Haunted House

Le jeu

Haunted House is a 1982 adventure game programmed by James Andreasen for the Atari 2600 and published by Atari, Inc. The player controls a character presented by a pair of eyes peering in the dark as they explore a mansion seeking out parts of an urn to return to the entrance. Haunted House (Atari 2600) The game world is populated by roaming enemies including vampire bats, tarantulas, and a ghost. Haunted House was among the first games to use player-controlled scrolling between large portions of the visual space. Critics have called Haunted House one of the earliest examples of the survival horror genre due to its elements of horror themes, limited item management, and a variety of monsters. Other studies of the genre have suggested that the game lacked the specific elements that later games such as Alone in the Dark (1992) and Resident Evil (1996) had to establish it as a unique game genre. Haunted House is a single-player adventure game in which the player's goal is to recover three pieces of a magic urn that are randomly placed throughout 24 rooms of a mansion and return them to the entrance. The items and some areas within the game are revealed to player via matches which the player can ignite and blow out. The magazine How to Win at Video Games described Haunted House as a 'storyline' game, comparing its gameplay as being similar to that of Atari's previous games Superman (1979) and Adventure (1980). Tim Onosko of The Capital Times also compared Haunted House to the two previous games, describing it as an adventure game that requires players to learn rules and requirements and gathering items to reach a goal as they play. The player has nine lives to attempt this task. The player can only collect one object at a time, and can swap between two objects by touching another one. The mansion is a set of 24 rooms between four floors. The player can traverse through different doors that ascend or descend a level, but none permit the player to go in both directions. Throughout the mansion, the player may encounter such enemies as vampire bats, tarantulas and a ghost, which cause the player to lose a life upon contact. The game has nine settings of varying difficulty. For example, setting 1 has a room where walls around the room are lit by matches while all others are completely dark. Further challenges introduce locked doors, which require a master key that is also hidden within the mansion. Other difficulties add extra enemies and enemy abilities such as the bats stealing a carried item and placing it at a random location around the mansion. A scepter can be found inside the mansion as a collectable item, which prevent enemies from chasing the player on most levels of difficulty. The ghost will still give chase on higher difficulty levels regardless of whether the player has the scepter or not.