The History of Horror Games Reminds Us that Game Design Thrives on Creative Risk and Freedom

The new Nintendo Famicom Club game pays tribute to the storied risk-taking of horror games.

By Phoenix Simms | September 6, 2024 | 4:24pm

Video Games Features horror games

The History of Horror Games Reminds Us that Game Design Thrives on Creative Risk and Freedom

This past July, viewers were taken aback by a mysterious trailer for what seemed to be a horror game being published in-house by Nintendo. The trailer simply featured live-action footage of an ominous man wearing a paper bag on his head, a sinister smiling face scrawled on it. As everything faded to black after some typical glitchy horror jump cuts and a fragment of haunted piano music, the tense 16 second trailer ended. The description of the video only read “#WhoIsEmio.”

We now know indeed who Emio is and what game franchise he’s attached to. Likely by the time you’re reading this you’ve also played the game that has since been announced. The return to Nintendo’s mystery-horror series, Famicom Detective Club, and the clever introduction to its newest title and antagonist Emio the Smiling Man are certainly intriguing. But I’m more interested in what it means for Nintendo not only to dedicate itself once more to continuing its rare mature-rated series, but for the experimental spirit of the series. Famicom Detective Club, like the best of horror game classics like Clock Tower and Silent Hill, perseveres despite its long hiatus because its developers are willing to design on their own terms. This legacy of taking creative risks is also key to the game preservation efforts made for the aforementioned games as well. More on that later.

Idiosyncratic design philosophy and underdog projects are the origins of practically every horror game series you can think of. At this point, Team Silent and the plight which led to the creation of Silent Hill is considered legendary. The series production history and reputation has been so mythologized that independent researchers like TheGamingMuse have analyzed primary and secondary sources in both English and Japanese to recontextualize the narrative more accurately. While it is true that the original developers involved with the project from Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (a.k.a. KCET) were uniquely talented, they were not an isolated group of misunderstood geniuses per se. TheGamingMuse’s research points towards there being multiple teams working on Silent Hill’s first four titles in fact, with no singular official Team Silent having been recognized or organized by KCET. But this decentralized development on Silent Hill was still unique in its own right. What’s more, the series being put on ice in 2004 highlights the company’s shift from allowing a modicum of creative freedom in the ‘90s to focusing on guaranteed profit. Now, the future of the franchise rests again in the hands of several independent developers, with the most anticipated being NeoBards Entertainment’s Silent Hill F. This is due to the involvement of horror visual novel veteran Ryukishi07 (When They Cry franchise) as the principal writer.

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There’s an interesting parallel to be drawn here between the development of Silent Hill F and Emio The Smiling Man, especially in regards to both titles’ relations to niche game genres like visual novels and point and click adventures. The original Famicom Detective Club games were inspired by Yuji Horii’s influential early adventure game genre The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which reimagined text adventure games by streamlining player choices with a list of commands and assigning part of the screen to a graphics display.

As Thomas Game Docs notes in her breakdown of Famicom Detective Club series’ full history, sustained development was uncertain at first. The idea was proposed to Nintendo to make an adventure game from the company’s ghost development partner, Tose Software. Although Nintendo assembled a team and had Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi produce the project, it would only be once they secured a scriptwriter in Yoshio Sakamoto (known for Metroid) that they would proceed to create Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir. Sakamoto was heavily inspired by Horii’s Portopia but studied Japanese classic Kosuke Kindaichi mystery novels less than he did horror stories about high schools. Sakamoto’s penchant for horror runs deep, with him taking four design tenets of mood, timing, foreshadowing and contrast from his favorite director Dario Argento.

The first Japan-exclusive game, like Silent Hill’s initial entry, was quite successful. Unlike Silent Hill, however, The Missing Heir was released in an unorthodox for the time two installments for the relatively short-lived Famicom Disk System console. Still, one could argue both series were subject to the eventual switch to next gen consoles and their more expensive development cycles. What put Silent Hill on ice was a combination of next gen development pressures and the varying popularity of a niche genre like horror, after all. Although Famicom Detective Club wasn’t strictly horror, it still was fairly adjacent to the genre, particularly with the second title in the series, The Girl Who Stood Behind. The composer Kenji Yamamoto even audio-designed for the game’s volume to suddenly increase during the climax scenes of the mystery.

Horror games by the inherent subversiveness of the genre inspire the people who want to work with them to remain agile and open to invention, both in regard to the subject matter of their works and the platforms they host these unique experiences on. In addition to its first two entries being split into two installments for the Famicom Disk System, Famicom Detective Club also had an obscure title on the Satellaview called BS Detective Club: Lost Memories in the Snow (ironic in hindsight). BS stood for “Broadcast Satellite”, FYI. The Satellaview is the same satellite peripheral for the Super Famicom that broadcasted Radical Dreamers (a title recently at least partially preserved by the Chrono Cross 2023 remaster). This semi-canonical title was not directed by Sakamoto and was famously clunky to play, with many non-playable sections due to live voice overs needing to be broadcast during specific cutscenes of the game.

The game was also broadcast according to a rigid schedule, sometimes limiting many players from experiencing the full gameplay experience as it was intended. Despite these difficulties, this lost title exemplifies the kind of innovations associated with horror game series. That episodic nature of Famicom Detective Club is referenced subtly today with Nintendo’s release of three separate demos for Emio the Smiling Man. When you consider all the above, it’s not totally surprising that Makoto Asada from visual novel company MAGES (Stein’s Gate) proposed to remake the series, at first independently crafting a polished animated prototype of the point and click adventure game.

Clock Tower, one of the titles that launched the survival horror game genre, shares several parallels of source texts and innovation with Famicom Detective Club as well. The game was also heavily-influenced by Dario Argento and wears its Giallo inspirations on its sleeve, with a protagonist resembling Jennifer Connelly’s character Jennifer from the movie Phenomena. The iconic Scissorman was also inspired by one of this film’s antagonists. It’s worth mentioning that Clock Tower is also a point and click adventure game featuring puzzles. Like Famicom Detective Club’s first entry, Clock Tower was also initially Japan-exclusive and had to fight for its development to be greenlit. According to tangomushi’s research, Director Hifumi Kono competed in a game design contest held by the company he worked for, Human Entertainment, which was not keen on horror titles and usually developed sports titles.

Like Silent Hill and The Missing Heir, however, Clock Tower became a classic, one that has inspired another significant collaboration between Limited Run Games and Way Forward with its current remake and preservation. The former is committing its Carbon Engine to the task of creating as close to a carbon copy of the 16-bit original as possible via a series of emulators, with some quality-of-life updates to the gameplay being offered by the latter.

Horror franchises like Silent Hill and Famicom Detective Club exist because of the unique niches that their developers carve out for them. They are often luck-of-the-draw projects that are experimental by nature and handled by underdogs of the industry. These games exemplify what’s most exciting about game design, proving that the industry produces its best and most expressive work when it allows for more creative risks and freedom.

Phoenix Simms is an Atlantic Canadian writer. She runs the column “Interlinked” at Unwinnable, is the co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review (TIER) and an indie game narrative designer. You can find her portfolio here. Her stream-of-consciousness is mostly present in bluer skies these days.