As a young boy back in 1991, I was easily rattled. I feared the dark, spiders and vampires to the point where I’d sometimes have to sleep with a sibling at night during the Halloween season. It’s hard to avoid the imagery of creepy things during the month of October. Every store has cobwebs on their windows, and every TV station plays horror movies 24×7 – or so it feels. When Andrew asked me to write about my most frightening gaming memory, I was immediately brought back to this time. And as much as I’ve been pointing the finger at everyone else for the times I was spooked, with this memory, the blame is all on me.
I was 9 or 10 when I played The Uninvited on NES. I was upstairs that night, alone in my room. Lights off. Blinds closed. Just me and the game my brother rented from Blockbuster. I remember very clearly the intro to this game: classic NES 8-bit audio (scary in their own right) slowly increasing in volume. Then, suddenly the start-menu appears in the form of an envelope. From here you enter the game and you’re in your car. It looks as though you’ve crashed. Sure enough, you have, and you’re all alone. Your car is about to explode so you have to leave your car. You have the option to investigate the car, but it’s best to just get the heck out of there.
Upon leaving the car, which does explode, you find yourself in front of a mansion. It’s clearly haunted, but you can’t choose to grab your cell and call 911. You have to go inside. At this point, as I entered the mansion, completely afraid for what was ahead of me, my brother, from OUT OF NOWHERE jumps on top of me with a blanket (one of his favorite past-times) and begins to smother me. I’m screaming so hard I couldn’t even breath. He eventually backs-off and I decide to never, ever play The Uninvited ever again.
I’ve played Doom 3, Resident Evil, Dead Space, etc. These games are comedies in comparison to the horrible memory of playing The Uninvited. In fact, it’s a yearly tradition for me to play Dead Space 2 at this time. I could use a good laugh…
The Uninvited on NES is a 1991 port of a 1986 game initially released on MAC, DOS, Atari, the Commodore 64 and eventually for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile (Pocket PC). It was developed by ICOM Simulations Inc and published on NES by Kemco.