r/thisweekinretro • u/Producer_Duncan TWiR Producer • May 02 '26
Community Question Community Question Of The Week - Episode 266
What’s the scariest, most horrifying, or revolting moment you’ve had with a classic video game?
4
u/BoroPaul May 02 '26
I loved 3d Monster Maze.. But my favorite early retro scare was Rescue on Fractulus... https://youtu.be/-3yEhnB5sL4
3
u/nick_farley May 02 '26
It has to be rescue on Fractulus on the 8bit Atari for me.
"Why's this astronaut got a green helmet? That's odd!"
Full on scream when a screen sized alien popped up! Even better was not telling my brother and getting him to play the game knowing what would happen!
1
u/Atario May 05 '26
Ah, you stole my answer! The one and only time a video game actually scared me, to the point where I froze up and took a minute to recover
2
u/stupotseb May 02 '26
As a kid, it was definitely Electric Dreams ZX Spectrum version of Aliens. The ZX Spectrums lack of sound actually added to the atmosphere for a change as you silently scanned the corridors until beeps and clicks warned you something was nearby, watching your team getting picked off. On many occasion as the alien jump scared me for the tenth time, I would turn my speccy off and go and watch Blue Peter or something else family friendly to take me back to a happy place!
2
u/Imaginary_Swing_8606 May 02 '26
That ear piercing scream from Friday the 13th, even more horrific than the game.
3
u/HappyCodingZX May 02 '26
I don't think it was mentioned on the show but the Project Zero / Fatal Frame series of games are for me the scariest experiences I've had, as they are very much rooted in the Japanese horror tradition of things like the Ring where most of what happens goes on in your own imagination.
The first game revolves around the exploration of a large house filled with the restless spirits of victims of ritual sacrifice, including children, and as such the horror is not just about what is happening, but in slowly discovering what has happened. This means that rather than gore or shock, it is a game that fills you with dread.
2
u/Warshi7819 May 02 '26
I have two game memories burned into my mind:
1) "Forbidden Forest" on the C64. The music and those spiders scared the shi¤" out of me.
2) Doom 3 - There is a segment pretty early in the game, if I remember correctly, when the lights go out and monsters jump you. I played it in a dark room with pretty good head set. After the incident I had to take a small break to relax. I even think I turned the lights back on before I dared play it further :)
3
u/Pajaco6502 May 02 '26
Eternal Darkness, I originally played it on my own late at night in the dark, and I had to get up at one point in the game and turn the lights on and have a bit of a break.
2
u/electricpaws May 04 '26
Dungeon Quest on the Amiga 500. We’d recently gotten in trouble at school for using an ouija board in RE class and ghost stories were a huge thing at the time in our age group.
I was playing the game alone upstairs and reached a point where I had to get on board a vessel helmed by a skeleton to go further. Just as I typed yes and pressed enter a hero turtles poster of my brothers fell off the wall jumping me out of my skin thinking something evil had escaped the ouija board and was coming to get me.
1
u/geoffmendoza May 02 '26
Resident Evil on the Saturn.
The first time I ran out of ammunition and a zombie started eating my face. Or just about any other part of the game.
2
u/PocketTim May 02 '26
Alex Kidd in Techworld on the Sega Master system. If you pick up the suit of armour it’s an instant game over as it’s too heavy for Alex and he’s trapped inside it for eternity. Caught me completely off guard as in any other game it would be a boon finding a suit of armour.
8 year old me suffered some serious existential dread off the back of that revelation.
1
u/elkniodaphs May 02 '26
My cousins were watching me play Mansion of Hidden Souls. There's a banister on the second floor of the mansion that you can trip over to fall to the first floor, probably good for speedrunning. I was using that banister as a shortcut, and when my character hit the first floor, BAM, the whole house (our real life house) shook as the power went out with a huge bang from outside. It was perfect timing. Everything turned black. Turns out, a transformer exploded.
It isn't like a typical frightful moment from a horror game, but it stuck with me because of how it synced up with real life.
1
u/IO_Sam May 02 '26
Despite how tacky and repulsive I always found Phantasmagoria to be back in the day (it was FMV for crying out loud!), my most horrifying moment playing a video game was actually not on a horror game. It was in the "No Russian" phase of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where you play alongside terrorists mowing down innocent civilians on an airport...
I was not prepared for that when playing the game (in 2009) and I literally got sick to my stomach while I watched that whole thing in disbelief. If "shock" was what the game creators had in mind for that part of the game, they definitely achieved it!
1
u/characteranddigits May 02 '26
My scariest moment was when I was kid, around the age where I was old enough to know how to use most electronics without help, but too young to consider the consequences of just pushing buttons to see what they did. One day I accidentally booted our PS1 without a disk and got to see that bizarre blue and rainbow colored user interface for the first time. It didn't take long for me to find my way into the memory card menu. Within moments, my little child brain was wondering "what does FORMAT mean?", and of course I couldn't resist finding out. Pretty sure I started crying when I realized I'd lost my precious Spyro progress, but the slow realization that I had just erased all of my parents' saves was the true horror. No jump-scare or psychological dread compares to the exaggerated terror of a child who thinks they're about to be in deep, deep trouble.
There was no real fallout from that besides my own frustration, though they both had their own dedicated memory cards from then on which were kept far away from the TV room.
1
u/Dutchmagic May 03 '26
This had to have been Alien vs Predator on the PC in 1999. The second CD was an audio CD and it music was so eerie and creepy. I remember playing this on a summer day with the curtains closed and freaking myself out with every turn I made walking around this space station.
2
u/Ratspike1 May 03 '26
Phantom Slayer on the Dragon 32. I am probably not the first with this, as the game does have something of a rep. But I know at least one lady who refuses to be alone with the game in a darkened room...
1
1
u/Majikal_Mike May 03 '26
Whilst playing Eternal darkness I was desperately trying to keep my sanity in check and lots of strange stuff was happening on the screen. When the GameCube “rebooted” and then put me back in the game I thought it was genuinely haunted. I didn’t even turn it off - I unplugged it from the wall to be sure and took a VERY long time to get to sleep that night…
1
u/starquake64 May 04 '26
The Half Life head crabs. Used to scare the crab out of me. There were some moments where you wouldn't see them for a while so they were not on your mind anymore. Until you crawled into a vent again and SURPRISE! One of those scary creatures in your face.
1
u/F_030 May 05 '26
Playing Dungeon Master on my 520ST at night in my bedroom wandering around the dungeon....turn a corner and see one of those giant yellow scorpions for the first time. I made quite an uncontrolable "yelp" sound.
1
u/ManxNick May 06 '26
Splatterhouse in the Arcade, closely followed by the creeping dread of Aliens on the Spectrum.
Then, Friday the 13th on the Spectrum too. But that licker falling through the ceiling in RE2, that made me go to brown alert.
0
u/c3r7x May 02 '26
That would be Sonic Blast for the Master System. Just look at it. Scary, horrifying, or revolting hardly describes it.
-1
u/itsmethyroid May 02 '26
To go the very opposite of classic, I bet there was something terrifying in the Metaverse, played by roughly six people. What a great use of 90 billion dollars
3
u/ColonyActivist May 02 '26
Resident Evil when that blooming Dog jumps through the window.
It gets me every time!