Original subtitles

Humans have been telling stories to scare each other since the dawn of time.

And I think every time a piece of technology has come along,

whether it's printing press or film or, you know, or radio dramas, and it's like

every time media evolves,

it's one of the first things that, you know, somebody ends up making a scary story with it.

"Yellow creature gobbles dots while being pursued through a maze by monsters."

"Video games, are the latest craze to sweep the country and most of the world too."

"The interest in electronic games, apparently is at an all time high."

"A billion games are played every month."

"There are those who say the impact of video games isn't all good."

"Some youths are becoming spaced out on the space games."

Now I'm a kid of the 80s, right? So...

The explosion of the video game craze hit us in 1983

with arcades and all the big arcade games.

“The most advanced video game you can play...

is awaiting your discovery at Showbiz Pizza Place.

I remember one of the first times being scared by a game,

would be like Dragon's Lair.

"Dragon's Lair! The supreme adventure in video games!"

Like when you died in Dragon's Lair you became the skeleton.

I lost a lot of money on that stupid game.

$0.50. Come on!

"Williams Electronics dares you to climb into your interceptor,

to hyper speed into the outer limits of space,

and be face to face with Sinister!"

"Beware I live!"

You're trying to run away while you're trying to mine

these little asteroids all over the place, and it's like "run coward!"

"Run! Coward!"

Scariest game in the arcades. It was so good.

I absolutely think of Sinister, or Otto, who was the

bouncing ball in Berserk who would come after you...

"Intruder alert! Intruder alert!"

As an archetype for modern horror creatures who are stalking you.

"STARS!"

They provided that same level of

oh my God, I gotta get out, I gotta stay alive,

I gotta get out, I gotta stay alive.

"Beware! I live!"

Everything old is new right? That idea of the stalker in a game

that didn't just come from the games you play now, that came from games long ago.

Certainly 3D Monster Maze has one of the all time great stalkers in that dinosaur.

So original Resident Evil one, what is it?

It's a bunch of people in a scary mansion where something is going wrong.

That's what Sweet Home is.

But it's also really interesting because it's a turn based JR PG

where you fight the ghosts and you had all these different characters

who had different abilities that you had to kind of,

use to navigate your way through this mansion.

Sweet home was based off of the film of the same name, Sweet Home.

And when you see some of the screenshots for it

they're genuinely like horrifying. There's this one really iconic image

there is just this skeleton with like its flesh melting off, reaching towards you,

and it is a really effective piece of horror.

It all takes place because a mother lost her child, who climbed into an incinerator.

The mother started bringing children back to the house and killing them so

her child would have ghost friends.

That has stuck with me for years, and I will never forget that.

The idea that it happens so many years before Resident Evil or

Alone in the Dark or anything else, is kind of insane.

There's that feeling where it was not a power fantasy. You were not the Ghost busters.

You were not obliterating this mansion. You had to think about how to move forward.

You had to consider how to move your party members

and like, avoid putting them in dangerous situations.

There's so much of survival horror's legacy that goes back to Sweet Home.

The first horror game that I played that I would say

felt like a horror game to me was probably Alone in the Dark.

You know, before that, in the 80s,

I don't feel like the graphics fidelity was enough to,

to feel like I was in a horror game.

But Alone in the Dark felt spooky.

"It's the kind of place ghosts run away from in terror."

"How can I describe what I saw?"

"No! What words are capable of explaining such evil?"

There wasn't really jump scares to it, but it was the idea of horror inside a story

that was happening to the character's psych that was unraveling.

This was a game that used cinematic camera angles

to really great effect, to create a feeling of suspense.

Not knowing what was lurking around the corner.

The immersion was brilliant. And, you know, it's kind of that

first experience of something smashing through a window.

And you're really trying to kind of pivot and tank control your way back out of it.

Those little challenges. You weren't just fighting monsters. You were fighting the controls.

But in a lot of ways, it's the same feeling of like, trying to run away from something

in real life and tripping over. Your stupid fucking body will not listen to you. You know?

And there's a real tension to that.

Edward Barnaby looks like he's ready to kind of

do a jolly old Englishman fistfight when he's fighting the zombies,

and there's nothing quite like charging a big kick or punch.

And then you miss. And then you're dead.

So that's the joy of Alone in the Dark.

"Luckily, devil worship makes me smile. So this is my idea of a paid vacation"

I would say, Alone in the Dark and yeah, maybe Clock Tower too,

kind of set the stage for the kind of mood you should aim for.

I think they're examples of how important the mood is

and how you use things like camera angles and ambient music to really reinforce that mood.

So, Clock Tower...

I could be wrong about this, but it was one of the first instances

with the idea of a stalker enemy.

And stalker enemies are a particular kind of enemy

that generally only really appear in horror games,

because they don't make sense for any other type of game.

What is like a primary function in most video games?

Navigating a world.

How well do you know this level? How well do you know where

like its safe points are, where its item pickups are, all this kind of stuff?

Now what happens when you drop an invincible monster

into that game that is designed to follow you?

And in the case of Glock Tower, it was the Scissor Man.

It's so subtle and it really gives you a sense of unease,

because nothing happens for a little while.

You're just going around meeting people, then all of a sudden...

Bang. Scissor Man turns up.

You just hear the scissors and you hear the music kick up,

and then you know you're in danger now.

Scissor Man can come at any point, and you have to get your character

to safety as quickly as you can.

So the classical video game protagonist is very athletic.

Has the ability to defend themselves

and, you know, handles their task really well.

But in a horror game, it makes sense to be someone who is

not athletic, doesn't even want to do the things that they're doing

and just want to get the hell out of there.

You don't hear the synopsis for a horror game and think, “I wish I was that person!”

“That would be great!" Like, that's not the case.

It's more that you read a synopsis for a horror story

or horror game and you're like...

"Oh God, that would be really crap being them."

But you can also see if you play it today, you're like, "oh wow! This is so annoying to play."

And this is a really big design issue in horror.

In Mario, you have to think, okay, what is the best way of jumping

from one place to another? What's the most fun?

But in a horror game you think more like, okay,

what sort of movement would create the emotions I'm after?

For one of the first times in video games, you're not charged with tackling,

you know, an enemy head on and trying to defeat them.

You have to hide. You have to outwit them.

I think that really resonated with a lot of people.

Clock Tower really had a strong impact in terms of advancing horror

with atmosphere, but it wasn't until a year later

that Resident Evil came along and really had that global impact.

Thinking back to the original Resident Evil, I remember

it being one of the first 3D cinematic experiences in a game.

"Chris Red field."

"Jill Valentine."

"Resident Evil"

I think, you know, before that, there was Alone in the Dark,

but with Resident Evil, it was much more cinematic focused,

less Lovecraft, and more in-your-face horror...

You know, you're walking around that corner and a zombie bites you

in the back of the neck, and you have to shake off the zombie.

There's no doubt that Resident Evil changed the game when it came to horror gaming.

The first game blew the lid off of what was possible in horror games.

First of all, it took a very well known genre of horror films. The zombie genre.

Certainly heavily borrowed from the god George Romero.

And it just was like nothing you'd ever seen.

That was a genuine jump scare, a trigger moment for me right there.

I was like, wow, these games are highly visceral.

"Hurry! This way!"

"That was too close. You were almost a Jill sandwich!"

"You're right!"

Resident Evil 1 is definitely iconic as an experience

when you, you know, explore that universe for the first time.

But I think that Resident Evil 2 adds something even more polished and special.

You feel like you belong in the shoes of Leon.

"What have we got here?"

Because it's his first day. Doesn't really know what he's doing.

"What are these things?"

So when you go into that world, when you go into Raccoon City,

he doesn't know much about it, and neither do you.

I liked it so much. I stayed up for almost three days. I hardly slept at all.

"You're up early."

"I haven't been to bed."

- "Wait! Don't shoot!" - "Get down!"

More than anything else that really got my attention

was the different perspectives on the characters.

"Name's Leon Kennedy, nice to meet you."

"Mine's Claire. Claire Red field. I came to find my brother Chris."

I remember playing that through as Leon and then straight

away going back, and I'm like, I'm doing this as Claire straight away.

I had no desire to play anything else.

That was the first game where the stalker element was brought in with Mr. X.

I think a lot of people assume that Nemesis was the

first character like that in the series, but Mr. X was.

The boss who breaks through the wall that doesn't happen the first time you play it.

It scared the shit out of me.

I just was really moved by that moment and sort of the power of the medium

to leave this lasting impression.

If you can create something that leaves a lasting impression

on people that they talk about for years later,

then I think as creators, we've done our job.

And that specific moment for me was like,

okay, I've never seen this before, I love this, I want to see more of it.

If I was going to make a video game, I want to do the same kind of things.

"You're right. This is just the beginning."

So I would say horror on the PSI was shaped

by the console's technical limitations in some really interesting ways.

One of them was the idea of per-rendered backgrounds, the idea that

there was not enough juice in that machine to do proper 3D backgrounds.

Although the PlayStation was a 3D console capable of rendering games with full polygons...

"Users lose all sense of reality and enter another world."

The cost of making that happen, and at the point

in which Resident Evil was released, which is early on in the PlayStation's

life cycle when developers weren't as familiar with the hardware

that led to the use of per-rendered backgrounds.

The way we're going to create the illusion of 3D is that once

your character hits a certain points, we are going to cut to a different shot,

like maybe this one shot is overhead, and then this camera cuts

and the next shot, the character is now facing the camera.

You see precisely what the game wants you to see.

Like it's not even a workaround for limitations,

it's limitation causing genuine, creatively brilliant decisions.

Then, of course, infamously, you have the mist of Silent Hill.

That first generation PlayStation had a draw distance

of about two feet in front of your nose before you get pop up or,

you know, artifacts and things happening so they solved, you know,

they solved that and they just brought the the fog plane like right there.

And then they were like, wow, that's actually scary to move to do that.

I feel like that must have been the moment where Silent Hill was born.

My first experience in the Silent Hill world was my co-writer,

Patrick had picked up this game, and I remember watching

Patrick play this game where he's walking through the fog

and he keeps walking through fog and fog and you hear a dog bark.

And you come around the corner, and you can't see more than ten feet in front of you.

I'm like, "this is terrifying!"

The very first five minutes of the game are amazing.

You see this disparate group of images, you hear this guitar twang playing

this theme song, and you don't know, like, are we watching a flash forward, a flash back?

What's reality? Because sometimes we're in the car with, Harry and Cheryl,

and sometimes we're like, seeing the nurse and all of these other things.

And then we see Cyril, we crash...

And then there's a guy named Harry, and he's just literally on a street.

And off you go.

It's one of the games that's both visually horror and narrative horror at the same time.

It's one of the very few games that actually does a really good job of that.

I love my Resident Evil. Resident Evil is awesome, but it is basically, this guy's an even bigger demon

than the last one, how am I going to take him down?

Silent Hill, on the other hand, is...

Oh my gosh, this thing is going to affect me deeply for the next few days.

At a time where scary games were kind of more about gore,

or it was gun based violence and shooters and things like that,

Silent Hill just made this like very slow burn, slow paced,

very claustrophobic psychological horror game that

clearly just rang everybody's bell in the horror genre.

I seen games that had stuff that assaulted you and stuff that attacked you

and monsters and whatnot, but I'd never seen a game that was relying on

the absence of danger to be dangerous.

So much of what makes Silent Hill So creepy is what you don't see.

It's the sound design. It's the fact that you can't see that far in front of you.

It's what could be around the corner that maybe never is.

That's what makes Silent Hill so terrifying.

"I'm so scared. Help me."

Silent Hill was a game about just fucking nightmares.

It was a game about you can't go back to this thing that once was.

And in the case of Silent Hill, one, it's this idea of memories,

This little girl's memories that slowly become corrupted

after she went through all these awful things

and you are now experiencing them.

It felt dark and it felt horrifying and felt personal.

You know, it felt like something that was made by people

that are hurting, like, you know, people that were struggling in their own way.

It just became so distinctive and beautiful

to anything else that was coming out on the PlayStation at the time.

It wasn't a mascot platformed. It wasn't that edgy brand of PSI game.

As much as it was told, be a clone of Resident Evil, it didn't feel like anything else.

And it's to this day a fucking incredible game.

“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill."

"You promised you'd take me there again someday..."

"But you never did."

"Well, I'm alone there now."

So I think my most memorable horror gaming experience would actually be the trailer

for Silent Hill 2.

"James, honey, did something happen to you?"

"Are you confusing me with someone else?"

It's such a strange and iconic trailer. And the monsters like the scary stuff, It's nearly an aside.

What that trailer really puts across is like, kind of the just

really distinctive vibe of Silent Hill 2.

And like, this town that doesn't exist anywhere and is broken and wrong.

“I'm not your Mary."

Imagine making a game where the narrative is the central

focal point of the game, and everything else works in with that.

The game play, the graphics, you know, the audio.

All of these come together to be something bigger than the sum of its parts,

but centrifugal to all of that is the narrative.

“I got a letter..."

"The name on the envelope said... Mary."

"My wife's name."

"Mary died of that damn disease three years ago."

"Could Mary really be there?"

"I guess really don't care if it's dangerous or not. I'm going to town either way."

I think the prevailing feeling for me when I play Silent Hill 2

is a feeling of lonesomeness.

Just terrible desolation and solitude, and every sound is magnified.

The drip of the water or the echoes of your footsteps.

I think that time that is spent doing nothing except being alone

works on you in a certain way, that other things don't.

It's a question of tempo. When am I going to get out of here? How am I going to get out of here?

It lets you sort of soak in your own misery.

I will state to the end of my days that it's

got to be one of the best stories in any video game I've ever seen.

Mr. Owaku, he was the guy who wrote the original script, and he was originally

just a programmer on Silent Hill 1, from what I understand.

And he was a very quiet, very dark guy, always dressed in black, never smiled.

But he wrote this incredibly sensitive, beautiful, complex story that allowed for

just tremendous insight into the characters.

Whenever he asked me, you know, how does this feel? What does this sound like?

We would have a very close conversation about things like what's Mary's motivation here?

What's James motivation here?

What kinds of a feeling are you trying to elicit in this scene?

In some cases even, he would change the Japanese if he felt that the English needed to be changed.

I remember playing it in a high school,

and the more of life that I experienced, the more I appreciated the themes of the game.

You know, this is like an embodiment of your...

Pent up sexual aggression or this is a metaphor for sickness or for a metaphor for someone's

trauma with an abusive family member, things like that.

When I first went in there for a meeting, they had asked me to come to,

to Tokyo to talk to them, and we sat together in a big meeting room.

They were basically asking me my input as a American.

They were still talking about the themes that they wanted to go for.

What about abortion? Can we show a, you know, a fetus or bloody fetus? And I'm "hmmm..."

So we talked about some of those things and how much push back

and what kind of reaction they might expect.

So much of what's great about Silent Hill 2 is like,

you are playing this sad, lonely man. You feel his sluggish movements, you

you nearly feel like his complete ineptness

in a way that I don't think you can write into a script and shoot.

What a great horror game is,

is it takes something that we are all afraid of,

and then you don't get to be a bystander.

You have to be there. You have to be in that space.

And you have to deal with that world, and that's, that's really, really special.

And so when the conclusion of that game hits

and you realize what he is...

It's staggering because it's you, you know, like it is you.

And, like, that's what horror games can do.

Silent Hill 2 is definitely mind blowing.

When I first played it, this was a game that I pretty much inhaled.

Like I think I finished it at like 3 a.m., like it was,

this was a game where I was like, I feel like I'm into the final stretch.

I can't disengage from it. I'm just going to keep playing.

And I remember at 3 a.m., you have like Mary's letter coming up.

And I was, like, crying, you know?

And then I sat for like, half an hour being like, what have I just witnessed?

I cry every single time I hear her do that.

And I cried on the set and she cried on the set.

And I think everybody cried on the set.

It was, a deeply emotional thing to write at the time.

And it's even more deeply emotional now for me.

Because, because my wife died two years ago, you know?

My wife's death has reframed, the way I see James now.

And the way I. The way I understand how James got to be, you know, so messed up about it.

"I want you to know this, James."

“I'll always love you."

If I got a letter from my dead wife? Hell, yeah. I would go to a special place.

I'd be confused! I also might start to question my own memories, my own sanity.

I might start to, you know, bring up all sorts of feelings of guilt and,

Yeah. That letter, it's a Killer.

Yamaoka showed that you could actually put

almost the opposite of what music you would expect.

I think he he took like a massive step on for horror music in general.

And you do, you hear that element in Silent Hill.

There's an element of trip hop there you know, where it's slowed down beats.

It kind of fits that dreamlike world.

But I really think it was revolutionary to put the combination of music choices that he did together.

So from ambient stuff that resembled, maybe like what was in Jacob's Ladder or something like that.

That was very discordant and almost mechanical sounding, industrial sounding,

to this beautiful, kind of sweet, ghostly melodies.

Yeah, just so memorable. I think, like at the time,

Quake came out and they had the Trent Reznor score there,

which was a similar thing where it wasn't really musical,

it was sounds, and it was atmospheric.

I think both those games at the time,

with these kind of industrial soundtracks for me was was kind of next level.

"Yamaoka also produced all the sound effects. A total of 50 sounds, not counting the nuances."

"They too break all the sound rules applicable to the horror survival game."

So yeah, for me, you know, Yamaoka's genius is the soundscapes, you know.

That horrible echoing the horrible footsteps, the horrible

shrieks and background noises that just get you so nervous.

There are certain visceral sounds that are just almost atavistic in their evocation of fear.

And they're usually often wild animals.

One of the nastiest things I've ever heard is a pig screaming.

It's horrendous.

Sound from the very beginning of games has always been an element of the horror of it.

Space invaders plays a heartbeat.

"Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum."

The more space invaders you Kill, "ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum!"

It gets, faster and faster and faster and faster.

On a more micro level, I think that the essence

of making good horror sounds are tapping into those universal,

scary sounds that inherently terrify us.

Cracking bones.

Gush.

Stabs.

An echo-y chamber where something might be dripping or moving,

things closing in on you. Those are all inherent scary moments for us as humans.

"The fuck is that?"

I remember doing the Rat King in Last of Us 2,

and when I first saw it, I was like, oh my God, these guys

their imagination is off the charts.

There are so many audio cues of what you're about to experience,

as you're getting closer but you don't know what it is.

So you just feel that building unease. Something is here. It's huge.

I'm not going to be able to fight it. What is going on?

And then when you finally get it...

Just the sound alone of hearing, "pakakaka..."

Is like having a spider running at you. It's creepy. It's a really creepy sound

hearing all those feet happen.

Oh and I think it actually had, like, saliva in its mouth.

So we had to do this kind of sticky, gooey sound when it would open its mouth.

Because it's a chase sequence, you can't constantly look back and, like, see what he's doing.

You can't really rely on the visual horror as much.

You have to rely on the sounds of it's getting closer, it's getting farther away.

Such a good use of the sound design to make me really tense and make me have to run faster.

I don't think you can have a great horror experience

without great sound, but it's so easy to not notice it also.

And actually, to a certain extent, it's part of what makes a great soundtrack or a great soundscape right?

It's the fact that it's not intrusive and it's just there to take everything else and raise it up.

And sometimes it's as simple as those intimate moments,

they sit on a couch and they take their backpack off.

Those are the moments that make you feel like you're dealing with real people.

I'm not watching animated people. I'm really in the room with them.

I think that sound is so important to horror

because it helps to build the anticipation.

And also the sound of the actors voice really matters.

"Why are you doing this? Get the fuck off me!"

“No! No!"

The mood of a horror game is what makes it scary or not.

You need that mood of the game to be able to draw the audience in

and make them feel like they're in that actual game.

Horror is a vibe, it's a feeling. People feel horror. People feel fear.

And you can feel fear in any genre of video games.

You could feel fear when you're playing Tetris because everything keeps falling too fast.

Like people have to feel some sort of tension in response to that.

The first game that I played that scared me was the original Myst.

Which isn't a horror game and isn't particularly scary, but I was a very sensitive young child so,

it just had this atmosphere because it's like just you

on this completely abandoned, weird set of different islands,

and at one point you find like the secret area and you go into it and it's just this horrible,

like murder chamber, like I guess is the best way to put it.

The best example of horror that I've ever had in a game is in Warcraft 3,

with Arthas, when Arthas slowly turns and you suddenly have to go murder an entire village.

"These people have all been infected. This entire city must be purged."

That to me was absolutely horrifying, and I stopped playing Warcraft 3 for about a week

because the game had taken me on a path I did not want to go.

I did not want to be the bad person.

I think it's good for other games to have a little bit of that sense of horror.

I felt it in Red Dead Redemption even, where I'm just out in the wilderness on my own,

and just a creepy feeling of it.

You do get a sense of power from a lot of games,

whereas, you know, horror is it's the opposite feeling.

And I think it does benefit a lot of games where you can counterbalance

some of that power play with feeling smaller.

And I guess I think back to Max Payne as kind of one of the horror games

that does a really good job of that.

"Max! No! Please Max! Why? I didn't mean to. I'm sorry."

The whole sequence in Max Payne that game, I was so lost in it for a long time.

The baby and the whole thing with walking along that red line,

and I love when when games do that.

When, when non-horror games, have a little moment

that sort of switch things up for a moment.

"No, no no, please, God no!"

If you sit someone down today and have them play Thief,

they're still going to be scared by some parts of that game.

It gets really tense and weird.

Playing the original Thief: The Dark project on PC.

There's, a sequence in that game, where you go deeper and deeper into the earth.

That kind of level of, the 3D geometry in those games, like, had enough

weight to it that even though it was, it was kind of crude,

I genuinely felt that I was descending deeper and deeper beneath the earth,

and I could feel like the weight of all that, that kind of dirt above me,

and it felt extremely scary and claustrophobic.

The sound that the ghosts make is not like a "000" ghost sound

it's like a screams from the depths of hell sort of ghost sound.

The thing about Thief is you never knew what was around the corner.

If it was going to be another guard or something really weird.

So it managed to be scary without trying.

"The Shalebridge Cradle...

When anybody talks about Thief 3, they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah,

not as good as the first two games but "Robbing the Cradle" though!

"I'm used to the dark, but this feels like a house. with bad dreams."

There have been entire think pieces written about that level, and it's

it's such an insane departure from everything yes, and it is a horror level.

And it's so scary and so effective.

"They filled up a bottle with my blood. It's down in the storm cellar. It's very dark down there."

You play through the entire first half of that level and there are no enemies.

But you are so scared that you don't take more than, like a couple of steps

because, you know, they do so much with sound design and lighting

that you're just like, well, something's going to kill me in a second, right?

Something's going to pop out from behind a door, and it never does.

Not until you get to the basement. It is such a well designed level.

The "Robbing the Cradle" level features an abandoned asylum,

which, of course, is a very common trope within horror.

It's one of those primal fears, the loss of sanity and autonomy

and this is something that has a lot of its roots in Lovecraft horror.

There's an interesting parallel there between Thief and Eternal Darkness,

where we're looking at the loss of sanity.

"How the knowledge changed me. It will also change you."

"You too will come to understand or you will perish."

Eternal Darkness is one of my go-to games

whenever I talk about horror games and the kind of things that I'd like to do

in horror games, and the kind of things that I try to get

publishers and platform holders to let me do in horror games.

"I cannot say what was the true beginning, nor am I sure of its end."

"The Guardians grow restless."

I love the way they wrote Eternal Darkness.

"My family has crossed their path. Their attention turns to my granddaughter."

The switching POV was brilliant

because you don't know who's going to live and who's going to die.

It's like a Shakespearean tragedy in a way,

because you know the ending for a lot of these characters

but then seeing them play out, you're kind of like, oh,

you know, I was getting attached to that guy or girl,

and now they just have met a horrible fate.

"Charlemagne!"

You not only don't know who's going to survive,

you don't know who's going to turn out to be a bad guy.

"It is now your destiny to fight the eternal darkness."

They break the fourth wall so marvelously, so exquisitely.

It's got, like, a Lovecraft, sanity mechanic in there

but when your character's sanity starts to dwindle, they start hallucinating.

And sometimes hallucinations are things like monsters that aren't really there or,

the maze, you know, the labyrinth changes and things like that.

They're so interesting and varied, from statues heads

turn to watch you as you're walking down a hall and you're like, did that happen?

Or was am I just really anxious? And it could be both.

My personal favorite is the Blue Screen of Death.

Your game would just pretend that the console crashed.

"This isn't really happening!"

The best one was when it looked like the game save file

got corrupted, and all of your progress was wiped out.

Talk about identifying what scares gamers the most.

"This can't be happening."

Fucking diabolical.

"Rated M for mature."

I can remember, you know, thinking that my television had turned itself off.

Watching as my character's head just falls off mid walk cycle. And I'm going, what is going on?

Or the volume in your TV starts to go down.

The volume down trick was a big one for me, because when it first happened, I immediately

ran to my remote and started turning it up all the way.

So when the volume came back it...

Scared the crap out of me.

I don't think you could get away with stuff like that now,

just because of the way TVs are built.

I remember when we were getting close to shipping the game,

I sat down with Mr. Miyamoto and a bunch of other leaders from Nintendo,

and everyone was worried.

We're telling people were deleting their save game and we're really not.

What happens if they take their Gamecube and smash it against the wall because they think it's a bug?

"This can't be happening."

The answer was, I don't know what this means for Nintendo,

but I know if someone did that to me, that would be a moment

I would never forget for the rest of my life.

I will always remember when that happened.

And I think, I think it's those kind of moments that everyone should aspire to.

I thought it was such a good way to play with the fact that this is a video game and not a movie.

This is not something that you're watching.

This is something that you are experiencing and it's unique to you.

It makes the story tailored to to you and to what you've been doing.

Some people went insane on purpose, and other times

people never wanted to see sanity effects, kept their sanity at maximum.

So it's very interesting to see the dichotomies out there when people are playing the game.

That was really the opportunity and exploration we were allowed to do with that system.

Breaking the fourth wall and having the player question

what is real and what isn't.

"A story centuries in the making."

"A thriller that blurs the line between reality and illusion."

My one thing that I would recommend to anyone who's doing these kind of things

is don't be afraid. Push things!

"You are hereby damned!"

What made me do Legacy of Kain? All these people telling me we couldn't.

What made us do some of the systems in Eternal Darkness?

People saying, oh, you can never have a game with 12 characters

that made no sense to anybody.

"Video games are causing violence." I'm like, oh yeah? I'll show you.

And it's those kind of things that I think,

impassioned creators to do something special for gamers.

"The darkness comes! It will damn us all!"

"Alpha team is flying around the forest situated in northwest Raccoon City."

"But we are searching for the helicopter of our compatriots. Bravo team."

"We continued our search for the other members and it turned into a nightmare."

"Head for that mansion!"

The very first time I played Resident Evil 1,

the remake for Gamecube, which is one of my favorite games ever.

It was so cool.

And it came at just the right time. It was the remake we didn't know we needed.

But it stepped it up.

"Live the nightmare. Resident Evil exclusively from Capcom"

"Rated M for Mature. Only on Nintendo Gamecube"

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to think that that came out only six years after the original,

but back then, technological and creative advances had very high returns

in such a short period of time that you just will never, ever see again in my opinion.

The Crimson Heads are essentially what a zombie evolves into if you don't,

kill them all the way, if they're only partially dead

as Billy Crystal said in Princess Bride, they're only mostly dead.

Resident Evil games traditionally got rid of the zombie bodies after you killed them.

When you're playing the remake for the first time, they don't disappear,

So you're assuming maybe they finally have the technology

to keep the bodies around, and then all of a sudden

they pop up. It's just like, holy shit. Like, what was that?

"Wesker! Barry! Help!"

You know you could tell they were aware of the reception to the original game,

but I think it was so ingrained in the DNA of that game that they kept,

you know, they kept the cheesiness alive.

"That was a close one! A second late, you would have fit nicely into a sandwich."

Chris and Jill are iconic in that they're average people who are put into a horrific situation.

I think both Chris and Jill, they don't have any special powers.

I mean, Jill is the master of unlocking, but other than that...

"Here's a lock pick. It might be handy if you, the master of unlocking, take it with you."

"You'd make better use of it."

You know, they're just average people. They're doing a job and they're in this horrific situation.

They are subject to all of the wear and tear that normal human beings are.

They, certainly can be Killed, as you will find out

many, many times over while you're trying to get through the game.

"No, Barry! You viral cultured freak!"

So there's this idea in media theory of the Final Girl, which was popularized by Carol J. Clover.

So the final girl is someone who, unlike her peers has managed to make it

to the end of the film, often escaping the killer or even defeating him.

We want women to think of themselves as able to face these demons, face these

horrors around every corner or behind every door and Jill Valentine does it really well.

When we hear the term final girl, I think, admittedly, all of us jump straight to the slasher film.

But really, there was this quiet revolution that was happening

within the PSI and PS2 especially era of video games

where we're seeing the final girl really come to the forefront.

"What the hell was that?"

"All I know is that things are getting really screwy around here,

and I got a weird feeling it's got something to do with me."

You know, so much of Silent Hill 3 is about this teenage girl,

and she's not, like, a hot video game babe, like she is not Ivy from Soul Calibur 2.

"Give up already."

She is a really normal looking 2000s teenager.

"Dad. It's me."

Heather in Silent Hill 3 is a very interesting character.

She faces horrors that are really presented as

being horrors equated to the feminine experience.

"Just accept it Alessa! The pain will disappear."

But what's interesting about Heather is that she's not a victim of her femininity.

Although she's tackling these monsters, which, you know, might look very phallic.

Or she's being stalked by a man, but she never actually interacts with them.

These are horrors that women sort of experience on the day to day, albeit,

you know, they're presented in a much grander way in Silent Hill 3.

But having her be such a grounded character,

you kind of you relate to her more, especially as a woman.

"Are you still following me?"

Heather's performance was very, very natural.

I remember the audition.

She did the scene where she finds her dead father

sitting in front of the TV, and she just really went for it.

"NO!"

For the rest of the project, her line reads were always super natural.

"He loved me just like I was his very own daughter."

Insightful.

"I never had the chance."

She did a great job.

"To tell you how happy you made me."

Fatal Frame, Fatal Frame 2 specifically, which is a Japanese game set

in a little Japanese village in the middle of nowhere.

Genuinely one of the scariest games I've ever played. It's really frightening.

"I don't want to kill anyone."

It had a mechanic, which was, a camera. Kind of an exorcism camera.

It's such a cool device, you know, for horror design it's awesome because you have to

You have to get the ghost in frame, you know?

And you have to take a nice picture of the ghost in order to fight it.

"1998 I'll never forget it."

"The virus broke out in a nearby mountain community, Raccoon City."

Six years have passed since that horrendous incident.

"Forget everything you think you know about Resident Evil."

"I'm under the president's order to rescue you."

"My father?"

"Who are these people?"

Still to this day, the best game, in my opinion, that's ever been made

is Resident Evil 4.

"“Shit."

It's an extraordinary game.

"Son of a..."

It was two discs worth, on the Gamecube, but it was huge,

and it covered such a vast array of new dynamics, the shooting was amazing.

"Freeze."

The horror was great. It looked fantastic.

The first time like, you go into the village

in the first time, and it's that opening where they just throw you to the wolves basically.

And you, you're scrambling to survive.

And then the guy with a chainsaw shows up and it's just it's just phenomenal.

It feels like you're outside in the woods, you know, like it feels really great.

Extremely well done. You know, you have to look at those details like those, those,

those tripwires that that'll just blow up C4 and kill you immediately.

Like the world is a world of traps and bad things, and you're just trying

to survive this and try to, you know, rescue the president's daughter.

"We kidnap the president's daughter in order to give her our power."

-"And then send her back." '"NO."

It was such a departure and broke all the previous rules with Resident Evil,

where it added action elements.

Throw out all the previous tank controls and survival elements where it was hard to control

and make it a fast action game, and then at the same time, keep those elements of horror.

I think a lot of people thought that wasn't possible until then,

and they certainly showed the way that, no, no, this is very possible,

and this is how we're going to do it.

They have redefined this whole series now,

and this is so much better.

Felt so good from that viewpoint behind the character

and a lot of good decisions, you know, so much audio design, you name it, the balancing.

"What are you selling? What are you buying?"

"What are you buying? What are you selling?"

Seriously, that whole game was perfection.

"Hehehehe, thank you!"

Resident Evil 4 was so good at what it did that everything after that was basically

just trying to imitate that action heavy over-the-shoulder shot

and survival horror, as we knew it kind of went away for a while.

"Where's everyone going? Bingo?"

"Bad dream?"

So the way that Patrick and I got involved in Silent Hill: Homecoming was that,

a college friend of ours was a producer on the game

when it was being developed at what was then, The Collective.

The Collective had just done a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game.

They had had some success using some outside writers

who were not video game writers, to come in and work on the game.

And it was to be the first time that an American company

was going to be developing a Silent Hill game.

It was going to be the first next gen Silent Hill installment.

They had been developing it for a little bit.

They had come up with a story, and they'd gotten to the point

where they said, we need to bring in some writers.

All right kids. Coming from film writing, which is a 100 page script,

This, here, is all the writing for Silent Hill: Homecoming.

It is every in-game cinematic. It is every character bio. It is every string file. For example,

"grunts in pain, teeth knocked out, hard number two."

Like we had to write all these little things in here.

Here's Wheeler's ambient chatter for Alex. Like, I mean, there was just so much writing

that had to be done in this game.

The other interesting thing that happened while working on Silent Hill: Homecoming is the movie came out.

And boy, did we have to pull a lot from the film. That was a directive right from Konami,

because they were now trying to turn that into a whole thing.

There are things from previous games that they wanted to sprinkle

into these games, to make sure that the fans had something to play with.

Robbie the Rabbit. You know, the nurses from the movie, obviously Pyramid Head.

Does Pyramid Head make sense in Silent Hill: Homecoming?

Not entirely.

Pyramid head is absolutely retrofitted canon. But the truth is, Pyramid Head lives

as a picture on a wall in the Silent Hill Historical Society

as being an executioner as part of the town's history.

And I would say, well, if Konami put the stamp on it, then

it becomes canon, like people retrofit canon in Star Wars and the Avengers,

Marvel, DC, like we retrofit canon all the time.

You work with some kind of intellectual property.

You're going to have a couple of people who don't like it. Or maybe a lot of people don't like it.

“I had no idea.”

“And if you did, would you have done anything about it?”

I actually thought that was a pretty good game.

But yeah, I, I would just imagine that part of the problem

with the post Silent Hill 4 titles is just that

like, there was never one studio,

like they would spread it around different studios with different visions

and different capabilities, and I always got the impression

that they didn't have enough budget to really get those titles

to the quality that Capcom could do with Resident Evil.

I remember Shattered Memories being such a different take,

because of, you know, it does this psychological profile

at the start of the game where it asks you various questions and you

have to answer them, and then it tailors the game to those fears.

- "Yes?" - "The new patient is here."

The framing device is of a woman in a psychiatrist's office who's telling this story,

like working through her memories, her shattered memories.

“Let's get started then."

And the choices that you make in that office are reflected in the world of the game.

So, for example, one of the most memorable sequences,

you're coloring in a house and it's full mechanic.

But then when we go back into the horror story,

you approach a house and it's all the colors

that you did in the psychiatrist office, because it's her story. It's the story she's telling.

We knew that the kind of survival horror template had become a bit old.

Right? A bit stagnant, and so we really tried to throw out

all the assumptions about what a horror game is, right?

Which at that time we're pretty much going back to Alone in the Dark

and Resident Evil, as these two games that kind of define things.

You're using guns, bludgeoning things to beat up on enemies

that are usually kind of dumb and numerous and zombie like right?

And it felt weird to us looking at Silent Hill and going,

well, this is a psychological horror.

"Where are you taking me? Where am I?"

If you go watch a movie in that genre or you go read a book in that genre,

the protagonist is not running around with a pipe bludgeoning zombies

Everyone has dreams where they are being chased by someone

and they can't escape right? It's like a very kind of primal fear.

The chase is the form of action.

I remember trying to justify it by saying it was Pac-Man.

There's a certain thing where, like executives, they're like, "what even is chase game play?"

"How does that work?" And I'd be like "it's Pac-Man."

Right, you're in a maze being chased by ghosts. It's Pac-Man. Right?

And then they're like, oh, okay, I understand, there's like a core

existing example of this thing working, then I'm going to feel clever.

So, in Silent Hill: Downpour, there was talk and serious

consideration of just like taking combat entirely out of the game.

Like not giving you the ability to have combat.

They had experimented with it and Konami wasn't happy with it and said, no,

give the player the ability to fight back.

Silent Hill: Downpour, I feel, just got like a really bad rap

because it was trying to do new things when Silent Hill players

just wanted more Silent Hill.

What I mostly saw was a Central European, you know, Czech team trying to ape Silent Hill 2.

They're clearly keyed in on Silent Hill 2 and maybe a little bit of Silent Hill 3.

They were trying their damnedest to replicate that and imitate it.

I don't know that anybody could really.

My advice to them was like, look, don't try to mimic Silent Hill 2.

Don't try to capture J-horror like Japanese horror

become Czech horror because you guys are actually really creepy.

Let's take a look around your town. It's like right up the street from the development

studio was this crematorium that was just going 24/7 and filling the sky with smoke and weird smells.

They made churches out of bones. There was a dark element in the Czech Republic,

and it was a former Soviet state. So it kind of had that like Soviet concrete brutalism

and industrialization happening around the town.

I was like, forget what the Japanese teams have done with Silent Hill.

That's like uniquely theirs, and we're not going to imitate it.

Let's figure out what the Czech Silent Hill looks like. So that's where we went.

"What is this this place?"

That was what got me into Silent Hill in the first place.

Like, oh, wow, this is such an interesting vibe.

Like, this is a team that is just, you know, running with it

and putting something out there that feels very fresh and unique.

So if we're just going to spend all our time copying

what that team did, you've already lost.

Like you've already stepped away from that idea of trying to make something interesting.

So many horror games that came out in that period, like the

the early aughts up into, you know, like for like ten years, let's call it,

horror was very action driven.

Like, Dead Space was scary as hell. Clearly a horror game.

But...

A little more of an action one, and it was a little more, you know, there was a little more shooty

shooty bang bang gun gun stuff happening in that then,

creeping around and feeling, you know, vulnerable and stuff.

Resident Evil used those elements in the way that it did.

It just eventually became the dominating approach in the genre.

There's not just one type of horror game. There's there's different subgenres within it, just like

there's subgenres of horror fiction and horror film.

The rules about those games, the rules to making them the kind of best practices,

that you put into place is very different depending on like,

are you a survival horror game or are you a horror shooter?

Are you sci-fi horror? Are you gothic horror?

Are you a walking sim kind of horror game?

Like, there's there's different rules and there's different expectations.

So I remember a long time ago,

and this was in a time when survival horror was considered dead.

Someone said to me how survival horror is still alive and it's Dark Souls.

And I really thought about that. Man. Yeah. Like I, I get that.

That has always been a part of Fromsoft games,

this idea that you're in a world that is not safe for you,

and you have to think very carefully about whether this is something

you want to engage with or not.

I think Fromsoft games kind of have another sense of horror,

because they can be so unforgiving at times.

So that kind of leads to the horror.

And then with Bloodborne, it's just complete horror aesthetic.

You're fighting werewolves and, you know, like zombie people and weird

snake sorcerers and all this, like, quite terrifying imagery.

But most importantly, as the player you really are fighting for your life

when you play these games, you're really trying your best to survive.

It's like it's interesting because it is a very different kind of fear,

but I do think one of the reasons people love those games so much is

they have learned to just take the essence of that survival horror of like this,

"Oh fuck, I have low resources and I'm going to die."

They've translated it into this complete new kind of way of looking at it.

Arguably, that paved the way for a resurgence of more traditional style of survival horror.

Resident Evil 7 and 8 really took us back to the roots of horror in that series,

with what some argue to be some of the scariest entries into the franchise.

Give me games which are as good as Resident Evil 7,

and then I'm going to give you all my love, all my money, all my time.

“In my restless dreams."

"I see that town..."

“Silent Hill."

We're now seeing remakes of all of these classics

such as Silent Hill 2, Dead Space, a multitude of the Resident Evil games.

"This time, it has to be different."

The indie space has had a huge revitalization of survival horror.

You know, we're seeing things like Crow Country, Sorry We're Closed,

Hollow Body and so many more.

It has opened the door for for the whole kind of survival horror genre.

For a period, it really seemed like survival horror had died.

But like the zombies that plague its hallways,

it always gets back up.

You cannot Kill survival horror.