The history of popular horror movies being adapted into video games is far older than many people realize. Back in the 1980s, when gaming was still in its infancy, and the cultural and commercial success of horror movies was becoming harder to ignore, the first connective tissue was being formed by licensed tie-ins like 1983’s Halloween on the Atari 2600, and 1990’s A Nightmare on Elm Street for the NES. Iconic horror properties have recently received fairly high-profile game adaptations, including Friday the 13th, The Evil Dead, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but the lucrative pipeline had humble beginnings.
All of those modern games have something in common: they’re asymmetric multiplayer titles riffing on a playstyle popularized by 2016’s Dead by Daylight, which features a four-player team of survivors trying to escape from a supernatural murderer controlled by a fifth player. DbD and many of the games that use this format are popular, but it’s become a predictable template for licensed horror games over the last decade, giving a mechanical uniformity to a group of titles that could’ve each offered a loving, hyper-specific experience. And that’s what makes Saber Interactive’s upcoming Hellraiser game such a breath of fresh air.
