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GAMES THAT SCARED THE HELL OUT OF ME AS A KID

Years before this shit, video games were 2D with less colors than a tube of M&Ms and weren’t gross or violent and couldn’t scare anyone. Except me. I had completely forgotten about what a wuss I used to be until I read that Splatterhouse (for a brief period the goriest game in history) is being remade. Then all the bad memories came flooding back so I decided to seek out some bootleg ROMs so I could finally defeat my gaming demons and feel like a real man at last. These are they.Devil’s Crush, TurboGrafx-16 My Age: 7

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Proof that I couldn’t deal with even the simplest shit--even this series of pinball games had me sucking on my safety blanket. My mate had a TurboGrafx-16 (which I always considered the naughty console) and we would play this late at night like it was some kind of super secret, rather than just a pretty dull pinball game. There was this lady vampire face imprisoned on the pinball board which always really bothered me because I wondered where the rest of her body was. Plus, being only vaguely aware of breasts, thinking about a woman’s body made me feel really weird. Friday the 13th, NES My Age: 7

The title screen is a knife descending into the eyesocket of Jason Vorhee’s hockey mask. There is nothing that’s not scary about that. The game saw you wandering around Camp Crystal Lake, trying to save campers before Jason ended them in dark, pseudo-3D bunk houses. You’d also row a boat across the lake, where Jason would occasionally butterfly-stroke his way across the screen at a million miles an hour. This, like every NES game based on a film (except Batman), is bullshit. Resident Evil, PS1 My Age: 13

The day Resident Evil was released, I got my mom to pick it up from the shop and my friend Ben and I sat up all night in our boxers playing it. The first time you meet a zombie in the game, there’s this cut-scene that shows it eating some guy’s head. Ben and I turned to each other and were like “Whoa,” because it was the most realistic bit of gore we had seen in video games up to that point. But really, given the low-budget CGI, it looks like somebody just held a lighter to a Ken doll. Nowadays, as a rule, I only play survival horror games in the dead of night with all the lights off as a big fuck you to how scared I was of the original games. Splatterhouse 3, Sega Genesis My Age: 10

Oh god, Splatterhouse 3 was gross. Every monster in this game looks like Jim Henson’s take on vagina dentate. It also introduced a countdown timer for each level, but if you let the time run out the game wouldn’t end, only the game’s ending would change--your wife would get eaten from the inside out by a penis with teeth that was living in her brain. Unsurprisingly, this game never came out in Europe. Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, NES My Age: 7

Castlevania was one of the first games I played that introduced the concept of safety. Rather than being constantly harangued by enemies, you could dip into one of Castlevania’s townships without fear of losing a life. That made being unsafe all the more scary. Outside of the townships, you would be attacked by skeletons that just wander back and forth and werewolves that bounced up and down. Even worse, it was the first game I played with a day and night cycle. Night would fall and bring super-creepy music and harder enemies. Then you would wander into a town and find all the townspeople had boarded up their windows because there are hoards of screaming green ghouls running around. That stuck with me for a while. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, DOS My Age: 12

As a kid, I really only did “being scared,” I didn’t do “dread,” that kind of metaphysical, gut-level all-pervasive kind of fear. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream sorted that out for me--it’s pretty much top of my list of extreme shit I shouldn’t have been allowed to subject my young mind to. It’s loosely based on the Harlan Elison story of the same name, (he even provided the voice of the game’s genocidal supercomputer). It was one of those point n’ click adventures like Monkey Island or Discworld, except you played as the five survivors of an apocalypse caused by a sadistic supercomputer, which has imprisoned them in cyberspace and has nothing better to do than torture them with their greatest fears. One of the characters is a former concentration camp doctor forced to repeat his crimes; there was a lot of rape if I remember correctly. Yoshi’s Island it wasn’t. MIKE STERRY