Original subtitles

I think the truth is, people enjoy being scared.

I mean, I think it's pretty simple.

I think we've just loved the idea that you're here

and there's evil out there and it's trying to get in.

What are you going to do about it?

I think the reason that horror is so huge in games,

because I don't think there's any argument about whether or not it is, it's massive.

I think it's because of the immersive element.

I think it's because people love to be scared.

It's very effective to scare people in a game.

Horror video games aren't quite like horror movies

because you're in them. You're controlling the character

Your character, who you identify with,

you project into your character, "this is me."

And you enter a dark room and can be scared.

You're feeling that fear.

You're looking behind you. I mean, you're really.

You're inside of that world.

It's usually going for the fault lines. You know, the most controversial

or scary taboo subjects.

I don't think it would be effective horror if it didn't go for that.

"And it's hard to identify who's going to turn out to be,

the Michael Cho or the Columbine."

I think there was just a point where people who don't play video

games kind of decided that this being an interactive experience,

that you were just mowing down innocent civilians, and that's what the game is about.

"Some experts warn this immersive, almost lifelike experience

desensitizes people in a troubling way."

It's strange because when you think about it,

a lot of horror games, you actually survive. You don't kill,

"you're engaged as the person who commits the violence, not just someone who watches the violence."

It's easy. It's not high brow.

It's low brow. It's messy, it's grungy, it's an easy target.

"And also video games. I'm hearing more and more people say the level of violence

on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts."

But, fuck 'em.

"The whole fascinationation with violence in video games is nothing

more than an adjunct to what's going on in media forever I mean, you know?"

"This comic book describes a sexual aberration so shocking that I couldn't mention"

"even the scientific term on television."

"I think there ought to be a law against them."

"Movie makers have gone to deplorable lengths. In order to emphasize what they've done,"

"they have produced some ads that are not only in questionable taste,"

"but are also downright degrading to the whole industry."

"The second game is Night Trap, which is a game set in a sorority house."

"The object is to keep hooded men from hanging, the young woman from a hook,"

"or drilling their necks with a tool designed to drain their blood."

"Night Trap uses actual actors and achieves an unprecedented level of realism."

So when it comes to Night Trap and all the problems that it had

with every new technology, there's always fear.

Fear of the unknown, which is, you know, very Lovecraft.

People were seeing this technology for the first time

and were thinking it had more impact than a horror film would

because of its interactivity.

"Night Trap, which adds a new dimension of violence"

"specifically targeted against women, is especially repugnant."

"I find that so extremely offensive, and the only word you can say is shame on you."

"Small children bought this at Toys "R" Us and he knows that as well as I do."

"What it amounts to is pornography being placed on, a CD-Rom technology."

Wanna sell something to 16 year old boys? Get it banned by Toys "R" Us.

You know. You can't keep enough of them in supply at the warehouse.

The danger arises when the subject of the software is of a violent nature.

"Bob Keeshan made another excellent point last week when he said that children

don't need violence to be entertained. His show proved that for over 30 years"

"At the end of the hearings, I walked up to Lieberman"

"and I said to him, 'Senator, have you ever actually played this game?'"

"And he said, I don't have to. This is filth."

"It is a sick, disgusting video game in my judgment."

It's kind of baffling how Night Trap was one of those games

that, was caught up in the whole ordeal.

Mortal Kombat made sense. There were head decapitations and hearts

being ripped out of bodies.

Night Trap I feel got sucked into the controversy

almost completely by accident.

It's almost like they just needed one more game to talk about.

So they just grabbed it.

And I feel like a lot of it has to do with the fact

that was actual video footage that they were using in that game.

"It was so new. It was so revolutionary at the time that it first"

"came out, that it was ideal fodder for somebody who wanted to use it"

"as, a political hand grenade."

So a lot of these people looked at this thing

and oh my goodness, it's a real person.

And they're actually being attacked. And we're selling this to children.

"I mean, how would you like to have a teenage daughter go out on a date

with someone who's just watched or played three hours of that game?"

"A guy from The New York Times called me and he said,"

"'we hear these terrible things are happening.'"

"And I was like, 'have you seen Night Trap?"

"Look at all the pretty girls!"

If you actually look at Night Trap and compare it to

something like Halloween, it's nothing.

It's silly, goofy fun.

"It's not violent, it's not gory, it's not anything like that at all."

"And the object of the game is to save the girls that go in for the slumber party."

"Way to go, control. I knew you could do it!"

"I'm afraid the augs aren't our biggest problem."

"My personal observation is I think it's pathetic and shameful."

"I'm pulling the plug on you before you do any more damage."

"Violence and violent images permeate more and more aspects of our lives,

and I think it's time to draw the line."

The day before Doom was released on December 9th,

there were congressional hearings on video game violence,

where they basically pulled up Night Trap and Mortal Kombat as examples

of how low games have stooped down to.

They had no idea what was going to actually show them where games were at.

And that was the next day with Doom.

-"Now on 32x" -"Doom for the Jaguar."

Doom was probably one of the most influential video games ever.

Look what a small group of people can do in the entertainment field.

"These games are getting really realistic."

I think it's set the foundation for a lot of things. Certainly as a horror game.

That was the mantra, wasn't it? It was scary, dark, fast.

One thing that I think is lost now

is that the whole diminished lighting look of Doom,

there was a lot of darkness as you got further away from light sources,

the light level would be diminished. It was intended to always have this element of spookiness.

On the tin, I would say that most people probably wouldn't

look at Doom as a horror game, because we're told

that we're this big, strong, masculine hero

and we have all of the weapons that we need to take down

the terrifying demons that we're going up against.

But when you take it back to its roots, this is a game that is dealing with demons

and the occult, and it very much is a scary game.

Contrast was kind of a key word for the entire game,

because the contrast isn't just light contrast, it's contrast in space.

Like we need a tight corridor opening into a really big room.

We need contrast and experience. We can't be fighting all the time.

We need to be exploring and feeling the suspense before the next combat beat takes over.

The flashing lights, things are broken like a space station

that's been overrun, destroyed, but you can't see anything yet.

You're just like waiting for something to happen.

And then all of a sudden all these walls open up and here comes fireballs.

It was all about like taking inspirations from horror movies

and putting them into the game as if this is a horror scene.

What I remember as being sort of repulsed, but also intrigued.

At that point, it was just like, dang, there is a lot of blood.

There's like dead guys on the floor.

You're shooting guys, and their chests are like exploding.

Making the game to me wasn't scary. There was not really any way

for me to experience the game the way that the players

will experience it for the first time, because I'm making it

so I know where everything is.

But then when Sandy Peterson came in and he started making E2M6,

that was really, really great to have that feeling

of just like the terror of playing

where it's like I get to a certain point and it's like,

I need to go into the dark. There's an area that is pitch black

and I have to go in there.

Doom established certain things with video games

where you could get this non-linear experience.

This was interactive and it was real time, and it was marketably different

than anything you saw for film and television.

It blew me away, quite frankly.

"Good afternoon. This is news two, and we are following a breaking story today,"

"a shooting at a high school in Littleton, Colorado that's near Denver."

"Here is what we know so far: Witnesses say two gunmen dressed in black"

"trench coats with black masks opened fire at Columbine High School"

"about lunchtime in Colorado. They said the gunman went from"

"one area of the school to another, shooting students as they went."

We know that there's people out there that have done heinous acts,

and sometimes people have tried to make a correlation.

Like I remember when the Columbine shooting happened, there was some rumblings about, oh,

they played Doom or they played Quake. That that must have been what happened.

"In every school shooting, we find that kids"

"who pulled the trigger are video gamers."

"Lawyer Jack Thompson filed the suits against Doom and Quake,"

"claiming they are partly responsible."

It couldn't have been any of the other things about American culture.

Couldn't have had anything to do about access to weapons.

It had to be the video games, logically,

"...and the result is we are programming many of our children to kill."

- "He's trained to do it." - "Bingo."

People need to spend more time blaming the guns

and less time blaming the video games.

And if they looked at the data, they would see that

people who play video games are less likely to do things like that.

"Todd Hollenshead, CEO of the company that made Doom and Quake, says,

they were just trying to make something fun and entertaining."

When the news came out, it was it was a huge shock,

especially when the front of CNN had pictures of them drawing,

You know, Doom 2 and, you know, imagery from the levels that they had made.

"Some people hold you responsible for real murders."

Lots of kids play games.

Tens of millions of people had played Doom at that time and never did this.

"The teen gunman, says Thompson, superimposed yearbook pictures of their classmates"

"So that they could literally, for weeks in advance,

not just practice shooting, but practice shooting a particular student."

There was something wrong with those Kids, you know, like any mass murderer.

You know, there's something wrong with them.

It's not because they played some games.

We felt that the best thing to do at that time was just like,

support the families of the kids that were affected.

And, you know, try to heal at that time because it was such a horrible time.

But not go pointing fingers at the entertainment or media

as the reason why that happened.

What a horrible event in history being tied to video games.

When it comes to horror and gore in fighting games.

The two of them go way back.

Everybody's going to immediately go to Mortal Kombat, and for good reason.

We all know the controversy that brought,

but it also brought in a whole lot of money.

So a lot of other people out there suddenly decide,

oh, gore sells in fighting games.

We need to do that.

So, Thrill Kill was always a fighting game from the start.

It's just it wasn't the fighting game

that it's kind of infamous for what it became.

It actually started out as this thing called Earth Monsters, which was kind of

a Mesoamerican, Aztec or Incan inspired bloodsport game.

But gradually, over time, Virgin was telling the team,

yeah, you know, the fighting game part of it's really good.

Could you maybe just like have these guys beat the hell out of each other?

So they did. And then they were like, you know what?

The Aztec thing's not really working for us either.

We've got a different art direction we want to start exploring with you.

To me, the thing that made $0 many people start

clutching their pearls over Thrill Kill was the sexuality of it.

There is a story from the developers that I have heard in

which one of the producers came in one day

and just dropped down a massive stack of porno mags

and said, "Gentlemen, this is your art style."

I can't say that's exactly how it went.

But when you look at the game, it feels like that's exactly how it went.

So we were looking at this stuff and going,

okay, well, we'll take the boots off of that one

and we'll take the mask off of that one and kind of piecing these things together.

But there was no rhyme or reason to it. There's no nothing holding it together.

Like, why are these characters dressed this way? What are they doing?

And that's when we decided, okay, well, what if these were all damned souls

and they were trying to fight their way out of hell?

And the other surprising bit was probably Cats.

Yep. Cats. The musical.

People dressed up in fur and tails,

and they all tell their sob story of what their life was like as a cat.

And the cat that's had the roughest life gets granted

nine new lives, and they get to go back to the mortal world again

and carry on being a cat. So obviously you see how these mesh right together.

It's Clive Barker meets Cats, except it's a bunch of damned souls in leather fetish gear.

Fighting to come back to the mortal plane.

Writes itself.

What would have been controversial about Thrill kill?

Well, the first thing that you're going to notice is the gore in there.

They're not trying to hide it. There's a guy in there

who's eating a leg as one of his normal moves.

And that is another reason why it got so controversial. It was the characters.

Every single character was designed to push the envelope

even before you know their backstories.

And if you do know their backstories,

it becomes jaw dropping at times.

There's a character in there who was a postal worker

who ended up shooting up his workplace,

and this was made during the 90s

when that was a thing you were reading about

in the newspapers on a fairly regular basis.

So after all of our hard work, sleeping under our desks

and doing everything we could to jump through Virgin's hoops,

ultimately the game did not come out.

And the reason it did not come out is during production.

And we're talking very late in production, like we were approaching Gold Master.

Virgin was acquired by Electronic Arts.

Then we started getting these rumblings that EA wasn't happy with the game.

You know, this was the time of Joe Lieberman and his crusade against video games,

and they shelved it.

And so the developers of Thrill Kill suddenly found themselves with no place to go.

But they had this game that they spent all this time making.

And then all of a sudden, Activision calls them up and goes,

"Hey, yeah, we understand that you guys make fighting games."

"We have a license with the Wu-Tang Clan and they want to make a fighting game."

"Can you do something with that?"

So this hasty marriage was arranged to give

Wu-Tang to, Paradox Development, and that is how the Wu-Tang Clan: Shaolin Style,

I think is the subtitle, came to be

I did play the Wu-Tang game many years later,

but I just remember thinking, what a turnaround from this hyper violent,

hell-based game to a hyper violent, you know, hip hop game.

It was a real interesting, transformation. But I'm glad that they still got to use

the ideas that they had because they were, you know,

even if they weren't executed the best, they were interesting.

There were those kind of ideas that would push genres forward.

It was definitely innovative. You could not have a game back

then that had four people all fighting at the exact same time.

That was way ahead of its time.

And I am positive that if it came out,

it might not have exploded. But you know what? Like 20 years later,

people would have been nostalgic for it.

They probably would have forgotten all the stuff that they didn't like in it.

It feels like one of those kind of games.

So sometime around 1998, 1999, yes, was probably about 1999.

I was living in Scotland. It was a weekend and I was on a train

and I was wearing, my Thrill Kill hat. I was wearing this very hat, actually,

up the row in the train comes these two backpackers

and they spot my hat and they're like,

"Oh man! Is that a Thrill Kill hat?"

So I was like, "you know what this hat is?" and they're like,

"oh man! That game is fucking magic man's it's the best game, all..."

And they, they're telling me about the characters and the fight moves and stuff.

And I was like, "how the hell is this possible? How did you ever play this game?"

And they're like, "oh, we bought it down at The Barras for £5 down in Glasgow."

The Barras is like a, like a car boot sale.

It's like a, like an open air market.

So that's how I discovered that somebody on one of the teams that could have been Virgin,

it could have been EA, it could have been Paradox.

Somebody let out a gold master of the game and it became a underground pirate hit.

"It's banned in Australia."

"The Kiwis put the kibosh on it."

"Verboten in Germany."

"What is it that the rest of the world doesn't want you to see? Why it's Manhunt of course."

Yeah. Manhunt was really interesting because,

obviously we had been used to violence for a long time

from all forms of entertainment, but it was when you were put into control of that

that I think it really resonated with people, for better or worse,

because when you're watching it happening on a screen,

this is filmed, you know, it's special effects, whatever.

Or if it happens to you in a video game when you die,

that's you being kind of punished for losing, but when you're the one doing it...

Oh. Wow. Where do we even begin with Manhunt?

I mean, I remember I worked at blockbuster at the time.

Manhunt was out for a week, and then we had to pull all the copies off the shelves

and slap it with its new adult only sticker.

To be fair, even nowadays, it is pretty graphic. I mean, it's a game based around.

Killing people. I mean, it is, but in like, gruesome ways

for a rich person to film and make money off of.

We're focusing on a prisoner who was set to be sentenced to death.

He's saved from death row by this mysterious director

who's now forcing him to commit these grave acts of violence against gangs,

all for the purpose of creating this snuff film.

Much like when we were doing The Thing, right Manhunt looked to push boundaries

and make people uncomfortable, and I think I always admired Rockstar

for pushing games in that direction.

If you look at Grand Theft Auto, they did all those things

that people told them, you can't do that.

You can't do that in a game. You can't do that in a game.

And they're like, "fuck you." We're going to do all of it.

Rockstar drew a lot of heat and vilification from the media at this time,

because they were involving elements of brutal violence and voyeurism,

and there was definitely a moral panic going on.

The news found out about this, and it was all over the place that,

Hey, this is like teaching our kids to Kill. And they're, it's teaching us that

the more graphic the kill, the cooler you are.

"Most infamously, Manhunt was linked to the murder of a 14 year old boy in the UK."

"It was later revealed that it was the victim who owned a copy, and the murderer"

"had never even played it."

When I was growing up, my dad wanted to buy me a Hitman game for my birthday,

but my mother didn't want to because she was worried I was going to be a Hitman.

I think you see that a lot with people who don't really look in

and understand. The things I do in video games, I'm not taking to the real world.

I'm not going to go to, you know, an army base and steal a plane and fly away.

It is called Manhunt 2, and it is being described

"as one of the most violent and gruesome video"

"games ever produced for a mass market."

"So violent, in fact, that it was banned in Great Britain."

"And we must warn you, there is nothing about this that is not disturbing."

"What sets this video game apart is that the player can become"

"physically involved in the acts of violence,"

"rather than just pushing buttons, the player actually wields a knife"

"an axe, a glass shard to stab an opponent."

There was a bit of controversy surrounding Manhunt 2

in the sense that it was on the Wii.

We kind of get this degree of separation previously where we're playing

with a controller against the screen.

Now, instead of just pressing a button, you're actually like,

using the Wii remote to like slash people and all that, so,

the fact that that even came out at all is a miracle.

"Violence in video games is nothing new. The difference is you're"

"actually committing the violence."

"By doing this, I can hit somebody with a sledgehammer, or a knife."

There was this specific execution you had to do with a telephone.

You know, to do it on a controller, it's hey, you hold, I think, like L1 or R1 to target somebody,

and then you hit a button and that's it.

But with the Wii, you actually had to, like,

do a motion like this, like you're wrapping a cord around somebody's throat

and then like pull back on it.

So I mean, I get it.

"So we've got them on record: 'The Rockstar team has come up with a game

that fits squarely within the horror genre, and was intended to do so.""

The ground that it had to stand on was the fact that you were kind of defending yourself.

You're fighting for your life, but that got lost in translation

because all people were talking about was the violence.

You know, Rockstar were just so notorious that, you know, your parents

or whoever was against video games just didn't, they didn't want to hear it.

"So if you have a child who's a gamer, discourage this form of, quote unquote, 'entertainment',"

"too much time playing video games is hazardous to their health."

"And with this latest entry may be hazardous to the health of others, too."

I remember reading really old newspaper articles talking about

"Don't let your daughters read too much poetry. It's really bad for them."

When it comes to new types of entertainment and new technologies that

that we don't quite understand,

I think people are always going to question it and be afraid.

"Best friends butchering one another, babies strangled in cribs. The whole city went to hell."

But it is really interesting to see how sometimes that can work

to the media's benefit, or sometimes it can work to its detriment.

A joke that insulted the president of China and called him Winnie the Pooh

resulted in one of the year's best horror games being removed from steam.

Devotion came from this Taiwanese development studio called Red Candle Games.

They had previously put out a different game called Detention.

Detention was an incredibly bold game, because the story

all builds up to being a message about a very dark time

within the Taiwanese government.

It's not even a time that was that long ago.

They specifically make sure to point out the people who suffered

during this time period are still alive today.

They wanted to come in here and make a message in a horror game

that the true horrors aren't spirits. They're not ghosts.

They're things that human beings actually did.

And then they come out with this game, Devotion.

This absolutely horrifying game about this man.

His life starts falling apart.

His wife starts to become unhappy with him.

His child gets very sick,

and he gets really desperate.

And he meets this woman, and this woman says,

All I need is your devotion.

And I can cure your child.

What's so beautiful about it is the entire thing is done in first person.

You are seeing all these really amazing visual representations of what's happening.

But there's something they hid in there that is comparing the president of China,

Xi Jinping, to Winnie the Pooh.

"When interacted with, the poster in the game would flash"

"the words 'Xi Jinping, the Winnie the Pooh moron' in Chinese.

It's not even something that's a focus in the game.

It's almost like an Easter egg or a secret that you have to find in there.

Because of that, the game could not actually be sold in China.

It got taken down from the Steam store.

It is, to this day, one of the best horror games I've ever played.

And it just for like 2 to 3 years, it just disappeared. You couldn't buy it.

That game deserved so much better.

It is always interesting when specific moments of visual violence

get pulled out of movies or TV shows or video games,

but the entire concept, which is absolutely horrific,

all good, all good. Infanticide? No worries. Just don't show this little part of it.

When prepping myself for this documentary, I was made aware of some controversies

over Silent Hill: Homecoming.

Germany and Australia didn't want to have anything to do with the game,

and they had to go back in and make some tweaks to the game

to remove some of the violence so that apparently the other horrific

things would be deemed okay.

"After just some hacking to get it through classification, Silent Hill: Homecoming"

"is finally in Australia, minus some camera angles and drills, but still full of crazy"

"scantily clad nurses, angry skinless dogs, fantastically weird bosses, and a whole lot of fog."

Regardless of this game or whatever, but every country has a series of censorship laws that impact

all kinds of things books, games, TV shows, movies.

And so it's not surprising. I mean, I think it's hilarious

because it's like cutting out a couple of scenes

of graphic violence here and there doesn't change the fact

that, like, these are parents that killed children, but I guess

somebody has to censor something, somewhere in the world,

and they've got to put a, they got to put a stamp on it, and that's what happens.

As much as like, hey, controversy gets you news and stuff.

Controversy tends to hurt a lot of video games as well.

I mean, just look at Rule of Rose for example.

That game got slammed with a bunch of controversy

and ended up being banned a bunch of places.

"Read the story. Please read the story."

Rule of Rose is controversial because...

okay, the real answer here is I think some fucking idiot needed to write a headline.

So, way back in the day you had a teenager who posted a review,

his honest review of the game online, and he was actually quite supportive and positive of the game.

We then got this Italian magazine called Panorama who essentially plagiarized this review.

But not only are they plagiarizing it, they're sort of twisting the words.

They're making it out as though Rule of Rose is this masochistic game

that you're engaging in child abuse, and that there's really weird

sort of perverse representations of children in this game.

And that gets swept up into this moral panic.

Before anyone really had time to sort of correct any of this

that had been said or done, we've now got Italian politicians who are damning the text.

You've got British tabloids that are running very similar headlines.

From there it kind of like snowballed to the point where

for the longest time, you couldn't even buy

a copy of Rule of Rose in North America.

I think the worst thing that happens is our main character gets like

buried underground for like three seconds.

It's not about torturing or killing children. There's just a lot of children in the game.

But it's also got this really distinctive, unique vibe.

Rule of Rose, believe it or not, I think is very underrated.

I think that there is just such a clear motif with that game

and how it's presented and the story that it's telling.

The story is good. I do think it does interesting things.

Gameplay wise. It's a little rough.

Rule of Rose is not fun to play, and it's not fun to play

in a way that even survival horror games aren't, like, there's a competency

to Resident Evil and Silent Hill

Rule of Rose is frustrating, and it can just be kind of exhausting.

But despite that, I think it's like, it's worth it.

It's weird and it's strange and it's got this incredible atmosphere

and these beautiful cut scenes.

Particularly like, when you start to see, like the cruelty of these girls

and like how they treat you, how they treat like the player character.

There's something just really unsettling about it.

And it's unsettling in a way that no other game did.

It really was its own thing. Everything from when you open the menu

and it's like a chalkboard and the sounds that go with that.

Everything about that game feel so intentional, and I think it's really amazing for that.

I think ultimately what I love about horror is the ability to explore

very deep, primal feelings right about our existence as human beings.

"That's why I needed you..."

I get how much fun it is for people to be really scared

because they're scared in a safe way. They're in a safe environment. They're in their home.

"OceanGate is now putting out a statement that they do believe

that that debris that was found is indeed the debris of the small submersible."

An interesting thing happened with the OceanGate disaster, where

when people were trapped underwater with the public

not knowing if they were still alive or not, suddenly

a lot of people had this new anxiety about being trapped under the ocean.

When people heard the situation around OceanGate,

they're like, "wow, that sounds a hell of a lot like Iron Lung."

Whenever a bunch of people start talking about a game, it's going to get a spike in sales.

I kind of didn't like it. Because thinking about like, people

being actually trapped down there in the /Iron Lung,

basically, and running out of air and stuff is, eugh.

"It is a difficult day. And it's especially difficult,

for the families. And our thoughts are with the families."

I feel personally with all the things that we've created

when it comes to taking people to dark places.

"This is god?"

There's something to be said for pulling yourself out of those dark places.

I'm pro human. I'm pro, "let's always keep hope."

Hope is one of the major aspects, I think, that defines the human soul.

"If there's anyone alive, contact me now. Just give me a sign.

I repeat. This is your last chance."

I had to find the strength and the courage to play Jill in a strong way.

The players have to do the same

for themselves. They have to make the right choices, the courageous choices.

In overcoming the fears, it allows us to shine a light in the darkness

and really allows us to experiment, take risks

that we wouldn't normally be allowed to in real life.

I had the honor to meet a couple of people through the conventions

that were talking to me about why they enjoyed Dead by Daylight.

And one of the things that came up was, there's a group of of veterans

like Army veterans that are back with PTSD,

and they play together and they like to play Dead by Daylight.

And one of the reasons they were telling me was because it's a, it's a tense environment.

It's a scary place, but you're experiencing it in a safe way.

A place where you have challenges and you have all the tools to overcome them.

And if it ever gets too much, you can just turn off the game

and move on and go do something else.

And I think that comes up quite a lot, for a lot of people

to be able to do that in a safe environment and sort of work through some,

some issues, or maybe just feel that way so that you can become more comfortable

with intense emotions, which is not something

that's necessarily easy to, to everybody, right?

"...Dad."

"Dad..."

I think there's something profoundly optimistic about the genre in that way.

You don't have to be, you know, super spec ops.

I have 18 machine guns on my back. You can just be a person who can think

their way through and, you know, just keep trudging along and you'll be okay.

And the horror genre is telling us that you can be okay. You are enough to overcome this.

So I would say, like what horror games mean to me...

I think this comes back to like something that's become huge online,

and that's the idea of the save room.

You know, you play these games and you enter the save room and you're okay.

It's like for a moment, all the fucking weird horrors

and all the monsters and everything you have to deal with.

It's gone. And you're in this just safe little room.

I think you know different games do it in different ways.

I think with something like Death Stranding, you know, sitting in that menu

where you're organizing your bags is your safe room.

You know, nothing's coming for you there.

And so that is a big part of any, any horror for me

where you need a safe space before you then go out before you then pluck up the courage

to then, you know, traverse to the next bit.

As a much younger human, there was a game on the Amstrad CPC

that was, a tie-in game for Aliens.

You're supposed to be in the command HQ looking at the,

the camera feeds from the marines,

and you'd kind of scroll the camera to move through these rooms.

And then every now and then, an alien would show up,

and the "beep beep beep beep beep" would start happening very crudely.

The kind of gun mechanics were so bad that it was almost guaranteed that you would die,

if one of these aliens got you.

I remember that being so powerfully upsetting and stressful as a game.

If you press the pause button, the blast doors kind of came in

and then it played this kind of jazzy, upbeat music.

We kept having to go into that pause screen to just take a moment,

because it was getting so stressful and so intense.

And then if we look at games like Bloodborne and Dark Souls,

I think the bonfires and the messenger lamps,

I think they're really great at what they do as well.

We often think of the weary traveler.

The bonfire is acting as a sort of light in the darkness for them.

They're coming to sit at the bonfire to rest.

I'm not really interested in a horror game if it's full on, just like a

nightmare the entire time. I need that like that change of pace,

because I think something about it is like really deeply

healthy in a way. It's like nearly kind of human, where it's kind of

Shit is awful. Shit is terrifying. Shit is scary.

But it's okay because there are going to be these moments

where you're going to be all right.

There will always be these little moments of peace.

And I love that.

Horror games were like a bonding experience for me and my friends.

When PT. came out in 2014, that was a huge deal.

We all huddled around the TVs, you know?

My friends actually invited me over to play PT.

Because they got to a point where they couldn't finish it,

and so they invited me over for like emotional support I guess.

So PT. was meant to be a playable teaser

starring Norman Reedus in a brand new Silent Hill game.

One it was a genius move from a marketing standpoint.

I mean, to make a playable trailer, essentially.

I mean, back in the day, we would call it, you know, a demo.

Like, everybody was just kind of expecting it to be like, just a first glimpse or a trailer and then,

oh, no, it's a playable experience.

"The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?"

And it's not just a terrifying experience. It's from Kojima, and he's brought along his friend,

Guillermo Del Toro, you know, another master of horror from another medium.

It's just like it was such an event. It was an event in, in games

and an event in the horror genre.

"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!"

"Daemon here with IGN News, Konami has issued a statement

that Silent Hills has been officially canceled."

And then not only did they cancel the game, they like removed it.

So now you don't even have the ability to experience it.

"P.T. was delisted from the PlayStation store shortly thereafter. A brutal and final end."

PT. gives me feelings of happiness and rage

because I didn't own a PS4 before it was gone, so I've never got to experience it firsthand.

I think RT. was absolutely horrifying,

and I think it was brilliant in a way that, like, only video games can be.

That entire game is your relation to a specific space.

You are walking through this hall. You turn the corner. You walk down the rest of the hall.

You're back to the start. It is this infinite, looping, liminal space in a video game.

A liminal space has no identity and therefore, like neither do you in it.

And I think there's a weird, comforting oblivion to that.

They get you so used to it, like you're just used to this hall again

and again, and again, and again, and again...

...and then all of a sudden...

And it's not just that she's a terrifying ghost woman.

It's that she's a terrifying ghost woman in this space, you are familiar with.

And it's beautiful, and again, it's like, how do you do that in any other medium?

So cool seeing something so unique that seemed professional,

made from a studio that it got my hopes up that were immediately dashed.

Like it was almost a moment of like, this is too good to be true, and then it was.

It takes a lot of things to go right, to make, to make a game.

But then again, maybe that was the best it could get.

It's very different making a 6 or 8 or 12 hour game

that maintains a sense of tension and, interest

and making a 10 or 15 minute playable demo that does the same thing.

So it may be one of those cases where it was best that it didn't come out

so that everyone could maintain this illusion, that it would have been

the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don't know if it would have been.

What people don't realize about Konami is that their main business is gambling machines.

When you fly into Las Vegas airport, you will pass a massive warehouse

with the Konami logo strewn across it.

That is their bread and butter, actually. They're, they made gambling machines,

slot machines, video poker, all that stuff.

Video games were like a tangential business to it.

"Konami is committed to new Silent Hill titles."

"However, the embryonic Silent Hills project, developed with Guillermo Del Toro"

"and featuring the likeness of Norman Reedus, will not be continued."

I never got the feeling that there was like,

tremendous love within the company for Silent Hill.

There was love amongst the people working on it. Those guys loved it.

But you go up the chain in the the hierarchy. I never got the feeling that they loved it.

I think after the fans reacted to PT. and the outcry

when you couldn't play it anymore, that is probably what spurred them on

to go, oh, actually, there is something really valuable here, let's...

the, you know, blackjack machines are cool, but maybe we should actually invest

in this Silent Hill thing.

"They say there was once a game. A game unlike any other that infiltrated"

"arcades in 81, when gaming fever was hot, it captivated the youth"

"who lined up in a magnetic trance to play it."

Polybius was this non-existent game, that is rumored to have existed.

It sort of feeds on the minds of the player

and takes control of them. It causes hallucinations or whatever.

The story varies a little bit.

It's a story of an arcade game that was really popular in the 80s, but only in Portland, Oregon.

There was this idea that the FBI are monitoring arcades, and already,

like I say, that sentence and it's like you can feel

your imagination going into overdrive, right?

"Why would they be doing th-that's so crazy! Like, what? What are they doing?"

This was all a secret test by the government to see whether or not

they could use addictive radiation through television screens.

You know, there's subtext to it, too. Like, everything can be an addiction in some way.

But it was also from the, you know, the fear of,

you know, the influence that video games could have on people.

I think the reason people make fake video games is actually really simple.

People making games like this make the forbidden media that you can't touch,

you can't interact with, because to interact with it,

you're kind of consuming it, and you're alleviating

the horrors that you feel from just thinking about it.

Valle Verde is one that looks very Animal Crossing

and has some kind of helmet you're supposed to wear to play it.

And there's kids trapped in it.

They take that idea of the glitch like the game is corrupting. This is like a tear in this world.

And when those tears appear and the characters

start acting in ways they shouldn't, or you start seeing environments you shouldn't,

it becomes this window into this complete underworld of that game.

I think creepy past as have influenced the broader horror space.

Creepypastas are essentially online urban legends created by the community,

and take the form of short stories.

One of the most famous creepy past as was something called Ben Drowned,

this famous story about a guy finding this Majora's Mask copy,

and in it the file is called Ben.

And already, like, there's something to that, right?

Because it's like your save game is distinctive to you.

But when someone else gets that save game, it is like walking around someone's house

and they don't know you're there.

Now, Majora's Mask, for a lot of people, is already

a very creepy game, both in its aesthetics and its characters.

Ben drowned built upon that. It took those mechanics and characters,

and now we're adding in this creepy past a story of the owner of the cartridge

has passed away, and they're haunting this game cartridge.

There's some ghost in the machine. There's some elements of this game that is hostile towards you.

There's a whole subgenre of, like, game corruptions where games can just suddenly

turn from a happy, child friendly game to horrific by random chance.

One of the first games of this kind was called Frog Fractions.

And Frog Fractions is this educational game

where you have to swallow a bunch of flies, and you do that for about five minutes.

And then it turns into this spaceship game. It turns into a text adventure.

It turns into like a Phoenix Wright style court game.

And that idea that like, okay, you were looking at the surface,

but there's so much more here.

That is what so many of those creepy past a like haunted video games were.

And now you're seeing it in like all these different titles.

There's games like I'm Scared by Ivan Zanotti and Doki Doki Literature Club

that literally mess with your computer.

But they really have this sense of breaking that barrier between

player and game, and they, they reach out to the player.

When the horror comes, it's like you have been lulled into a false sense of security,

and then you're grabbed and pulled somewhere else.

Pretty quickly on, you realize this is not a typical,

you know, schoolgirl, titillating story about,

you know, a visual novel kind of thing of that genre.

You know, a girl in the game ends up having a crush on you,

and she is really violent and scary and threatening,

and she starts messing with the game and it starts, the game starts glitching.

And in fact, the only way to beat her is to exit the game and go into the actual

like files stored on the hard drive and like delete her.

You have to find her character data and delete her. And that's actually the only way to save yourself

from this psychotic schoolgirl.

It's genius.

That is a creepy past a. Except it's an actual video game.

And I really think, like, we're probably only at the beginning of seeing weird

and interesting stuff like this.

Games is at a point where we can do anything

that we want to do on a screen, that we want to actually show.

There's nothing stopping us from doing anything.

So a lot of it is now, what is the design of the game that you want to actually go make,

that is a horror game that is going to be interesting?

That's the most fearful thing in the world is to, is to look at yourself.

It sounds like a cliche, but I really think it's true.

If you have a monster right, you don't really have to look at yourself.

You're looking at the monster, it's jumping out at you.

You can stab it, you can burn it.

What are you going to do when you know, when you find out

you're the monster or you have something inside you,

some kind of body horror, cancer or something.

Your skin is rotting and, you know,

I find that stuff just horribly scary.

It just really penetrates into the basic core of our being,

having to deal with those fears.

If there's something I'm portraying in a horror game,

it's because I find that thing horrifying.

When I became a parent and I came back to writing after becoming a parent,

I had to sit with, what are the things about being a parent that is terrifying?

I'm afraid of not being enough. I'm afraid of everything that I don't like about myself

passing on to another person. I'm afraid of not being there when this person needs me.

I think the best horror games are the ones that make it personal for the player.

It's what makes games such a better medium then more limp

mediums like film or television, because games put you in the action,

and when you make a horror game,

you know, you literally have to get your character out of there.

You can't afford to close your eyes and hope it goes away.

It's got to be uncomfortable, but you feel the urge to go back regardless.

You want you want to go through those, high emotions.

I think being scared makes you feel alive.

There's a really interesting kind of relationship that's formed

between the game creator and the game player when that happens.

I want it to happen to me, and I want me to be the adventurer.

I don't want it to be John McClane. I don't want it to be Master Chief.

I don't want it to be, you know, anyone else.

I want to be the one to think that I did that.

And I want that to be on me as a person, and to have players get up the next morning to think,

"I just messed up bad." And then go have their coffee.

"There's always trouble heading my way in this job,

but I'm always up for a little excitement too."

Horror, naturally is abnormal and innovative.

Horror is the unfamiliar. Horror is exploring uncharted territory.

You can't show somebody the exact same scare over and over and over again,

and expect them to keep being afraid.

You have to constantly reinvent the wheel when it comes to horror.

You have to constantly be innovating.

I think you're going to have horror games start to explore more of the social conditions.

Especially with technology, censorship, control,

in ways that we haven't seen so far.

Social media, cloud technology, artificial intelligence.

I think that's going to be fertile ground for people to explore in, in the genre.

"You will stream."

"They will watch."

A lot of the best innovation will come from indie devs.

I think VR will continue to contribute to a lot of the innovation we see in horror games.

We're no longer going to see this separation of player and screen.

We're actually going to be a part of that monsters' world. We are physically going to be hunted

by horrifying things like the Xenomorph.

All it takes is a couple seconds for your brain to really kind of think,

"Oh! I'm fucking here." You know? And if there's like,

like a little attachment where you feel like something's like kind of grabbing onto your throat,

we're going to scare ourselves to death because that's what we do.

We're dumb like that.