This year we’re putting together a list of 31 Retro Horror games. Games that have come from dead console generations, back to haunt us. Sadly, not all of these games will be available for you to play due to the complicated nature of video game preservation. However, we’re going to note if it’s possible to play them on modern hardware. We’re going to be covering games from the Seventh Generation (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii) and earlier. So basically anything before 2006.
Day 3
The House of the Dead
Released on arcades back in 1997, The House of the Dead was released about a year after Resident Evil. And even though they both take place in a house full of zombies and science gone awry, they’re vastly different experiences.
Resident Evil is known as an incredibly influential game that helped bring zombies into the modern zeitgeist. The House of the Dead and its sequels did a lot to push zombies into the mainstream too, but it's not brought up nearly as often. It doesn’t help that famed director Uwe Boll made an absolutely terrible adaptation of the arcade shooter.
The House of the Dead is an on-rails light gun shooter by Sega and Wow Entertainment (as Sega Research and Development was named at the time). It used the Virtua Cop engine, with the developers originally wanting an ambitious branching story. And while The House of the Dead is known for its branching paths and three separate endings, apparently the developers had to back down from some of their more ambitious goals to meet a tight development timeline.
You might think that The House of the Dead is basically ripping off Resident Evil, and I’d forgive you, because that was the impression I had. But apparently the developers only settled on the game’s name because the arrangement of the english words The House of the Dead was the most visually appealing.
The gameplay consists of frantic shooting as zombies and other creatures pop-out at you. You have to defeat all of the enemies on screen before the action progresses to the next area. Sometimes shooting crates and saving civilians can yield healing items, while shooting civilians takes away precious health.
At the time, The House of the Dead was received well by critics. It even spawned five mainline sequels, with the latest The House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn releasing in 2018. It also spawned a bunch of spin-offs, like Zombie Rampage for the Dreamcast, The Typing of the Dead for Dreamcast and PC, and The Pinball of the Dead among others.
It would be hard to play The House of the Dead nowadays, unless you have access to an arcade that has it. The Sega Saturn port is prohibitively expensive (unless you buy the Japanese version, but that requires a Japanese Saturn or an Action Replay, etc.) You can also download the PC port from myabandonware.com, but that would probably take some finagling to work on modern systems. Luckily for those who absolutely have to experience this zombie shooter, there was a remake released in 2022 that brought The House of the Dead into the modern era with enhanced graphics. But there’s something lost when the game goes from pixelated 3D to HD.
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