideas from there.

      That said, after watching House on Haunted Hill [imdb.com] (no, not the lousy sequel [imdb.com]), anyone else think a game based on that would be interesting? Random creepy things happening, but you're armed with a gun that has a limited number of bullets and you can't shoot innocent guest

  • 7th Guest! (Score:1, Interesting)

    by cbrichar ( 819941 )
    The 7th Guest still holds a place of honour in my memory for delivering some of the creepiest gaming moments I've ever had. I can still remember that awful, mocking laugh of Henry Stauf bouncing off the walls as the paintings suddenly came to life with gruesome depictions. And that haunting violin that plays in the opening cinematic? Classic haunted house horror.

    It's a shame that it and the sequel, "The 11th Hour", became fairly unplayable (with respect to system compatibility) once the new waves of com

  • The Beowerewulf
  • Pac-Man. When that little red ghost is quickly closing in...

    so close...

    gaining...

    the faint sound of 'wakka.... wakka.... (silence)'

    so close... the air is chilled.

    THEN HE GETS YOU! "Mwah mwah mwah".

    *shiver*

  • F.E.A.R. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Thalagyrt ( 851883 )
    F.E.A.R. is simply the creepiest game that I've ever played. It screws with your mind the entire time, people appearing and when you get close disintegrating, that little girl Alma always watching from some hidden corner. There's the usual scare tactics of stuff jumping at you - walking down a hallway in the middle of it someone's body flys through an office window into the hall dead. But then you walk into the office and there's nobody there. Or you'll be walking down a hall and all of a sudden a white fla
    • I find it hard to be scared by FEAR. Maybe it begins later on but as long as those things you see are harmless they are more like a tourist attraction than anything scary. Especially since they decided to make your enemies soldiers. Soldiers are there, they die when you shoot them, they don't come out of a wall and rip you to pieces or disappear just to appear somewhere nearby a few seconds after. As long as you know where the enemy is and what his limits are it's not scary. When you're the unstoppable supe
      • After about the fourth or fifth interval the apparitions and Alma/Paxton Fettel start hurting you, and in the 9th-11th it's mainly Alma/Paxton Fettel battling you, even though the soldiers are still there. If you haven't finished it, at least give it another shot and try to finish it through. The ending of the game is just insane. That's just my opinion of course! I've heard rumors that there's two more in the works (FEAR 2/3) but that's just a rumor... (Though I hope it's true!)
        • I just finished it last night.

          To me, it was just another run-of-the-mill FPS with some creepy moments thrown in. The most chilling were the sudden appearance of the girl right in front of me when I was on my way down a ladder, and then paxton at the bottom of same. But those were, really, the ONLY two moments that actually raised hair.

          The rest of it was standard seek and destroy. The bullet time, er... slo-mo was a nice touch, even if it was an obvious ripoff of Max Payne.

          That said, FEAR was infinitely bett
    • Would've been greater had they spent the time to finish out the office building's scripted scenes so they didn't have to change some character roles and hack the story up into bits easy enough to digest via lots and lots of voicemail.
      Worst scares for me? (Spoilers ahead naturally.)

      Seriously, spoilers.







      *The first time a vision of Fettel's victims flashes in your eyes.
      *The early Alma attack that sends you flying out of the warehouse window.
      *Alma surprising you from behind in the sewer access ar
  • The 7th Guest and the 11th Hour were really scary with all the live video mixed in with the haunted house and creepy people talking.

  • Doom 3, I agree. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sierpinski ( 266120 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @04:25PM (#13917658)
    Here I am, sitting in my basement, 30 years old, finding myself having to save the game and go upstairs (during the day, I might add) after hearing that faint whisper:

    "Sssssave me."
    or
    "This way."
    or
    "Follow me..."

    *gah*

    Towards the end of the game, the imp summoning was nothing. I'd wait until they were close, and blast them with my shotgun. But when I first started playing that game, I found I was more freaked out than the first time watching the Nightmare on Elm Street.
  • Now that game was scary. The sites and sounds of your brothers screaming as there're been ripped to shreds by the Genestealers.

    Not only was it a FPS, you can also fight hand to hand with the monsters.

    The sound was awesome.I remember playing the game with a friend and the stereo was up. All you can hear were gene stealers coming closer and your brothers fighting them off as bet they could. Eventually our defense was breached I started fighting them off hand to claw. As soon as I killed one I turned around an
  • I can not for the life of me remember this game which I'll describe. If someone else does, please do tell since I would like to perhaps try and find it for an emulator. Anyway, you are doing various rescue missions on desolate planets, you have to pick up humans which you see as blips on the screen. When you land you turn off your shields and whatnot and wait for the "person" to come into view running towards the ship. They begin to knock and you either decide to let them in, or fry them with the shields..
    • RTFA for your answer. Bill Kunkel mentions "Rescue on Fractalus" which is what you're describing.
    • "Rescue on Fractalus" scared the hell out of me too the first time one of the survivors I was picking up turned out to be an alien... It was about 1AM, lights are out, the TV volume was up high so I could hear the little guy knock, and BAM! The alien jumps up, very LOUD spooky sound you describe. Knocked me right out of my seat, I had to shut it off immediately and turn on all the lights! Needless to say I didn't get much sleep that night...
      I'd love to see a remake of that game. If my workload ever drops
  • The first several hours of Doom 3, playing with the lights off, gave me the biggest sense of fear ever in a video game, and I've played Silent Hill 1-3, Fatal Frame 1-2, System Shock 2. I had to actually takes breaks for a while because the game was getting under my skin.

    The problem is that the game repeats the same scares over and over for too long until they're no longer scary. It's like watching Nightmare on Elm Street 1 to 6, by the time you get to part 6 it's no longer scary and you forget how scary

  • For a moment I thought it was a list of scary things from Todd Hollenshead, and that John Romero was the second scariest thing to him. ;p

  • That there next game might be.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by elasticwings ( 758452 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @04:56PM (#13917954)
    DAIKATANA!!! Oh, imagine the nightmare of having that attached to your resume on your way to your next job, being that a flop that big probably cost your current one.
  • That's what scares me...
  • For me, I have never been more scared when playing the Paris Catacombs levels in Deus Ex (the first one). After playing more populated levels (such as New York and the very bright and not-scary Hong Kong) the isolation and darkness of the Catacombs was a very good contrast. Also, the much tougher enemies started to appear which only magnified the effect. Although Doom 3 was well scary, it still did not match the atmosphere that the developers of Deus Ex created for the Catacombs levels, probably because y
    • I have to agree with you on this one. Another thing scary about Deus Ex was the amazing level of detail put into the game environment... sitting all night with headphones on, lights out, and reading about how the world is crumbling in newspapers or public terminals.. the plague victims/zyme addicts made the atmosphere complete. Spooky. Not jump out of your seat scary, but complete immersion.

  • RE2 (Score:1)

    by dewc ( 700281 )
    I bought a Playstation, bought RE2 after deciding FF7 wasn't for me. I tried playing it, frustrated with the controls and the zombies biting me. Scared me pretty bad in that I gave up playing it and I was only 1 minute into the game. My neighbors in college picked it up and played in my room. All of the sudden, while I was there, he shrieked out very loud. Not to insult the ladies, but he literally sounded like a girl. I didn't experience it first hand, but I sure had a good laugh.

  • Don't know what it is called, but it is the level you walk through in its entirety without encountering a single enemy, and then switch some system on, and go back again.

    The game never gave me any indication that this would now be a phase without enemies, and the further I went, the more my palms started to sweat (always play with dimmed lights and with good headphones) because "pretty soon something just has to happen", and I really began shadow hugging and turned around corners as if it was a stealth ga

    • I haven't played Quake 4 yet, but there's a vaguely similar-sounding map in the classic Zerstörer: Testament of the Destroyer [telefragged.com] mod for the original Quake. You descend deeper and deeper into some horrifically complex facility without encountering a single enemy, in search of some elusive artefact - you reach a colossal underground arena and the Sanguinoch lies just in front of you, and you just know that when you take it, you're going to have to fight untold hordes of enemies in order to escape...

      Zerst

  • Clive Barker's Undying (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheWickedKingJeremy ( 578077 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @05:25PM (#13918206) Homepage
    I agree with a lot of other comments... System Shock 2 was scary, as was Resident Evil 4 (the Gamecube Resident Evils in general were quite well made).

    I also remember Undying being pretty scary in parts... I thought that game was underrated.

    • Undying is underrated. I certainly find it more enjoyable than Doom. But I felt it kind of trails off after a while: I thought the designers used up all their best material in the mansion at the start of the game. From the monastery onwards it basically transformed into a fairly straightforward shoot-em-up (albeit a high-quality one).

      Mind you, there was nothing quite like that moment when you walked up to a mirror, thinking that you were looking at your own reflection, only to realise a moment later that s

  • Ok.. not most of Max Payne, but the nightmare/hallucination scenes? Really creepy as you try to follow the cries of your baby.

    Of course, System Shock 2 as well... 7th Guest had its moments.

    Let us not forget getting chased by those ghosts in Super Mario either..

  • threads. the multi-core cpus in next generation consoles are forcing the issue.
  • There's a point in Eternal Darkness where, just as you leave one of the rooms, there's a loud pounding on a door somewhere. I was too scared to go on for several minutes.

    Shortly after that, I went upstairs, explored the bathroom, and realized my first instincts were probably right.

  • Monolith's "F.EAR" is the most recent game to actally creep me out. It's got hallucinatory effects that are genuinely spooky. Silicon Knights' "Eternal Darkness" had something similar (and was creepy in its own right), but it was tied to a "sanity meter"- so if you played right, you'd never even encounter them. Kinda unfortunate, since they made it possible (and desirable) to avoid the coolest feature of the game. FEAR, on the other hand, does it at set points so that it's unavoidable. It's definitely a gam
  • Has no one mentioned Thief: Deadly Shadows? Even though you play as the 'terror that lurks in the night,' the atmosphere of that game is thick with horror.

    For example, the mansion with the grieving, insane, widow-in-denial. As you lurk about in the shadows, lightning flashes over the sea, sporadically illuminating the dark corridors and stairwells. The servants and guests at the estate wander about, humming to themselves, unaware of you, laughing nervously when they catch the sound of your footsteps.

    What
  • That game scared the hell out of me. And Myst III: Exile is the only game so far that has scared me half to death because something moved..
  • The fact that Duke Nuke 'Em Forever may actually hit the shelves... Or: 1. Management change the minimum spec from a 5Ghz CPU to 286. 2. Deadline mysteriously alters from next year to next month. 3. Asked to put in a simulated porn film easter egg which could potentially kill the company through law suits and make you loose your job...
  • Judging by the characters left out of their games, developers are apparantly scared of gay people, women who don't fit some weird pubescent fantasy, and foreigners who aren't ethnic stereotypes.
  • A friend of mine actually owned a PC when I was in college. He had just gotten a huge 1GB hard drive and was downloading DOOM wads like a madman when he came across the Alien wad. The damn mobs moved so friggin fast. Playing the game with all of the lights turned off, a blanket over my head and monitor, with headphones on literally had me jumping out of the seat when one of the aliens would pop out of its hiding place and rip my face off.
  • I would have thought Electronic Arts would have got a much better run
  • Absolutely the first level of the Aliens TC for Doom. The first level. Not one monster on the whole level, but I wasted just about all my ammo shooting at random noises and doors that opened by themselves. -shudder-

    • Re:Scariest.. ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by thenerdgod ( 122843 )
      Amen absolutely. The Aliens TC for DOOM was scarier than DOOM itself, for exactly that reason: The level designers could afford to make the first level suspensful, because with DOOM, if the first level of the shareware version had NO MONSTERS, people wouldn't have bought the game.

      Sometimes the scariest parts of games are the parts where you're left alone, wondering when the hammer will fall. I also liked the Aliens TC for the novel approach to door monsters... they'd have partially transparent walls, so you

  • Doom 3, right. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 88NoSoup4U88 ( 721233 ) on Monday October 31, 2005 @08:08PM (#13919597)
    I call bullshit on Todd Hollenshead's comment that it's Doom 3 : When you've been so much involved in the process of designing such a game (or, to make a parallel, a horror movie) you know all the tricks involved in -making- it that scary :
    The zombie grungily walking towards you is now "that model made by Kenneth Scott with the grunting made by that voice actor (we had some pretty fun times creating those grunting loops !) that gets triggered once you walk past that cabinet".

    I think it's lame to call Doom 3 the scariest game : Not even because he is (partly) the creator of it himself, but because it just... wasn't.

  • My list (Score:2, Interesting)

    by sabit666 ( 457634 )
    3. Max Payne - dream sequence
    2. KOTOR 2 - Sith Tomb
    1. Half Life 2 - Ravenhome
  • Im sorry but I really dont see what was so scary about that level. To me it was just another level, samething but a little darker and with some kool traps. Doom III actually was scary, when a monster jumped out it really would scare you. F.E.A.R I cannt comment on because THEY DONT HAVE A LINUX PORT AND CEDEGA DOSNT WORK WITH IT!!!
  • The Alien game on the old C64 was the only game to ever really scare me.

    There I was, watching the bright-gray scenery drift by as I was looking for aliens when suddenly one popped up right in front of me.

    Took me about half a second to find the "Off" switch on the computer.

    Tried playing the game again on several occasions but it never got anywhere even close to that experience again.

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