Full disclosure, I wasn’t born when Diablo 2 came out. Throw your rotten fruit at me and call me an infant. I missed it by three months, so I quickly toggled to the original mode when I got my hands on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the remake. I didn’t really care abo༒ut the empty fields of nothing, with a camera angle so distant that the visuals were hard to make out. I just wanted to see what Diablo 2 looked like when I was still in the womb. Turns out, it’s terrifying.
The environments aren’t worth writing home about. As I said, lots of empty barren fields with cobbled🦂-together walls and dying trees, so it feels like walking through the countryside. But the older limitations mean it has muted lighting that suggests neither night nor day, it’s more of a strange stripped-down blur of the two - vaguely cloudy, but without the looming shadows. Then you have the photorealistic environments that look like they were ripped from grainy old pictures, juxta♔posed by pixelated sprites exploring them. It evokes an uneasy feeling so strong it bleeds into the game’s atmosphere.
I’ve had this sensation a few times in the past, but have never bothered to explore it. It’s simple enough - older games freak me out. Even if it’s something as innocuous as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Sims 2, I have my couple living their happy life together, cooking meals, and watching TV… it’s so painstakingly normal that to get nightmares about it sounds bizarre. Yet the low-poly models and poor render distance shrouds the game in a mystery which leaves so much blank space for you to fill that, if you’re a Zoomer who g𓃲rew up with video game urban legends and creepypastas, you quickly shovel with horror. I can’t play The Sims 2 without an overwhelming anxiety of being stalked, but in reality, I’m the one playing stalker.
Camera angles play a key role in the horror of older games. I recently tried out the original 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 2, and not being able to see around every corner heightens the anxiety—you never know if you’re safe, because you can’t swivel around or check every single nook and cranny. You’re held to a fixed camera positioned in a voyeuristic fashion that pits you as the watcher, an uninvited guest peering in on people’s lives. All the while, you’re hoping that whatever you’re wandering into isn’t laden with zombies ready to ju💜mp out at you, but hope is painfully vague, so you’re always on edge as you tiptoe from room to room, the unknown casting a shadow over your every move.
We’re not looking through the eyes of Harry Mason or Leon Kennedy, we’re observing them. Diablo 2 and The Sims don’t have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:tank controls, opting instead for a more fitting birds-eye view, yet those fixed cameras strike similar chords, keeping us suspended like we’re sifting through found footage. It’s no wonder that Resident Evil 7 opted to take that literally and have Ethan Winters learn about past victims of the Baker household through old VHS tapes that slot us into past victims’ viewpoints. There’s something deeply personal about these more grounded camera angles, which is why found footage horror can be so viscerally upsetting to watch. It feels like a tangible and real situation, rather than a carefully const💜ructed work of fiction.
A lot of the camera work in older games came down to tech limitations, but old hardware had other profound effects on horror. Silent Hill famously used thick fog to mask its poor renไder distance, but this only amplified the unease and became a staple of the series. Walking through the empty streets, boxed in by an oppressive force of nature, is unnerving because the fog traps you in this hell while hiding the monsters lurking just out of sight. Constraints also bled into sound design. Older memory limits mean that the audio in older games is often as crunchy and distorted as the graphics, making it sound as though we’re hearing everything through an old radio, one that nobody is answering.
I haven’t just been mentioning my age to annoy my co-workers. When I was growing up, YouTube was just getting started, and the internet was already laden with digital urban myths. Given that it was centred around a growing online culture, most of it was tied up with video games, whether it was Herobrine in Minecraft, CJ’s mom hauntinᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚg her home in GTA: San Andreas, or that Lavender Town’s theme in Pokemon Blue/Red would lead to your untimely death. Campfire horror stories becꦑame synonymous with retro as so many of these early myths were rooted in classics. I’m sure plenty of others my age have had similar experiences, since whenever I mention retro games being inherently scary by nature of being old, Millennials and Gen Xers tend not to get it, while Zoomers mostly agree.
After playing so many old games and getting freaked out so many times, never wrapping my head around why, I thin💖k I finally have an answer. Urban legends, technical limitations, and the fear of the unknown that floods the gaps these games had to leave mix together in a cocktail that sends shivers down my spine. Maybe that should put me off playing these oldies, since more often than not, a midnight gaming session with classics leads to me obsessively peering over my shoulder at the front door, afraid that s🔯omeone’s going to burst in, but I love horror. It’s half the fun of digging into my retro backlog.