Haunted House

About Haunted House

Haunted House (1982) is Atari's Atari 2600 adventure in which a pair of eyes in the dark explores a 24-room mansion by matchlight, hunting for the pieces of an urn, and is often cited as one of the earliest survival horror games.

Haunted House in Depth

The player, shown only as a pair of eyes peering in the dark, must find three pieces of a magic urn placed at random in the 24 rooms of a four-floor mansion and bring them back to the entrance. Matches, lit and blown out, reveal items and parts of the rooms. Only one object can be carried at a time, swapped by touching another, and stairways between floors work in only one direction. Vampire bats, tarantulas and a ghost roam the mansion and cost one of the player's nine lives on contact. Nine difficulty settings change the challenge: the easiest has one room whose walls are lit, while others add locked doors that need a hidden master key, more enemies, and bats that steal the item being carried and drop it elsewhere. A scepter stops most enemies chasing the player, though on higher settings the ghost keeps coming regardless.

Critics such as GameSpy's Christopher Buecheler and Allgame's Skyler Miller have called it one of the first survival horror games, for its creepy themes, limited item management and variety of monsters. Others, including Laurie N. Taylor and Bernard Perron, have argued that the genre began with Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil and that the 2600 could not create the mise-en-scène of fear later games did.

Making Haunted House

Andreasen, a University of Colorado graduate, programmed it for the Atari VCS, whose TIA chip forced programmers to draw every frame themselves. Its rooms are hand-designed and loaded into the game, and it was among the first games to let the player scroll between large portions of the playing space. Released in February 1982, it was one of the top-selling games by July according to Cashbox. Electronic Games found it "much more atmospheric" than Atari's Adventure and "one of the most intriguing and novel video game cartridges to appear in some time", with "the spine-tingling sensation that something spooky is always about to happen", and The Space Gamer could find no drawbacks, while The Capital Times found its graphics blocky and How to Win at Video Games found it hard to understand at first. Game Informer later noted that it contained many elements of Silent Hill and Resident Evil. It has appeared in many Atari compilations, including Atari 50, and inspired new versions in 2010, 2014 and 2023.