The arrival of the PlayStation in 1995 sent shockwaves through the games industry, but most of all it transformed the art of fear and suspense, and with it came the debut of two juggernauts of video game horror: Silent Hill and Resident Evil. In this clip from TerrorBytes: The Evolution of Horror Gaming, a new five-part documentary series exploring the rich history of horror in games, Silent Hill series alumni and a cast of other game developers and horror experts discuss what the original PlayStation meant for horror in games and how it enabled the perfect marriage of horror aesthetics and horror narrative in Silent Hill.
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Short filmTranscript
00:00So, I would say horror on the PS1 was shaped by the console's technical limitations in some really interesting ways.
00:27One of them was the idea of pre-rendered backgrounds.
00:30The idea that there was not enough juice in that machine to do proper 3D backgrounds.
00:37Although the PlayStation was a 3D console capable of rendering games with full polygons.
00:42Users lose all sense of reality and enter another world.
00:46The cost of making that happen and at the point in which Resident Evil was released,
00:51which is early on in the PlayStation's life cycle when developers weren't as familiar with the hardware.
00:57That led to the use of pre-rendered backgrounds.
01:01The way we're going to create the illusion of 3D is that once your character hits a certain point,
01:06we are going to cut to a different shot.
01:09Like maybe this one shot is overhead and then this camera cuts and the next shot the character is now facing the camera.
01:16You see precisely what the game wants you to see.
01:23Like, it's not even a workaround for limitations.
01:26It's limitation causing genuine, creatively brilliant decisions.
01:30Then, of course, infamously, you have the mist of Silent Hill.
01:34That 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.
01:46So, they solved, you know, they solved that and they just brought the fog plane like right there.
01:52And then they were like, wow, that's actually scary to move through that.
01:55And I feel like that must have been the aha moment where Silent Hill was born.
01:59What's the first time it came out?
02:16Well, at the beginning of the end, it was Biohazard.
02:20It was the genre of horror game.
02:25My first experience in the Silent Hill world was
02:54my co-writer Patrick had picked up this game and I remember watching Patrick play this
02:59game where he's walking through the fog and he keeps walking through fog and fog and you
03:05hear a dog bark and you come around the corner and you can't see more than 10 feet in front
03:11of you.
03:12And I'm like, this is terrifying.
03:18The very first five minutes of the game are amazing.
03:20You see this disparate group of images, you hear this guitar twang playing this theme
03:25song and you don't know like, are we watching a flash forward, a flash back, what's reality
03:29because sometimes we're in the car with Harry and Cheryl and sometimes we're like seeing
03:34the nurse and all these other things.
03:35And then we see Sybil, we crash.
03:41And then there's a guy named Harry and he's just literally on a street and off you go.
03:55It's one of the games that's both visually horror and narrative horror at the same time.
04:01It's one of the very few games that actually does a really good job of that.
04:05I love my Resident Evil, Resident Evil is awesome, but it is basically this guy's an even bigger
04:12demon than the last one.
04:13How am I going to take him down?
04:15Silent Hill on the other hand is...
04:17What is this?
04:18Oh my gosh, this thing is going to affect me deeply for the next few days.
04:31At a time where scary games were kind of more about gore or it was gun-based violence and
04:38shooters and things like that, Silent Hill just made this like very slow burn, slow paced,
04:44very claustrophobic, psychological horror game that clearly just rang everybody's bell
04:49in the horror genre.
04:51I'd seen games that had stuff that assaulted you and stuff that attacked you and monsters
04:59and whatnot, but I'd never seen a game that was relying on the absence of danger to be dangerous.
05:09So much of what makes Silent Hill so creepy is what you don't see.
05:14It's the sound design.
05:15It's the fact that you can't see that far in front of you.
05:18It's what could be around the corner that maybe never is.
05:22That's what makes Silent Hill so terrifying.
05:24I'm so scared.
05:28Help me.
05:29Silent Hill was a game about just fucking nightmares.
05:42It was a game about you can't go back to this thing that once was and in the case of Silent
05:53Hill 1 it's this idea of memories.
05:55This little girl's memories that slowly become corrupted after she went through all these awful
06:01things and you are now experiencing them.
06:03No.
06:04I don't want to.
06:06Do what mommy tells you now.
06:10It felt dark and it felt horrifying and it felt personal.
06:14It felt like something that was made by people that are hurting.
06:20people that were struggling in their own way.
06:27It just became so distinctive and beautiful to anything else that was coming out on the
06:33PlayStation at the time.
06:34It wasn't a mascot platformer.
06:36It wasn't that edgy brand of PS1 game.
06:39As much as it was told be a clone of Resident Evil, it didn't feel like anything else.
06:45And it's to this day a fucking incredible game.