WRITTEN BY NATALIE CLAYTONomething’s moving in the dark.
You stalk forwards, slowly, trying
to get a better look, but your
senses aren’t quite working right.
The shape in the distance remains
motionless as you approach; all you can hear is
an ominous scraping sound. Then, before you
can run or let out a scream, the shape’s bearing
down on you: a terrifying assault of teeth
and shrieks.
The lights turn on. You switch off the console,
and sit ashen-faced in front of the screen. It’s
the end of the 1990s – and with the dawn of 3D,
video games have become more terrifying than
ever before. It’s the era of Resident Evil, Silent Hill,
and countless other tense and horrifying games
that have turned the medium into a war on the
senses. Twenty years on, and those nineties
kids who cowered in front of their televisions
are now all grown-up – and some of them are
making games.S
Today’s generation of indies probably didn’t
grow up on the 2D titans of the eighties. We’ve
played the early Sonic and Super Mario games,
sure, but for many of today’s creators, there’s
a growing nostalgia for shimmering polygons,
grainy textures, angular corridors, and the kind
of thick fog you’d expect to see filling a laser-tag
arena. The late nineties was a time when 3D
graphics were on the march, but developers
were only just getting to grips with ways of using
them to terrify us.
“There are more people moving towards the
low-res style, more people moving towards
PlayStation and N64 nostalgia,” says Breogán
Hackett, Irish indie developer and founder of
the Haunted PS1 game jam community. “There’s
a whole load of horror games being made, but
very little community around it.”
Hackett has been running Haunted PS1 since
March 2018, where it grew from a handful
of hand-picked developers to a communityFRIGHT-TEEN
-NINETY-NINE
The horror games harking back to the PSone era
We meet the developers who’ve applied the low-poly
look of the PlayStation era to their horror games18 / wfmag.cc
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