Games and Gamers  What Makes A Horror Game Go Bump in the Night?
The Stauf mansion, as featured in the updated version of The 7th
Guest. i i  The Stauf mansion, as featured in the updated
version of The 7th Guest. Trilobyte Games hide caption  itoggle
caption Trilobyte Games   Trilobyte Games  The first computer
game that really frightened me to the bones was 1994's The 7th
Guest. It's certainly primitive compared to today's games, but
parts of it were indubitably scary. Even early on, when a kind
of Steadicam slowly led me up a Victorian mansion's stairs,
there was a feeling of uncomfortable dread. Don't go there, I
said to myself. Yet, like so many ill-fated protagonists in the
movies, I went there. And when ghosts moved about on the second
floor — damn — that was eerie. It was like that "cold spot" in
Robert Wise's The Haunting. Because the setup created such
foreboding tension, I saw the ghosts in The 7th Guest just as
distinctly as I felt the cold spot.  Back then, horror-based
games were influenced mor