Haunted House (video game)

Haunted House is a 1982 adventure game programmed by James Andreasen for the Atari Video Computer System (later renamed the Atari 2600) and published by Atari, Inc. The player controls a character presented by a pair of eyes peering in the dark as they explore a mansion seeking out parts of an urn to return to the entrance. The game world is populated by roaming enemies including vampire bats, tarantulas, and a ghost. Haunted House was among the first games to use player-controlled scrolling between large portions of the visual space.

Haunted House received positive reviews from contemporary video game publications such as The Space Gamer and Electronic Games, while others, such as How to Win at Home Video Games, noted the game's difficulty and lack of intuitiveness. The game has seen several releases across consoles and formats as part of Atari compilation packages as well as follow-up games, such as Haunted House (2010) and Haunted House: Cryptic Graves (2014), and Haunted House (2023).

Critics such as Christopher Buecheler of GameSpy have called Haunted House one of the earliest examples of the survival horror genre due to its elements of horror themes, limited item management, and a variety of monsters. Other studies of the genre have suggested that the game lacked the specific elements that later games like Alone in the Dark (1992) and Resident Evil (1996) had to establish it as a unique game genre.

Gameplay

Haunted House is a single-player adventure game in which the player's goal is to recover three pieces of a magic

Reception

Cashbox reported the game as one of the top selling video games by July 1982. Reviews commented on the game's similarity to other titles, graphics and sound, and its difficulty. Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel of Electronic Games found the game similar to Atari's previous game Adventure (1980). The reviewers commented that it was "much more atmospheric" than Adventure, and found it to be "one of the most intriguing and novel video game cartridges to appear in some time" calling its audio and visuals excellent, while finding the scoring system a bit difficult to parse. Another review from Electronic Games, from the "1983 Software Encyclopedia" issue, gave the game a seven out of ten rating, again finding the audio and visuals as excellent while stating that the game gave the player "the spine-tingling sensation that something spooky is always about to happen". Richard A. Edwards of The Space Gamer declared that the game was among the best graphics and sound Atari had produced and could not find any drawbacks to the game.

Onosoko of The Capital Times wrote that the game's graphics were deemed as "blocky" and unimpressive, but the game itself could be challenging. A review in Video Games found that it was hard to get excited by a game predominantly played in darkness, giving it an "interest rating" of five out of ten and a "skill rating" of nine out of ten, stating that "you almost need to take notes to keep track of things in this game [...] there is no single solution to any of the [difficulty levels]". How to Win at Video Games found the game difficult and not easy to understand at first, but recommended it to audiences willing to give time to learn the game's mechanics.

In 1995, Flux magazine ranked Haunted House #68 on their list of "Top 100 Video Games". Christopher Buecheler of GameSpy included Haunted House into the website's "Hall of Fame" in December 2002. Beucheler praised the game, stating that "in an age where most game design was "fire lasers until you die"", that the game was a noteworthy accomplishment. Brett Weiss included the game as an "honorable mention" in his book The 100 Greatest Console Video Games 1977-1987 (2014), recommending it for Adventure fans who were "hankering for something creepier". A retrospective review in Game Informer from 2005 said that Haunted House contained many gameplay elements that were found in later survival horror games in the Silent Hill or Resident Evil series despite lacking the "visual razzle-dazzle" of those games.

Legacy

Some video game critics, such as Buecheler of GameSpy and Skyler Miller of AllGame, have cited the game as being one of the earliest in the survival horror genre. Buecheler specifically noted the elements of the genre with its creepy themes, limited item management, and a variety of monsters. In her writings on the genre, Laurie N. Taylor traced the origins of the genre to Alone in the Dark (1992) and that the genre was expanded on by Resident Evil (1996) while stating that survival horror was "Like most genre definitions [...] a loose category and one unevenly applied by players, journalists, designers and scholars". Matthew Wiese in 2009 similarly said that labeling all horror-themed games as survival horror was problematic due to the term not existing prior to the release of Resident Evil (1996). In Horror Games Magazine (2003), Vim Sical and Remi Delekta found that horror required mise-en-scène, which required visual technical capabilities. Bernard Perron, in his book The World of Scary Video Games, agreed with this statement, stating that Haunted House could not have in mind the mise-en-scène of fear that would become possible in later decades and chose to regard games like Haunted House for "what they were".

Several follow-ups to Haunted House have been published. Atari released a new version of Haunted House for the PC, Xbox 360 (via Xbox Live Arcade) and the Nintendo Wii in 2010. Roland Lesterlin, the producer of the 2010 game, said that they made connections with the original game such as the pair of glowing eyes representing the player. Atari published another version of Haunted House, Haunted House: Cryptic Graves, by Italian studio Dreampainters for Windows on November 24, 2014. The game moved away from the more cartoonish look of the previous 2010 release. Digital Eclipse made a new game titled Haunted Houses featuring 3D voxel-based graphics which was included in the Atari 50 (2022) compilation release. Orbit Studio released a new version of Haunted House that was a roguelite-styled game on October 12, 2023.

Haunted House (video game)

Gameplay

Development

Release

Reception

Legacy

Footnotes

Sources

External links

title	Haunted House
developer	Atari, Inc.
publisher	Atari, Inc.
platforms	Atari 2600
released	February 1982
genre	Adventure
modes	Single player
programmer	James Andreasen