For kids who grew up in the 1990s, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” was practically a right of passage. Along with R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books (the television series wouldn’t begin until 1996) and Alvin Schwartz’s “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark” introduced a generation of children to the delights of horror.

The show featured a different ghost or monster story in each episode. The stories were told by members of the Midnight Society, a group of friends who met in the woods to tell scary stories. The show ran from 1990-1996, and was briefly revived in 1999.

The Tale of Orpheo’s curse was a video game adaptation of the television show. It was released in 1994 and available on MS-DOS and Mac. In it, you played the part of a potential new member of the Midnight Society. To be accepted by the group, you had to tell a good story. Your story was titled, “The Tale of Orpheo’s Curse.” It was about two siblings (Alex and Terri)  who go exploring in Orpheo’s Palace, a classic vaudeville style theater.

Once inside the theater, you were trapped by the ghost of Orpheo, a magician who used to grace the stage. It seems that many years prior, a curse was placed on Orpheo which caused all of his tricks to go terribly wrong. Your mission was to find five enchanted objects. Doing so would break the curse and free the ghosts trapped in the theater.

Orpheo’s Curse was a point and click game that featured puzzles you had to solve as you worked your way through the theater. Along the way, you got to explore places like The Museum of Nature’s Oddities, The Wax Museum (which included classic horror figures like Dracula, the Wolf Man, and a Mummy), the theater dressing rooms, the magic workshop, and even the catacombs beneath the building. You controlled both characters, but certain areas were specific to Terri or Alex. A few of the spirits inhabiting the theater helped you during your quest, but more often than not the haunts were malicious.

If you stopped playing and had to reload, you were brought back to the gathering of the Midnight Society. The other members, all seated around a fire, would recap the previous action before your game loaded to the last save point.

Compared to its contemporaries (games like The 7th Guest or the 11th Hour), Orpheo’s Curse was relatively tame. There was no outright gore or shocking violence like you find in many of our modern horror games. Still, it packed a healthy dose of thrills and chills. If you were a fan of the show, it was an absolute must play. It was fun to sit at your keyboard, attempting to solve the puzzles. It was exciting to move through the abandoned theater, feeling the rising sense of dread that something was about to leap out and snatch you. To top it off, the game offered the tantalizing hope that you, yes you, could become a member of the legendary Midnight Society.

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As kids, the Millers were enormous fans of Tolkien, as well as science fiction authors like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Jules Verne. In 1987 the pair decided to found Cyan Worlds, Inc out of their parents basement in Spokane, Washington. They released a series of games aimed at children, including Manhole and Cosmic Osmo and the World Beyond the Mackerel, before pitching a more adult oriented titled called The Gray Summons to Activision. The game was not picked up, but the pair were later approached by Sunsoft to create a game for older players.

The result is the now classic Myst, released in 1993 for the Mac OS. The brothers spent an extensive amount of time developing the puzzles for the world, and drew inspiration from Jules Verne’s classic novel “The Mysterious Island.” The game itself involved exploring the island setting, solving puzzles, and eventually finding books that would link the player to different “Ages.” Each “Age” (the Selenitic, Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood) was a self contained world with its own set of puzzles to solve. There was little to exposition at the start of the game to give you a sense of context, lending to the air of mystery while exploring. There were also no time limits, hazards, or enemies. Players were free to focus completely on exploring their environment and solving the game’s puzzles.

Initially, the Millers played to have the game operate without a soundtrack beyond some ambient noise, but ultimately decided to utilize music. Robyn Miller composed the soundtrack, which proved popular enough that it was released as a CD in 1998 by Virgin Records.

It’s a fascinating backstory to a fascinating game, and a brilliant picture of what can happen when young minds are free to explore fantastic worlds.

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The game was created by Tim Schafer (Psychonauts, Full Throttle, and more) and was billed as a “Dramatic Expose of a Mythical World” and an “Epic Story of Crime and Corruption Spanning Four Incredible Years!” It featured you as Manuel “Manny” Calavera, a travel agent in the Land of the Dead. According to the mythos of the game, when you die you are sent on a journey through the Land of the Dead. For those who lived a good life, the journey goes quickly, but for others the journey lasts four years and must be taken on foot. One particular client, Mercedes “Meche” Colomar, seems perfectly qualified for an express trip, but for some reason is forced to walk. When Calavera begins investigating the reason why, he uncovers a vast conspiracy of criminal enterprise involving underworld boss Hector LeMans.  To say more would be to ruin the brilliant storytelling that makes Grim Fandango so special, with twists and turns worthy of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler.

The game’s script is brilliantly complimented by the 3D graphics and extensive use of cutscenes. However, it’s the style of the game that is most memorable, the blend of film noir with Aztec mythology that combines into something weird and wonderful. It seamlessly blends elements of Mexican folk art with Art Deco style architecture. The end result is what an article written just before the game’s release described as, “Casablanca meets Roger Rabbit, but without the bunny suit.”

You can trace the seeds of the game back to an anthropology class Schafer took at the University of California at Berkeley, taught by folklorist Alan Dundes. Talking about it in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Schafer said “We learned about this land where the dark souls go, and where they have to make this four- year journey. Later I learned that they also fight all these obstacles on the way, and I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s a story.’  The idea to make it a crime story came after learning that the dead were often buried with two bags of gold in Mexico. In the same interview, Schafer elaborated, “In the Day of the Dead folklore, people are buried with money so they’ll have it to spend in the next world.And often it is hidden in the lining of the coffins so other souls won’t steal it. That idea that greed and avarice still take place in the next world fascinated me, and became a key plot element for the game.”

Adding to the game’s brilliance is a gorgeously orchestrated soundtrack composed by Peter McConnell, mixing elements of jazz, South American folk, and strings from the Russian, Celtic and Indian musical traditions. The score was so brilliant that Square Enix Music Online stated, “the compositions and performances are so good that listening to this album on a stand-alone basis can make people feel like they’re in a bar back then…” and the soundtrack has long been considered one of the best ever created for video games.

While it’s regrettable that the world of LucasArts adventure games had to come to an end (Escape from Monkey Island released in 2000 would be their last venture into the genre), at least the company ended in style. Grim Fandango is an absolute masterpiece which succeeds on every level.

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At age four, future video game designer Roberta Williams saw the 1959 film Horrors of the Black Museum, a movie about a frustrated writer who hypnotizes his assistant and makes him torture people to provide inspiration for his books. The film was released by Anglo-Amalgamated, the producers of Circus of Horrors and Peeping Tom, films so violent that critic David Pirie termed them a “Sadian trilogy” (after the Marquis de Sade, French nobleman, philosopher, and writer whose name gave us the term “sadism”).  The movie scared Williams away from the horror genre for a time, but as a teen she ventured back, soaking in movies like Carrie and Halloween.

In 1995, Williams added her own title to the universe of horror: Phantasmagoria. The game was a point and click adventure horror game released for MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and the Sega Saturn. The game was developed and published by Sierra On-Line, the company responsible for classic adventure games like King’s Quest and the Leisure Suit Larry series.

In the game, players controlled Adrienne Delaney, a mystery novelist. She had recently moved with her husband to a mansion, previously owned by magician Zoltan “Carno” Carnovasch. This simple premise set the scene for a story of murder, possession, and (perhaps most disturbingly) a rape.

The rape scene made the game particularly controversial, leading some companies to refuse to stock the game after its release. Parents, religious groups and more condemned the scene and one publication went so far as to say that the Phantasmagoria “makes a game of sexual violence.” The game could not be sold at all in Australia after the Office of Film and Literature Classification refused to give it a rating. For her part, Williams defended the game pointing at the games like Doom and others were far more violent, and in those games the protagonist was the perpetrator of the violence. Williams also argued that the scene was essential to advancing the plot, which involved the main character’s husband becoming possessed by the spirit of Carno.

The game was Sadian beyond the rape scene. Its cinematic graphics emphasized the realism of the game’s violence. Special effects helped create graphic and disturbing scenes like a head being split in half by a pendulum blade and a head being burned. These effects were achieved using replicas of the actors’ heads, pumps full of fake blood, a network of strings that allowed them to pull the fake head apart, and other prosthetics that emphasized the grizzly nature of the injuries.

None of this controversy diminished the success of the game (it arguably increased interest). The game won several awards, earned $12 million dollars its opening weekend, helped raise Sierra’s stock prices, and spawned a sequel titled Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh.  

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Sadly, the museum was never completed. To make matters worse, a pair of high school students unleashed evil spirits (known as the ixupi), which consumed them and the professor. It is your job to capture the ixupi and liberate the spirits of Windlenot and the teens. You do this by finding the urns meant to hold the malevolent spirits. There are ten in total.

This, in a nutshell, was the game Shivers, released by Sierra On-Line in 1995 for Windows and Mac. The game has drawn numerous comparisons to 1993’s Myst. It was an adventure game that operated from a first person view. However, unlike Myst, you had a life meter. The ixupi could chip away at your health as the game went on.  

Gameplay involved exploring the museum while solving a variety of puzzles. The game maintains a creepy ambiance throughout, amplified by the game’s soundtrack. As you play, you can read the descriptions of the museum’s bizarre collection (though you had to avoid the ixupi as you did so). Once you complete the game’s main mission, you could continue exploring the museum.

The game was designed by Marcia Bales, who had a passion for both travel and archaeology. Her initial game concept involved travelling the world to collect the spirits. The idea of placing the game in a set location came from Roberta Williams (designer of the game Phantasmagoria). The concept for the ixupi came from Bales knowledge of South American cultures, while incorporating aspects of Egyptian mythology and a variety of other folklore and legends.

Willie Eide, who worked as the game’s lead developer, was responsible for the game’s inclusion of closed captions. According to Eide, “I come from a deaf family. My parents are deaf and a couple of my brothers are deaf so having deaf individuals or hard-of-hearing individuals play our game is very important to me. So we really tried to make sure that the hard-of-hearing person, although he will miss the cool stereo ambient sounds that we have in each of the rooms, will at least be able to play the game and all the puzzles.”

There were a few bugs in the gameplay that could make it frustrating. Your character could only carry one item at a time. You also had to repeat some of the puzzles as you traveled through the museum. That said, the graphics and ambiance were enough to keep it engaging.

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That same year, Lucasfilm Games released Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure. Developed using the SCUMM engine (which was used to create games like The Secret of Monkey Island, and Maniac Mansion). Noah Falstein, David Fox, and Ron Gilbert developed the game, expanding on the classic adventure game format.

The story in the video game was very similar to the film, featuring Dr. Jones travelling with archaeologist Elsa Schneider, finding his father, Henry Jones, held captive by Nazis in Brunwald Castle, and seeking the Valley of the Crescent Moon. Players directed Indiana’s actions by clicking on various directions at the bottom of the screen, using commands like push, open, or pick up. The game also allowed options like “throw a punch” for action sequences. Another action sequence in the game took place over the skies of Europe, with Jones piloting a biplane and shooting at Nazi planes.

Unlike many adventure games, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, allowed multiple solutions to problems and presented multiple ways to complete the game. How you solved a problem affected your “I.Q.” or “Indy Quotient,” the game’s point system. The game also featured Henry Jones’s diary, which provided clues to completing your quest, including information that would keep you from “choosing poorly” when Indy went to identify the true grail.

The game was released on the Amiga system, as well as the DOS, Atari ST, and the MAC OS. Amiga Power later declared it one of the best games ever created for the system (ranking it number 28 on their list), and PC Power declaring it one of the 50 best video games of all time.

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