Fright Week: Favorite Scares in Gaming

Written by: Adam "ManKorn" Korenman, CC2K Video Games Editor

7th Guest

Gather around, children, and let me tell you some history. Before the age of consoles, video games were a hard-sought commodity. There was no online Flash, no Bluray, and no cartridge. The only way to install a game onto your home computer was to use the floppy disk.

“Floppy Disk” : What your mother called your father when she drank

It took roughly four-to-eighty of these things to hold all the information for a game, and took upwards of six hours to install. By the time you actually were ready to play the game, you could have invented a new one of your own creation, like Calvinball. Then, out of the withering darkness, came the CD-ROM.

Usually delivered to your home via cargo helicopter

Now, compact disks already existed, but they were used to store Michael Jackson’s music or AOL installation software. No one had ever thought to place interactive entertainment on them. Until, that is, a young studio put together 7th Guest, a puzzle game that mixed 1990’s CGI with 1980’s acting. The story was pretty basic, though revolutionary for the time. You, as an amnesiac/mute protagonist, had to wander the haunted halls of a murderer’s estate in order to solve puzzles and figure out just what was going on.

Also, to escape certain death from spooky ghosts.

Now I get it. Looking at this today, from a post-Dead Space viewpoint, this image is pretty tame. And lame. And other rhyming wrods. But back in the latter days of Home Improvement, this was terrifying. Also, for this argument, let’s pretend I was only five. And home alone during a thunderstorm. And a girl.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GHKMtCoE-0

But crappy full-motion video–FMV to you pros–was only the beginning.