Listen to the VICE Gaming Podcast’s Horror Special

‘Resident Evil’ illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham, originally commissioned for our PlayStation 20th anniversary piece

Welcome, listener, to the VICE Gaming Podcast’s horror special. Why now to get gruesome, you wonder? Why not at, say, Halloween; or around the Queen’s 90th birthday celebrations? Because March 2016 marks 20 whole years since the original Resident Evil debuted on Sony’s PlayStation, going on to enjoy ports, remakes and remasters across a host of platforms. If you’ve bought a computer or console any time across the past couple of decades, you can probably play Resi on it.

Capcom’s survival horror hit isn’t quite the masterpiece you might remember – as we explained a few weeks ago. But its impact in the mid-90s was massive. Sure, it wasn’t without precedent, but this interactive haunted house, full of brain-hungry zombies, gigantic mutated animals, cawing crows and fiendish traps, felt wholly revelatory to players just getting used to the potential offered by 32bit gaming.

Videos by VICE

Listen to the VICE Gaming Podcast’s horror special below, via Soundcloud. Alternatively, download the podcast directly from VICE, here, or subscribe to it on iTunes, here.

Joining VICE Gaming editor Mike Diver on this episode are two regular contributors to VICE’s video game pages, Jonathan Beach and Ian Dransfield. One of these men adores horror games. The other, not so much. Listen, and you will soon learn who is the coward, and who craves a future horror classic from Hideo Kojima.

As well as the Resi series, we dip into the great Kojima/Del Toro game that never was, Silent Hills, and its playable teaser, P.T.; we chat about Layers of Fear and the Dead Space series, and a little about how Firewatch does feature its share of horror qualities. Do we mention ZombiU? If we don’t, it’s because we ran out of time. Sorry.

Next time, in early April: we’re joined by games-maker Mike Bithell, the brains behind Volume and Thomas Was Alone, and State of Play, the BAFTA-winning London-based studio responsible for Lumino City, Lume and INKS. We’ll probably be talking about these indie game things. Are indie game things even a thing, anymore? We’ll find out. Probably.

Follow VICE Gaming on Twitter at @VICEGaming, and our guests at @jonothonbeech and @ianinthefuture.