Bad For Thinking

In light of my previous post, a friend of mine asked me to post the original list of my top ten favorite scary games. Here they are:

10. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
9. System Shock 2
8. F.E.A.R.
7. Aliens versus Predator 2
6. Doom 3
5. Silent Hill 3
4. Half-Life
3. Eternal Darkness - Sanity's Requiem
2. Resident Evil - REmake
1. Silent Hill 2

Note that these are my "favorite scary games," rather than "games that have scared me the most." I found Doom 3 to be a much scarier game than Half-Life, for example, but Half-Life is definitely my favorite of the two.

A quick anecdote about a game I feel should get an honorable mention:

One of the very first real games I ever played as a kid was Star Wars: Dark Forces, a Doom-style first-person shooter. It was passed on to me (along with the CD-ROM version of the first two Prince of Persia games) by my brother when I was eight. I had never played a first-person shooter before, so it took me a while to even beat the first level, but when I did, I really got into it. In the third level, however, Kyle Katarn (the main character) visits the sewers of Anoat City to track down an Imperial weapons designer. With the exception of a couple of interrogation droids, the only monsters in the level were the dianogas that lived under the water. You couldn't see them, you couldn't go under the water, and the only hint that you had that they were there was the occasional eyeball stalk that would pop out of the murky water to look around. The sewer would be quiet for a while, and then suddenly you would have have this in your face:

Okay, so kids today may have their Flood and their Locusts, and I'm sure that they all make the dianoga from Dark Forces look laughable today, but to an eight year-old in 1996, this was what terror looked like.

So, I had this problem. I loved the game, and I wanted to continue, but I was too afraid to even start the level, let alone finish it. So I got this brilliant idea: I would get my mother to play it. After all, any other time that I was afraid of something, I would just get Mom to take care of it. I remember quite vividly what it was that I told her to convince her to come upstairs to see Dark Forces. I said, "Hey Mom, have you ever wondered what the monster that dragged Luke under the water in Star Wars looked like?" And my poor, sweet mother who, at the time, was lying on her bed, peacefully reading a book and drinking tea, looked up at me and said, "You know, I always have." 

To my knowledge, as of today, my mother has only ever played two video games: Dance Dance Revolution (a completely separate, yet fun story) and the third level of Dark Forces. I would stand behind her, facing away from the screen and she would describe her surroundings. It took us a good chunk of the summer, but together, we navigated the labyrinth-like sewer, and while she never actually beat the level herself, she got me close enough that I was able to make a mad dash for the exit.

It is one of my most cherished summer memories.

Of course, Dark Forces isn't a horror game. In fact, while Anoat City is still pretty horrifying to this day (I had to play it in order to take the above screenshot. I won't lie, my heart was racing a bit), the rest of the game is pretty tame. It's for this reason that it only gets an honorable mention, but it has a very special place in my heart.