(helicopter blades whirring) Whenever I crave the true, classic,
O.G. survival horror experience, then there’s pretty much
no way around ancient, awe-inspiring, derelict estates
in the middle of nowhere. (thunder) When I get that itch to revisit
the forefather of the pure, distilled formula of the
genre, I boot up the game, take my pick between the male
and female protagonist option, and then Enter The Survival Horror
once more... - [Wesker] Wow... what a mansion! exploring the cavernous,
maze-like corridors of its mysterious
mansion setting, while solving environmental puzzles
and fighting my way through its iconic lineup of zombies and other
horrible eldritch creatures– -while steering my 3D avatar in
cinematically staged fixed camera pre-rendered backgrounds, with
character-relative, a.k.a. tank-controls, and choosing from an arsenal
of melee and distance weapons– -all while having to painstakingly micromanage
my ammunition and restorative items. It’s about facing sheer overwhelming odds
that are best dealt with brains over brawn. And all of this, of course,
leads to the discovery of dark, sinister secrets hidden below the surface,
waiting for the player to gradually uncover. Of course, we all know
what game I’m talking about: Alone in the Dark! While the term Survival Horror was
specifically coined for the marketing of the first Resident Evil before it transmogrified
into a bona fide subgenre of horror games, Infogrames’ groundbreaking 1992
horror adventure Alone in the Dark that came out four years
prior to it, had already featured virtually all of the genre’s signature
elements in the same combination, so that it was posthumously
attributed to the genre. And even awarded the
First-Ever 3D Survival Horror Game by Guinness World Records:
Gamer Edition in 2008- -yep, that’s a thing! And rightfully so: Aside from the handful of features I've
summarized during this opening’s little bait-and-switch, there are
plenty more elements that are suspiciously identical in Capcom’s
later zombie horror milestone. So much so that some people have even
accused Shinji Mikami and co. of plagiarizing it. As Infogrames’ programmer
Franck de Girolami remembers in an interview for the book
La Saga des jeux vidéo: ”When I first played Resident Evil, I
honestly thought it was plagiarism." "I could recognize entire
rooms from Alone in the Dark.” And in fact, Mikami was, from the
beginning, completely transparent and honest about how central of an influence Alone in
the Dark was for the conception of Resident Evil: As this video-series, Origins of Survival
Horror, will uncover across future episodes, there were many games that had heavily
influenced and inspired the genre-progenitor, Resident Evil, and thereby actively
contributed to the very birth of the genre, but if there are two titles without
whose existence it, with utmost certainty, would never have happened, then those
are Capcom’s 1989 Horror-RPG Sweet Home, which Resident Evil
was a direct remake to (and which we’ve covered in the
last episode) AND Alone in the Dark. And aside from just being the inspirational
spark, Alone in the Dark remains, up to this day, one of the
most groundbreaking titles in PC Gaming history in its
own right in so many ways: it was forward thinking, technically
and stylistically ahead of its time and highly innovative, and, not just as one the first
video games based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, without question one of the most important
milestones for horror gaming writ large, with a highly interesting
development origin story to boot. So, in this video, we’re going
to dig into all of this with gusto, and take a look at the
strange and inconsistent legacy Alone in the Dark had as a
franchise, up until this day. (door hinges creakind loudly) It is high time we give Alone in the
Dark the spotlight it always deserved, (Edward "The Reptile"
Carnby screams fatally) because it is, without question,
one of the most important ORIGINS OF SURVIVAL HORROR. (electronic glitch) Before we continue, a little
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that in 1990, 3D gaming was in its infancy. It’s way more like it
was in its fetal stage. Those 3D games that did
exist were all highly experimental when employing even the most barebones 3D rendering
techniques for game objects in environments. One such experimental 3D game of
the time was Alpha Waves, an abstract, labyrinthine exploration game
with platformer gameplay elements. It was, in fact, also awarded by the
Guinness Book of Records - Gaming Edition, namely as the first 3D
platformer game ever made, and it was the first game ever that
would feature dynamic 3d-to-3d interaction, such as objects bouncing off
a three dimensional surface. Absolutely groundbreaking
at the time, technologically. Alpha Waves had been developed for
the Atari ST by Christophe de Dinechin, and then later ported to
MS-DOS by Frédérick Raynal. And it’s important to note that back then,
a port to a different platform was not just downloading a different
set of Unity libraries, going through a few rounds of platform-specific
fixes if needed and then click compile, and y'er done! It literally meant recreating the entire
game from scratch on a different platform in a different language, and try to achieve a result
that's as close to the original as humanly possible. Raynal’s work and the impressions
and experience with 3D technology he gained through this project
would become one of the three key factors that led to the
development of Alone in the Dark. The second factor was that Infogrames’
founder and CEO at the time, Bruno Bonnell, had apparently been playing a lot
of Haunted House for the Atari 2600, and thought to himself:
"that’s something we should make as well!" So he put out a proposal for a
game to his team of developers, in which players would navigate
a pitch dark environment and only get momentary snapshot glimpses
of the environment by striking matches. Anyone with a good concept
based on it was welcome to pitch it. Luckily, this themeing
resonated deeply with the fact that Frédérick Raynal was a huge
horror film nerd (the third factor), which led him to pitch a concept
based on Bonnell’s outline that would employ advanced
3D graphics to realize this vision. His pitch was accepted with
enthusiasm and Raynal and a small team, including Franck de Girolami,
who had worked with him on the Alpha Waves port already,
was tasked to make it reality. Raynal’s vision, that was clear from the
start, would require a grade of visual 3D fidelity that had simply never been achieved
before on any home computer system to date. The biggest challenge was
really how to achieve the aesthetic and visual quality
with computers at the time, whose computing power, long before
any specialized 3D hardward existed, was, well, extremely limited. So they took some
pointers from Alpha Waves. This game was able to render
fully three-dimensional environments simply because it chose
to render not a whole lot. A few simple unicolor geometrical
shapes and a flat-color background, that’s it. Because, rendering an entire
haunted house completely in 3D? Far too much for any
processor of the time to handle; at the time, a realtime-rendered
scene containing more than 100 polygons would get even cutting-edge
CPUs to their breaking point. So Raynal thought, what if that “flat
background” was not just a flat color, but a three-dimensional environment,
that would rendered into a picture, and only moving objects, such
as characters and animated and interactive items would be
rendered with actual 3D geometry. So they went on to built a prototype, taking
photographs of a real-life derelict mansion and then attempted to project
three-dimensional space onto them for characters to move
“within the space”. The technology available
at the time turned out to be not nearly sophisticated enough
to pull this off convincingly, and 3D modeling and rendering tools
of the time were insufficiently primitive, so Raynal and his team went on to develop
their own high-res EGA color palette 3D editor that would serve to model and render the, for
the time, rather complex background images and provide accurate data
based on positioning of objects and camera for the game
to interpret the environment, as well as model and animate
characters that would populate the scenes. Like, technologically,
when you see a shot like this, the game renders a literal
flat image in the background. But when a character walks
beind an object, like here, the engine must know where within
the 3 dimensional space this object is and then mask everything that is positioned
behind it on the depth buffer accordingly. So, it calculates an invisible,
highly simplified version of the room’s geometry so that
characters and objects can be rendered and masked
accurately within the 3D space. This might seem unimpressive for the
near-photorealism spoiled 3D gamer of today, but it can’t be stated
emphatically enough that this was absolutely and completely
unprecedented at the time. 1992 was big for 3D gaming
because it saw the release of 2 other technologically
revolutionary 3D titles: First, Wolfenstein 3D by id software
and Ultima Underworld by Origin Systems. Each of these specialized
in wildly different areas: Wolfenstein featured a fake-3D or
2.5D first person environment focused on unprecendetedly fast and fluent
motion and action-focused gameplay laying the foundation stone
for the first person shooter, while Ultima Underworld
delivered a slower, more methodical first
person exploration gameplay, in fully three-dimensional environments
that would pioneer the immersive sim. Both of these rendered enemies and objects as
crude 2 dimensional sprites to save CPU cycles, while Alone in the Dark, on the other
hand, went the complete opposite way, featuring fully polygonal and
animated characters and objects, while delegating the environments to
pre-rendered flat sprites in the background. The thing that made this one stand out
was that this technology allowed for arguably the most “cinematic”
presentation of any game to date, with camera angles that
would feel like they were taken straight out of an Italian art house
horror film of the 70s and 80s. Which, well, they were. Raynal proved in many ways
the perfect match for the project, because not only was he technologically
bold and visionary enough to insist on creating something never-before-seen in
video games to realize his artistic vision. He also had the right instincts as
a storyteller and game designer, and understood long before
“survival horror” was an established genre, what aspects would be important to create an
unprecedented, spine-chilling horror adventure. Long before dozens of developers
(including Infogrames and Atari with the Alone in the Dark
legacy later down the line) failed over and over again in mistaking horror
for violence/action porn with monster theming, Raynal understood that what Alone
in the Dark needed was deliberate player disempowerment, mystery, danger,
patience, and a constant sense of looming danger. player disempowerment, mystery, patience,
and a constant sense of looming danger. The player must feel like they
are facing insurmountable odds. He understood, that that which
you don’t see, know or understand, is always far more anxiety-inducing
than anything you can draw out in detail in
front of the player’s eyes. Considering this, there couldn’t
be a more perfect fit than the fact that Alone in the Dark was
one of the first video games set in the universe of HP
Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu mythos. For a time during development,
Infogrames actually worked with the offical Call of Cthulhu RPG
license, acquired by Chaosium. However, the tabletop publisher
eventually decided to backrudder and revoke the license because they
felt that the game was not capable of accurately portraying the
complex pen and paper ruleset. A pretty short-sighted and
narrowminded decision if you ask me, but since HP Lovecraft’s works
were not yet public domain at the time— -that happened in 2008- -Alone in the Dark was
eventually released with the byline: “A Virtual Adventure Game inspired
by the Work of H.P. Lovecraft”. Now all of this is certainly pretty impressive,
but you know what really blew my mind? When replaying Alone
in the Dark for this video, it has been at least 15 years since I
last actively played the game myself. And that’s not even
half its actual age. At the time of release of this video, it’s been
almost 31 years since it was put on shelves. For a game this antediluvian, I was
amazed at how well it had aged and how pleasant and enjoyable
it is to play to this day. And sure, its controls and UI/UX of course
can’t conform to the standards of today, where games can follow a comfortably beaten
path of game design and UX best practices players are now conditioned
to expect by default. When Alone in the Dark came
out there simply was no path at all; this game was literally the first to
“blaze the trail” into uncharted territory. But considering that, it really
feels still extremely approachable and after a comparably small
old-game-acclimatisation phase, it plays very intuitive. (smack!) And I highly, highly recommend this to
anyone who was either never played it themselves or hadn’t even heard
of it before watching this video, because I’m convinced it will
instantly make you understand WHY this game was so engaging and
considered SCARY as hell back in 1992. The game’s story takes place in 1924, in
the derelict Louisiana estate of renowned eccentric and reclusive
atrist Jeremy Hartwood, who— -as expected in a
Lovecraftian tale- -had just recently
taken his life. Right at the start, the game gives us the
choice between a male and a female protagonist. We step into the shoes of either Edward
‘Jack’ Carnby, the hard-boiled noir PI, or the neice of the
deceased, Emily Hartwood. No matter who you
play as, after reading— -or if you had the fancy
CD-ROM version HEARING- the characters’ opening monologues
in full and gloriously hammy voice over, you travel to Derceto Mansion deep
in the heart of the Louisiana bayous. (Resident Evil 7 anyone?) Your goal is to seek out the artist’s old
piano which is supposed to be stored in the attic of the house, as it is said to
contain hidden secrets that we’re tasked to find. Before starting to play, the game plays
maybe one of the most iconic, and at the time, positively jaw-dropping intro
cutscenes in all of classic gaming— -fully rendered within the actual
game engine to show off what it can do. We drive along muddy roads,
with the iconic polygonal flexing toad hopping dangerously closely out of
our way before getting squished to pulp. This is followed by the protagonist of
our choice arriving at Derceto Mansion and walking up the driveway
to the mansions lavish doorstep. I can faithfully attest
this bit alone, at the time when playing it at a
way too young age, ALREADY made me glad I was
wearing my brown pants that day. This shot alone here,
with the creepy hand on the windowsill hinting at the
dangers lurking in this place- -dangers that our character was
walking straight into on train tracks— -was enough to make the
hair on my arms stand up. I’ve always loved games that take
their time to slowly build things up before unleashing hell on the player,
and Alone in the Dark really is patient; it drags out this opening walk out without
remorse, the double doors swinging slowly open with the hinges
nerve-gratingly screaking, and the protagonist walking all the
way up several flights of stairs to the attic, basically placing us as far
away from the entrance (and exit!) as humanly possible
before putting us in control (and thereby detroying all
hope of following the urge of turning on the heel and noping
straight back to where we came from). Once being put in control, the game
actually doesn’t grant us a lot of time at all to get acquainted with the
controls and overall game feel, because after about half a minute up
here, we’re greeted by a strange beast shuffling
and creeping about behind the roof window. I genuinely love this
moment, because it’s a perfect microcosm of the game’s
design philosophy in a nutshell. Spotting the creature outside the
window is a warning of imminent danger; something bad is about to happen,
but the game here is giving us a window in which we can act in order to
prevent things from going truly bad. If we wait too long, the crudely
polygonal but STILL very creepy creature will burst through the window
and is all over us in a heartbeat and we have to defend ourselves
with fists and feet in melee combat. This is not impossible, but all
the player’s actions in the game, as befits a good survival horror
game, are slow and very deliberate, tailored around making
players feel disempowered. You're not supposed to
feel like a badass fighter, but someone who's weak and squishy
against the primordial evils that are thrown at us. You have to activate the fighting
stance in the menu before even being able to dish out punches and kicks
by holding the directional keys. And these attacks a long time to build
up, while locking you in the animation, so that a kick or a punch’s
HIT takes places an arduously long time after you press
the key and initiate the attack. It makes fights feel...not very
fun at all, and serves the purpose that you’re naturally inclined to
avoid fights whenever you can. And that’s exactly what
the game wants you to do. As I said, it’s very feasible to kill this
first enemy in hand-to-hand combat. But given the slow and unreliable controls, and the
fact that you haven't learned the ins and outs yet, the chances of you taking at least
some damage here are pretty high, and since healing items are a
finite rarity, each hit feels costly. (grunt and moan) The way more cunning alternative
to tanking it with the Rocky defense— -and the way the game
actually wants you to play it— -is to use situational awareness
to AVOID danger altogether. There’s a generous enough time window, between
the warning scream and the creature entering, in which we can act, so we can
make use of the PUSH stance and shove this wardrobe
here in front of the window to barricade it and then the monster
won’t be able to enter at all. Crisis averted. Like, this is yet another little mechanic,
here, that was first used in this game as a quick and locigal solution to avoid
imminent danger in a horror game and it keeps being re-used to great
effect in so many horror games, if it’s barring Lycans from
entering in Resident Evil Village or barricading your hideout for the night to keep
eldritch Polish abominations out in Darkwood. Alone in the Dark just non-chalantly
shakes that out of its sleeve and doesn’t even give us time enough to process before
1-uping the situation and repeating the lesson, When a zombie bursts out of a trap
door the moment we open this alluring crate and pick up the rifle it contains. Just like before, we have the
option to be smarter about it here, by resisting the temptation
of looting the chest right away, and instead pushing it
right on top of the trap door and thereby sealing the
zombie in his hideout until he rots. Like, even more
than he does already. And the, uh, collateral
advantage here, is that we don't have to either take damage
or waste the rifle's extremely sparse ammo and have it at our disposal for later. If that's not the survival horror formula
in a nutshell then I don't know what is. After this first onslaught, we’re finally
getting a little bit of time to breathe, explore the attic, and find the hidden
compartment in the piano that reveals the first clue on the scavenger hunt across the halls
and floors of Derceto Mansion on the quest to uncover the otherworldly secrets that
drove Jeremy Hartwood to his untimely suicide. Up here, we can also find some
additional supply items and some books that we can read through to get drip-fed
the sinister backstory of the mansion. It feels positively Elder Scrolls’ean
that we can find a plethora of different volumes that are all written
out and readable start to finish, in the CDRom
even voice narrated, and sometimes they're even only tangentially or not
at all connected to the immediate story of the game, which helps flesh out the setting and
overall mysterious atmosphere greatly. But more often than not, these books
also contain a piece of information, a clue that will help you overcome the
game’s numerous obstacles, riddles and puzzles, but you have to read carefully and
often between the lines to pick up on them. It’s telegraphed early on and clearly
enough that you understand from the get-go that there’s helpful wisdom FOR
THE GAME buried in these books, and that really works like a
charm in making you feel like a typical lovecraftian detective
piecing together the mystery breadcrumb by b breadcrumb by brrbrblbrl breadcrumb by breadcrumb, ... what a tongue twister and it gets you into this mindset
that makes you search every nook and cranny with a high
degree of awareness. Just the right state of mind to be in this
suspense filled horror adventure, right? Another aspect that this opening
segment beautifully establishes is the feeling that you’re
never safe in this place, that something bad can
happen to you at any time. This was something that Frederic
Raynal was adamant from the start about getting across as
early and clearly as possible. For instance, there’s parts where
just “going down the wrong corridor” or even “reading the wrong
book” can kill you in an instant. This does sound unfair, like an old-school
Sierra adventure of the sadistic kind where clicking the wrong object
can often subject you to a completely unpredictable death
without any signposting whatsoever, and where you can almost hear the
developers sadistically cackling in the background; Alone in the Dark on the other hand is
always fair with its sudden deathtraps, because it tries its darndest to ensure
to signpost danger clearly enough that if you get struck down, you’ll
go “Aw god, yes of course”, because you had all the information
to know that it would happen already. You just didn't connect
it yet for some reason. Like, take the case of the
aforementioned "killing book" for instance- -while it sounds unfair to have the player
drop dead from just opening the wrong book (Ron Gilbert would say “getting punished for
exploring in a game that wants you to explore”)- -the game is set up in a way that you will
mandatorily stumble across another book before you get your hands on
it, and this first book catalogues several other books and tomes
and their eldritch properties, including the "killing book" while
clearly stating that it kills, explicitly. (funny scream) (crack, thunk) So, if you read this before you have
paid attention and then and drop dead, you'll very likely go, "Oh right, they mentioned
that. Shit, it acutally did kill me." because you've been warned. Unless you’re someone who just
clicks away all exposition and dialogue, but then, well, this is just
not the game for you, buddy. So yeah, Alone in the Dark
really goes out of its way to be fair with its looming dangers, while
still putting you on the edge. Plus, you can also save the
game anywhere, at any time, so it’s not like the game smacks
you over the head and lets you replay half an hour of playtime or even
the entire game for no reason. Save often, save early and
there’s really nothing to whine about. Raynal's approach
here is efficient: the game teaches its lessons with the
first room well enough that you instantly take them to heart, because from here on out,
with each threatening situation you encounter, you automatically start
scanning the area for a more cunning solution than just beating
the shit out of your opposition. Like the iconic dining room puzzle where
you serve a pot of soup with human meat to a group of zombies that would
otherwise gang up on you and tear you apart, but with a good stew, they're
content and feasting away and don't have a care in
the world for you anymore. Their heirachy of needs in the
Maslovian pyramid is met, basically. Some enemies are completely invincible,
so you have to find a way to get past them without them hurting you or disabling
them through some puzzle mechanic, like the 2 gargoyles at the
top of the upper staircase, who prevent you from descending
into the lower parts of the manison, by turning you to stone if you
come too close and catch their gaze, so you’ll have to trick them into gazing at each
other with some good old medus’ean mirror-trickery. But of course, there are also instances
where your choices are either fight or flight. Luckily, over time, you do
accumulate a bit of an arsenal, with the attic shotgun being
first weapon you discover, followed by pistol, revolver, ax,
knife, sword, bow and arrow and so on. BUT this really doesn't mean that you're
gonna turn into a one man - or woman - army. This is survival horror. Your inventory space is severely
limited, so you have to drop items frequently in order to have enough
space for quest relevant items. Ammo is exceedingly
sparse, and on top of that, melee weapons have the
tendency to break, pretty quickly. While I'm 9 times out of 10 not a
big fan of weapon durability in games, this is the 1 of 10 cases
where it makes perfect sense, because the melee weapons do give you
quite an edge in combat (no pun intended), so making you think twice about
when you use your resources and when you rather save
them for later in a more precarious situation and instead either flee
or try to make it work with less; that's the secret sauce of what makes
survival horror so timelessly engaging. Raynal’s approach for a horror
game was ahead of its time... - [Stévérick Raynobs] And we
have invented a new G E N R E called
S U R V I V A L H O R R O R which is phenomenal... ... it works like magic! - And it's all the more astounding how
much foresight he showed by managing to basically nail the forumla of survival
horror straight up on the first try! (bang, cha-chunk) So good in fact that none of its numerous
successors were ever able to live up to it again, or understand what made
it good in the first place. We'll get to that in a bit. Alone in the Dark succeeds
in making you feel unsafe wherever you go without being
unfair or unnecessarily punishing, it deliberately disempowers players with
"realistically slow" controls and movement, comparably low health and a limited,
restricted use of weapons and items that it conjures that signature survival
horror min-max tension with ease. Alone in the Dark is a masterpiece because
it is a videogame that is so much greater than the sum of its parts, while being
comprised of so many parts that are already, on their own, absolutely trailblazing and
breathtaking, not just in the context of its time. Because so many elements of
this game have, right out of the gate, become the de facto standard that a
vast majority of horror games still adhere to, to this day, often without even
knowing that it originated here. Raynal surged ahead into virtually uncharted
territory without even a hint of a beaten path, and ended up being the one that, yeah,
beat the path that has ultimately evolved into the time-honored game design trail for
a classic survival horror pilgrimage. "But hey," I hear you ask,
"What about the game's premise?" It says on the tin:
"Alone in the dark", but this looks all bright
and well-lit, doesn't it? And what about Bonnel's
original concept idea of a game where you have to light
matches to see in the Dark? Now, as you might have guessed by
now, in a time when a three-digit number of flat-shaded polygons would turn even a
cutting edge CPU of the time into a frying pan, it was of course not even
remotely technically feasible to compute realtime
lightning on a home computer. Everything you see in this game is
by necessity "flat shaded": Simple colors, no gradients, no
dynamic light sources, no shadows or anything interacting with
polygonal objects or backgrounds. That kind of magic would still be a good
few years down the road at that point in time. Nevertheless, they still didn't
completely drop the premise and tried to implement something
close to it in spirit by adding certain rooms that are simply
pitch dark when you enter them. You can't do anything. So unless you bring a light source, like an
oil lamp, your screen would be plain black. Simple on/off state
adventure puzzle. But hey, wait! There is actually a section, near the end, when you explore the cavernous
labyrinth below the mansion on the trail of the Old God
that’s slumbering deep down here who’s been leeching on the
Hartwoods for generations as it turns out – in this part you’ll have to navigate a
maze that makes you feel like a rat in a lab – completely _Alone in the Dark_ and your lantern will only provide
you with a small radius of visibility the rest is masked completely pitch black. It’s pretty much Bonnell’s
original pitch, right there – and it’s also one of the least
entertaining/most aggravating parts of the game – next to the more action-laden
platforming segments during the finale. Sometimes... it’s just better to discard an idea, even if it’s the one the whole
project was founded on, technically... By the time Alone in the
Dark was about to be shipped, especially the Quality Assurance,
bugfixing and polishing phase had severely worn down Raynal's
spirits and optimism about the game. He was intensely frustrated with himself and
pretty much every aspect of the project by now, convinced it would tank, and that
players would tear it apart for all its, in his eyes, painfully apparent
flaws and shortcomings. If ever there was a textbook
case for the metaphor of “not seeing the forest for the trees”
or production blindness, then this is it, because Alone in the Dark was
met with overwhelming critical acclaim and sold exceedingly well, earning
accolades and rewards left and right, and it surpassed 2 and a half
million sales by the end of the decade. It was insanely visionary and ahead
of its time on pretty much every front. And to re-iterate and go full circle
with this video series’ central thesis: Alone in the Dark had featured virtually
every single element that would later be defined as Survival Horror
with the inception of Resident Evil and serve as its prime inspiration and blueprint,
4 whole years before it graced our CRT TVs. - [Barry] "What is this....?"
- [Shinji Weskami] "WOW!" (extremely lofi ocean waves and seagulls) - Given its commercial and critical
success, it comes as no surprise that a sequel to Alone in the Dark was
pretty much immediately put into production. Alone in the Dark 2 was released in
1993 and I can say that I find the game... fascinating, from a video
game historical standpoint. Because... well...I just gushed pretty
much endlessly about all these individual, never-before seen like this elements
Frédéric Raynal had tactfully and tastefully thought up and assembled with an
incredibly keen instinct for what a trailblazing 3D horror game would require in order
to work as well as it ended up doing. Well, Raynal was not involved in
the sequel any more but moved on to start working on his wonderful
Little Big Adventure duology, after this, and it's so fascinating to see what conclusions
the team that would work on the sequel came to regarding which aspects of the
first game they thought was worth putting more emphasis on and which ones
to push further into the background. You wanna take a guess? (kaboooom!) (kabang!!) Their take-away from the success of the
first game was that its sequel needed to: - Focus way more on action,
combat, gunplay, bang boom bang. - Tone down on the
quote-unquote "boring" stuff, the slow paced exploration, the puzzles,
ya know, the stuff that puts you to sleep etc. - And for some reason they also
felt like Edward / Jack Carnby was the absolute main
attraction of the first game, an iconic, charismatic, peerlessly
admirable video game protagonist, and that HE would be the
thing to put front and center, that people couldn't
wait to get more from; so more focus on the one and only JACK...
(and no more option for a female protagonist). So basically saying: Hey, all the
things that made the first game so unique and peerless and special, the
things that made it truly standout from anything else video games
had ever brought forward- -that's the stuff we should cut back on, and
become more like every other game out there. And also to put all their
chips on the gamble that JACK, literally one of the most
uninteresting protagonists I had come across, in my
life, in gaming so far at the time, believing he had the potential to become
something like Horror Gaming's Super Mario. Which...like...really? Like, don't get me wrong, Alone in
the Dark 2 is not a bad game at all, it's entertaining enough and still a
decently-made horror action game, all in all. But most of what makes it good is the places
where its predecessor's DNA still shines through. But as I said, I find it way more interesting
as a harbinger of what was to come, as a showcase of how
nobody really understood what made a horror game
good in the first place, because it showed how fleeting and volatile
and seemingly impossible to capture in a bottle this yet undefined will-o-the-wisp
survival horror still was. Because they never ever managed to
recapture the essence of the first game ever again, and it only went
downhill from here. Alone in the Dark 3
followed another year later, and at least had the sense to
rudder back to a somewhat less action oriented approach and
embrace more of the original's qualities. It's also not a bad game at all,
but it still was pretty apparent that Infogrames was struggling to
recapture the essence of the original, stumbling around wildly without
understanding what made it work in the first place. Messing around with theming and setting,
trying to shift it into a Wild West setting- -with zombies--and of course more
of the amazing JACK at the forefront. The series' trajectory is in many
ways similar to the ongoing identity crisis that Resident Evil faced
after the fourth installment, which was so groundbreaking and
trailblazing and revolutionary at the time for both horror and action gaming for generations
to come and that put the bar so unsurmountably high that it took many, many years for
developers trying to follow in its footsteps to even understand what it was
that made it work in the first place, and not continuously come
to the wrong conclusions, before survival horror could
finally properly start breathing again. The immediate two sequels of Alone
in the Dark, as I said, are okay games, and definitely interesting from a historical
standpoint and if you're digging the series, definitely worth a play,
but ultimately they were completely overshadowed by the
peerless greatness of their ancestor. This is also what both gaming press
and sales figures at the time thought. The games were rated decently enough but
ended up dipping more and more in sales so that Infogrames decided to
put the series on halt after 1994, concluding that there's just no real
market in this type of horror adventure, ya know, and that the first Alone in the
Dark was just a one trick pony, probably. (roar!) But we all know what
happened in the next years. The following seven years,
right after Alone in the Dark 3, would see the birth and overwhelming
success of entire first Resident Evil trilogy, followed by the ever-emerging
survival horror boom, which must have really fricking
stung for Infogrames at the time. Basically right
after they were like: "Nah, this was probably just a
fluke; there's no money in this." and decided to put it to rest, some Japanese
developer comes around the corner and says "No no no no no, you have
not idea what you have there." "You don't really understand, let
me show you how it's done right," and they printed money, and they
infected the whole world with a fever for the very genre that THEY
technically had invented, but were unable to unlock, or
even realize, its full potential. I would be biting my own
ass, if I were in their shoes. At the very least, they came to
a similar conclusion by realizing "hey waitaminute! This
survival horror thing," "WE'RE the ARCHITECTS
of this whole shebang!" and so they said, "okay, you know what?
Let's reboot series and task developer studio" "Darkworks to develop 'Alone in
the Dark: The New Nightmare'", a complete do-over of the franchise, with a
newly designed heartthrob version of Edward Carnby. The game actually turned out to be surprisingly
decent, like visually and technically it was
quite impressive considering the visual fidelity it managed to
squeeze out of the humble PS1 hardware. What's really interesting though
is how it's crystal clear now that this title was basically
so heavily cross-pollinated, because it unabashedly
took heaviest inspiration from the Resident Evil
series this time around, so much so that...some have
accused it of plagiarism at the time. Kinda ironic, isn't it? The New Nightmare is a highly
interesting game in its own right; it has a lot of flaws, a good couple of
actually quite cool ideas and set pieces, a similarly pulpy B-movie feel that makes
the Resident Evil series so unmistakable, and a lot of potential locked behind
a thick layer of bad polish and jank, but it's actually a highly scary
and redeeming horror game for the patient player who's willing to
brace its quite intense difficulty level. AND weirdly enough, the game received a
strange but oddly great GameBoy Color version (not even Gameboy
Advance, but Gameboy Color) that was, if nothing else,
technically quite remarkable. I've been considering to cover The New Nightmare
in a video on its own many times in the past; maybe I'll get to it one day, so let me know if
this is something you'd be interested in watching. The game came out on PC, PS1, and then later
in an upgraded version for Dreamcast and PS2, and as we said, in a surprisingly faithful
2D adaptation for the GameBoy Color, and it ALMOST was published
in Japan for PS1 and 2 by none other than Capcom,
which did not come to be in the end. The game sold pretty well,
broke even multiple times, and especially the GameBoy
version ended up selling almost 1.5 million units within
the first year of release. Pretty impressive to be honest. All of this makes it rather
puzzling that The New Nightmare never continued,
at least not directly. Instead..... (sigh) ...what we got was...Alone
in the Dark: A New Atrocity in 2005, aka the horrendously, horrendously
bad Uwe Boll directed low-budget movie adaptation with Christian Slater
in the role of Edward Carnby. The film won multiple
awards, such as Worst Picture, Worst Director and Least quote-unquote
"Special" Effects in a Film and is regularly at the top of the movie-charts such
as worst movies ever and the likes. Absolute master, uh,
pardon, disasterpiece. (mønster snærls) It horribly tanked at the box office,
didn't even remotely brake even, but for some reason legendary
Price Boxer movie quack Uwe Boll decided that producing another one would
be a fantastic idea, and it was released in 2008, this time exploiting Lance
Henriksen as highest billed actor. And it cost about 5 million US Dollars to
produce and made a whopping 133,000 back. [sigh] - [Uwe] Fuck yourself! Because that is so fucking absörd what re***ded amatör idietts! - (enthusiastic /s) If you'd like me to
make a video on the Uwe Boll movie duology then please let me
know in the comments. (whispers) please don't
[Note from the captioner: PLS DO!:3] In the same year, Infogrames— -now named Atari after the
publisher had gone through a lot of turbulent times, bankruptcy,
insolvency and severe restructuring— -decided that what Alone in
the Dark needed now was... a reboot.
Yeah, another one. This one would be titled simply
"Alone in the Dark" again and it... one has to admit, it at least tried
some ideas and also otherwise tried to be original and inventive and
also tried to reinvent the series, kind of. It featured interchangable camera
perspectives and tried to latch onto the trend of binging TV
shows on DVDs, at the time, structuring its narrative in an
episodic format similar to, like, Alan Wake or some of
the classic Telltale series. Something that quite a few games
dabbled in in one way or another at the time, and all of them more or less
realized eventually that it's... not something that really
works for the medium at all. I think the most noteworty feature of this
game is the focus on environmental puzzles, especially that it was the first 3D
action game to feature a dynamic fire propagation system that
would create dangers to overcome and had to be used cunningly
to solve puzzles and such. Another big thing of the time
really, with 3D action games regularly featuring the odd physics based gimmick
mechanic, like Half-Life 2's gravity gun. Sadly though, the fire propagation
system, while kinda impressive, on a technical level, was much more
interesting on paper than in execution, and that's the general
takeaway critics and players had, not just of the system,
but of the whole game. It's a game that tries some
interesting things but, once again, lacks polish pretty much
every step of the way, so much so that it's often
a pain to bite through— -but personally? I think there IS a generally
good game buried deep under a mountain of flaws and imperfections,
that takes an iron stomach to excavate. Maybe I should consider
covering this one too, one day. The list is getting longer. But hey, we're
still not at the end. Atari-formerly Infogrames,
who had so far shown an (Sarcastic enunciaton)
incredibly keen sense for what the Alone in the Dark franchise
needed at any moment in time to elevate it to its
former greatness— -of course, came to the conclusion
in 2014 that what it REALLY needed (drumroll) Was an explosive, action focused,
4 player Co-op third person shooter!! (beleaguered sigh) Alone in the Dark: Illumination
(the title is funny, I gotta admit), was an absolute dumpster fire that would
finally make the video games reach the true potential the Uwe Boll movies had
proven was slumbering within the series. It felt like it attempted to be one
of the most uninspired mashups of Resident Evil 5 and Left
4 Dead, you can imagine, and a lot of game developers tried
something similar at the time (mumbles). (continued beleaguered mumbling) And it's now sitting at a whopping 19 out of 100
on Metacritic with an even worse user average. I often think, if anything, the
series should probably be accused of Nine Inch Nails plagiarism,
because in so many ways, it's been one continuous
Downward Spiral ever since the O.G. saw the light of
day and impressed everyone. Huge part of me thinks that this IP
should have just left it at that one, groundbreaking, overwhelmingly
good horror gaming historical milestone, groundbreaking, overwhelmingly
good horror gaming historical milestone, completely unsullied
to look back on now. But what people now think of when
they see Alone in the Dark is like, "oh man, what did Atari
do to this poor series?" But hey, it looks like despite its relocation
to rock bottom, it's not completely dead yet. But hey, it looks like despite its relocation
to rock bottom, it's not completely dead yet. - This is Madness! - Because Alone in the
Dark is currently getting- -you have three guesses... Another Reboot. (crowd cheering) After Illumination in 2015,
Atari finally gave up on the IP, realizing that they really
had no clue what to do with it— -thank Nyarlathotep!- -and sold it to THQ Nordic in 2018, who
promptly tasked the studio Pieces Interactive- -best known for developing
Magicka 2--with making said reboot. This took a strong
inspiration by, you guessed it, the smash success of the
Remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3, the resurgence of survival
horror, in the last half decade. And honestly, I am... more
optimistic than I've been for Alone in the Dark for
a very, very long time. I'm not, like, over the moon, but I'm
caaaaarefully optimistic for this one. It is unlikely that it will
be able to compete with the recent REMakes in
terms of production quality; I don't think the money for
that is there to begin with, but I feel like we're at a point
where survival horror has finally been digested enough that it's now understood
better than it ever has by game designers, and the team also made sure to hire a
horror writer with actual experience in the field, with Mikael Hedberg, who
formerly worked as a writer on the original Amesia: The Dark
Descent and SOMA, which, truth be told, is one of the best-written horror games
in the past decade, in my humble opinion. I'm definitely awaiting
it with careful curiosity! And frankly, I think it'd be really,
really hard to make a game worse than where the series
left off, even if they tried to. It can only go up from here. That's the most positive notion
I've been able to end this on. - Welcome to the Madhouse, detective! (blows) (static interference) Yo, thank you so much for watching,
this was Origins of Survival Horror, a series on games that were full-blown survival
horror that preceded the first Resident Evil. If you haven’t seen the
first episode on Sweet Home, the game Resident Evil’s development
started as a direct remake to, then you should
absolutely check that out, and there’s more games we’re
planning to cover in future episodes; this is a really exciting era of
video game history to unravel! If this is your
first video of mine, hey, I’m Ragnar and on
this channel I largely cover old games, horror games, indie
games and combinations thereof. Before I let you go, a
small plea for support. The videos on this channel
are in large part crowdfunded, so if you’re considering helping
me and everyone who partakes in making these videos out with a monthly
donation within your comfort levels, you can do so over on Patreon: even a small pledge
makes a big difference, so thanks for considering! To my active Patrons, I greatly
appreciate your continuous support, you have my heartfelt
gratitude, and as always, a special thank you
this time goes out to: patreon.com/RagnarRoxShow/ Until next time... ta ta! (static intensifies)
