The gender survival horror (survive the horror in our language) is, as the name suggests, focused on the protagonist’s survival in a climate of terror. Resources are scarce and generally horrible beings, such as ghosts or zombies, appear to hinder you, and the player proceeds by solving puzzles. Scares and fear are constant in the player. The term was first used with the release of Resident Evil in 1996, but many games before it already focused on horror.
The first game with elements of survivor horror that is known is “Nostromo“, developed by a Japanese student at the University of Tokyo named Akira Takiguchi in 1981 for the computers of the time. The game involved the player needing to escape from a spaceship and not encounter an invisible alien, which became more visible as it approached the player. In it we already saw the limited resources, where the player needed to collect certain items in order to escape and, if he didn’t, he wouldn’t reset the game.
In 1982 there was a game for the Atari 2600 “haunted house“, also with elements well known to this day, such as the emphasis on solving puzzles and having creatures typical of horror films, such as ghosts and bats. This also already had an inventory and areas that could only be accessed if you found a certain item. For many, this was the first survival horror game precisely because it had all these elements.
Already the first game that gave scares that is known was “Malcolm Evans 3D Monster Maze” released for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1982. This was a first-person game where the player had no way to fight the enemy, which is a tyrannosaurus rex, and needed to escape as quickly as possible.
That same year, SEGA released an arcade game called “monster bash“, a pioneer in showing many monsters typical of horror films, such as Dracula, Frankenstein and werewolves. Throughout the 1980s several games with a darker atmosphere were released, including Castlevania and Splatterhouse.
However, the gamesweet home” from 1989 released for Nintendinho is considered the predecessor of Resident Evil, not least because it was created by Tokuro Fujiwara, who later created the aforementioned game. Being basically a “Resident Evil in 2D”, it had zombies, puzzles and a very limited inventory with a focus on survival.
Being of the JRPG genre, it also tried to give a scary atmosphere and told a ghastly story and, interestingly, the character who died in the team was permanently dead. Years later, Capcom wanted to remake this game, but with new ideas emerging, the project was discarded and Resident was born.
In 1992 it was Infogrames’ turn to launch the Alone in the Dark for PC, with three-dimensional graphics, pre-rendered scenarios, tank gameplay, where the character rotates around its own axis, and fixed cameras, being practically equal to the classic era of Resident Evil and having a strong influence on it and for the entire genre survival horror.
After the great success of the first Resident Evil for the PlayStation, companies began to bet “heavy” on the genre and several games appeared that “drank” from survivor horror, including Silent Hill by Konami; Squaresoft’s Parasite Eve; ASCII Clock Tower; Tecmo’s Fatal Frame among others.
