Of Blood and Brains

DMG Author:

Miranda George

You wake up in the belly of an abandoned house- your sense of sight engulfed by piercing darkness, your sense of smell taking in a grotesque mixture of rust and decay, and finally- perhaps the most disturbing of all- the intense and deafening silence with which your ears ring. You have no recollection of how you came to this position- and the confusion builds upon your fear and drives you to panic, a million memories rush through your head at once making the old adage “a life flashes before your eyes” seem like the understatement of the year.

The artist of your mind’s eye paints a portrait of a lifetime of faces, but few stand out to you with disturbing vividness. With the faces come the recollection of lives and deaths. Your countenance scrunches in an expression to match your internal agony and all at once you wish that your temporary amnesia had not gave way.

A vast sea of emotions flood you as you recall the face of your lover- fair and beautiful as she was, her cheeks tinted roses against a fair complexion, her slim figure clad in a white sundress that contrasted sharply against the florescent orange of the setting sun that she stood before. The Echo of her laugh ever so softly floated through the twilight as she outstretched an arm in your direction, her hand cupped and ready to take your own, but then everything changed.

As the sun hastily went down darkness enshrouded her revealing the beast that she had become. Her porcelain skin no longer shined with perfection but went grey and shriveled before your very eyes. Deep gushing lacerations appeared along her neck and chest permitting a blood of deep crimson to slowly make its way into the open. It was the blood of the dead. She began to approach you slowly, a morbid limp tainting her stride.

As she neared the backdrop of the night sky faded and your senses brought you back to the house- the smell of rust and rotten flesh intensifying. It was her. She was not just in your vision- but in the room. With each strained step she was coming closer to you, so close in fact that you could see dangling flesh that protruded from her mouth and the maggots that made her now tangled and ravished blonde locks their home. Her mouth opened as she got on her hands and knees, rushing towards you like a rabid dog, green puss streaked with blood foaming at the sides of her mouth.

On instinct you drew your gun and shot her once in the head. The marksmanship you acquired over your 4 years in the army must have served you well, you thought, as you watched your lovers skull explode like a massive human piñata sending infected chunks of sopping wet brain and harsh smelling green fluid all over the surrounding walls. The rest of the body slumped forward and hit the floor, blood pouring from the stump of the neck.

After a few moments you managed to stand, putting your weapon back in its holster. It’s been nearly a month since the zombie outbreak and already nature had worked its course on the most important person in your life. Not nature, no…but evil. Her death had been an offense, and you are now determined not to become victim to the same ill-fate. From this very moment it would be a fight for survival.

Most people would commit suicide before allowing themselves to be put through a horrific experience such as the one described above. Today, however, many avid video game players actually elect to not only take front-row seats to such situations, but actually partake in the happenings of them with immense enjoyment.

The horror genre is something that has fascinated people for years past ever since the times of Edger Allen Poe, and today’s generation of tech enthusiasts have taken the horror experience to the next level by creating the virtual world of survival-horror video games. This genre first reared its bloody head back in the 80’s. Yes, that’s right, the decade that produced stirrup pants and enough hairspray to eat our Ozone layer also gave birth to what many consider to be the father of our modern day survival-horror video games. But what precisely defines a S-H video game? What elements are necessities to classify a game as survival horror? Heres the check list:

- The Background Story holds the components of Horror-Fiction
- The Main character is vulnerable and under-armed
- Ammunition and weapons in general are scarce putting an emphasis on strategic skills for problem solving and general survival
- The enemies presented oftentimes greatly outnumber our group of main characters and are thought to be exceedingly dangerous (Like a full-scale zombie outbreak as we seen in the example story above)

Sweet Home which was released for the original Nintendo System in 1989 held the budding elements of today’s best-selling S-H games. This little number focused primarily on solving puzzles while battling hideous monsters to avoid your own mortal death [1]. This idea is primarily what lead to games such as Project Firestart and InfroGrames’ Alone in the Dark that solidified the Genre and made upcoming Giants such as Resident Evil possible. With the growth of these types of video games it is easy to see that they hold an influence over not only their fan base but also over other aspects of the media world. Games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill have gone on to become major motion pictures that were enjoyed by not only gamers but movie enthusiasts as well.

This process of going from video game to big screen, however, is oftentimes a give and take procedure. Sometimes- the notions that video games set forth are intriguing enough to become a part of the motion picture world…and sometimes storylines of major motion pictures are influential enough to cause a major outbreak of genre games. The best example of this would most likely be that of America’s seemingly favorite ghoul: the Zombie.

Zombies have held the imagination of young and old for countless years and have been feature characters in everything from literature (The Zombie Survival Guide/World War Z) to movies (Night of the Living Dead/Zombie Town) and of course these rotting flesh-disposals have starred in many video games over the years as well.

In the years following the resident evil video games zombie popularity took a serious dive though, even in spite of films such as Dawn of the Dead. Why, you may ask? Because of the thriving popularity of vampires and films such as Queen of the Damned and books like 30 Days of night stifled the brainless cannibals out of the view of the masses. The vampire popularity boomed seriously with the introduction the Twilight films – but it seemed that for every sun-sparkling teenager that adored this film, there were two others that despised it. The world had finally had enough and called for change. Zombies today have become a sort of anti-twilight (or anti-vampire in general) and this contributed vastly to their popularity. Stores such as Hot Topic sell zombie-themed clothes, the motion picture world released Zombieland, and even the channel AMC jumped on the bandwagon and created the survival series The Walking Dead. With all these influences it was only natural for game developers to go ahead and create games of the same nature, which is when the gaming community acquired mega-hits such as: Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Dead Rising, and Shell Shock 2 : Blood Trails. Even Call of Duty had featured a survival-type game mode in their World at War Instillation entitled Nazi Zombies.

With this case in mind it is easy to see how the various forms of media influence each other equally. In the world of Survival-Horror video games the avid gamer is ecstatic to be able to explore these horror-inducing environments with all the intensity of a near real-life experience. The future of S-H games seems to hold great promise as the horror genre is in no way diminishing – if anything one could say that the world has become blood crazed, and for fans of this particular type of game no news could be better.

[1] ^ a b c Jim Sterling (June 9, 2008). "Fear 101: A Beginner's Guide to Survival Horror". IGN. Retrieved 2009-08-26

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Of Blood and Brains

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