THE MAKING OF Project ZERO 1-3
IN THE KNOW
» PUBLISHER: TECMO
» DEVELOPER: TECMO
» RELEASED: 2001, 2003, 2005
» PLATFORM: PLAYSTATION 2, XBOX (1 AND 2)
» GENRE: SURVIVAL HORROR
DEVELOPER HIGHLIGHTS
TECMO BOWL SYSTEM: ARCADE, VARIOUS YEAR: 1987
NINJA GAIDEN BLACK SYSTEM: XBOX YEAR: 2005
MONSTER RANCHER (PICTURED) SYSTEM: IOS YEAR: 2019
The best horror games tend to show their cards differently to horror films. Where in films things often begin harmoniously, with just some eerie music or a mildly unusual sighting hinting at the impending darkness, videogames like to come out swinging. Think of the chaotic lorry-crash opening of Resident Evil 2, the alley nightmare that introduces you to Silent Hill or, going back, the monster smashing through the window in Alone In The Dark.
In some ways, the 2001 PS2 horror game Project Zero (‘Zero’ in Japan, Fatal Frame in the US) sticks to the fundamentals of the great games leading up to it. The difference is that nothing really happens for a good while in Project Zero.
Instead, after a nebulous opening cutscene introducing the sixth-sensed siblings Miku and Mafuyu, you enter the Himuro Mansion and are instantly submerged in a murky lake of reverberating sound – choral wailing and cavernous synths that sound both incorporeal and all-enveloping. Resembling the micropolyphony used in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey and the excellent 2015 horror The Witch, it’s an unyielding alarm from a dark dimension; it tells you that you’re now in a tortured place, and there’s no turning back.
A thousand tasteful touches like this helped Project Zero build on the fine lineage of survival horror games dating back to the original Resident Evil in 1996. It inherited certain traits of its predecessors – semi-fixed camera angles, stodgy movement and a scarcity of resources – but also addressed many oversights and shortcomings that had been blighting the genre for years.
The most glaring of these was the fact that, despite all the best horror games around the turn of the millennium being Japanese-developed and driven by Japanese art styles and design philosophy, they leaned heavily on western horror movies: Resident Evil and George Romero zombie films, and Dario Argento slasher flicks, 2 and Jacob’s Ladder. It didn’t matter that Japan had its own rich horror legacy – there seemed to be no belief among publishers that a wider audience would be interested.
