Alone in the DarkAlone In The Dark 2Alone in the Dark 3Alone in the Dark: InfernoAlone in the Dark: The New Nightmare
Frédérick Raynal's 1992 masterpiece is the textbook on horror. Seemingly overnight, it redefined the way action and adventure could be used to create suspense, and it went on to become not only a huge commercial success, but one of the most imitated games of the following decade. And with this ground-breaking success came pressure, impossible expectations, and a long struggle to recapture that early glory. It has been re-imagined, rebuilt, traveled across media, and never quite zeroed in on exactly what made us quake in our boots all those years ago. And yet still, the name still means something. As Alone in the Dark is resurrected from the dead once more, we plumb the depths of its storied past.
The Godfather of Survival-Horror
As the '80s gave way to a new decade, a young amateur game designer named Cristophe de Dinechin entered the Infogrames office in Villeurbanne, France with the hopes of landing an internship. To make his case, he had with him a small demo designed to show off a fast 3D engine. As the interview progressed, he realized that he had set his sights too low. He didn't land an internship, but instead secured the most generous development deal the company had ever given a freelancer. His assignment was to turn that demo into a game.
Alpha Waves, as the finished game was called, would turn a few heads. It is regarded by game historians as the first true 3D platform game, and while it didn't inspire waves of imitators, it caught the eye of one of Infogrames' programmers, Frédérick Raynal. He persuaded his superiors to let him take on the time-consuming task of porting the Atari ST version of Alpha Waves to MS-DOS PCs. After the experience, Raynal was convinced of the power of polygons, and he knew what his next move would be: a 3D game with animated human characters.
With that idea, the rest of the vision came together: a haunted house, walking dead, and a desperate plight to stay alive -- just like the zombie movies Frederick grew up watching. Infogrames brass wasn't convinced, so Raynal took the initiative and started working on a demo.
He developed a character engine that set new precedent. It interpolated the movement of points on a 3D model to create characters that not only animated smoothly, but could bend and flex instead of being cobbled together from solid blocks. Raynal knew that the primitive 3D graphics of the day weren't enough to lend his haunted manor the needed atmosphere, so he created a system that used bitmapped backgrounds to illustrate his 3D space with dramatic (but static) camera angles. At first he thought digitized photos would be the way to go, but before long he settled on hand-drawn art by Yaél Barroz and Jean-Marc Torroella.
His bosses were duly impressed, and placed Raynal in charge of the project. He would direct, design, and program the game. To establish the eerie mood he wanted, Raynal turned to H. P. Lovecraft for inspiration, borrowing mythology and monsters from the Cthulu stories. It was a different sort of storytelling, perhaps ahead of its time. Rather than imitating other media and explicitly telling a story using movie-like devices such as dialog, cut-scenes, and narration, Alone in the Dark would allow players to discover the story as investigators, piecing it together from books, journals, and environmental clues.
The atmosphere was thick. In 1920, an old plantation house in Louisiana called Derceto becomes the site of the unexpected and inexplicable suicide of Jeremy Hartwood, a man who had become fixated on learning about the occult during his final years in the house. Players could choose to play as either Emily Hartwood, Jeremy's niece, or Edward Carnby, a private investigator called to investigate what really happened. Interestingly, since the story is discovered through investigation, the player choice doesn't really affect the actual story. The player's imagination is left to piece together the unholy events that have transpired, not unlike more recent games like Bioshock and Half-Life 2.
While the action-adventure genre was far from new, Alone in the Dark blended these two styles of gameplay in an undeniably new way to create an uneasy feeling of horror. Certainly there were many horror-themed games already, but where most of these games were escapist fantasies about badass heroes with holy weapons or special powers, Raynal's creation captured the panic brought on by feeling helpless and overwhelmed. The slow movement was no accident, and the extremely limited supply of health upped the tension of every encounter. Death was always around the corner, and you could never feel truly safe.
In the later part of 1992, the ambitious genre-hopper finally hit store shelves. It garnered hefty critical acclaim, especially in its native Europe, and the cinematic camera design and spooky story captured audiences in America as well as back home. The title would eventually make its way to Japan on FM-TOWNS computers and the 3DO console, influencing a new generation of designers.
Against all conventional wisdom about games being a means for adolescent males to fantasize about being stronger, cooler, and more attractive, Alone in the Dark was a hit. The 1920s setting might not have been relatable, and the middle-aged characters were slow, older, and sorely lacking in kung-fu training, but no one seemed to mind. It was a testament to the strength of an artistic vision being greater than a marketing department's breakdown of the sum of its parts.
Sophomore Slump
After the commercial and critical success of Infogrames' experiment, a sequel seemed like a sure thing. Raynal's team got to work immediately, planning a sequel to carry what they had done even further. But tensions rose as Infogrames execs seemed unappreciative of Raynal's contributions and ambitions. Hopelessly at odds with the powers that be, he opted to walk away from a series that remains one of the greatest successes of his career.
He took with him the entire art and sound staff of the first Alone in the Dark game, leaving programmer Franck De Girolami to assume control of the shattered team. Raynal and company would form Adeline Software, and began developing Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure, a sprawling action-adventure that would build on many of Alone in the Dark's ambitious gameplay ideas.
Infogrames, unshaken by the departure, was determined to finish the game with a new team. They retained the rights to the engine and tools that were used to create the first game, so piecing together the parts for another seemed a fairly straightforward task. Unfortunately, Raynal operated as an auteur, taking on the bulk of programming work in addition to directing, and never articulated the subtleties of his design philosophy to the rest of his team. The new staff was left in the dark themselves.
Development of the sequel lasted around a year, and when production wrapped in November of 1993, De Girolami left Infogrames to come to Los Angeles, where he joined Xatrix Entertainment. Before the game even hit store shelves, their team was again crumbling.
Alone in the Dark 2 launched not long after, and it was immediately apparent that this interpretation of the series was different. Sure, the basic control and style seemed similar, but where the original game pitted you against shambling undead corpses, this sequel was populated by prohibition-era mobsters sporting Tommy guns. They may have been possessed by black magic and pale-green in color, but they could talk, run, and shoot like anyone else. To push the gameplay even further into the action realm, the enemy count was raised sharply from the couple dozen or so ghouls and monsters that populated the Derceto estate.
That isn't to say that Alone in the Dark 2 was dumbed down into a simple action game. There were still some clever puzzles, and most of the fights required more wits than reflexes. Late in the game, you got the chance to play as a second character, a small girl named Grace, who had to rely on stealth and traps to survive -- an ambitious twist for the time.
All the same, the reaction from critics was mixed. While most agreed it was a good game, few held it in the same regard as the original. The story strayed far from its Lovecraftian roots, and the gameplay took just as many liberties, upsetting fans anticipating another spooky mansion crawl. This didn't prevent it from becoming a commercial success, however, and ports to the Saturn and PlayStation helped to bring the game to a new audience that never saw the first.
Closing the Classic Era
With another success under their belts, Infogrames had no reason not to continue, and Alone in the Dark would soon become a trilogy. Infogrames once again rebuilt its staff and reused Raynal's original engine and tools to keep the series going.
The gameplay fundamentals were old, but Infogrames did what they could to keep things fresh. The storyline once again shifted into new territory. Carnby, now having established something of a reputation for confronting the paranormal, is called to an Old West ghost town to investigate the disappearance of Emily Hartwood, his co-star of the first episode. He's soon met by a band of zombie cowboy outlaws disturbed by the unwanted presence in their outpost.
Zombie cowboys weren't really any less campy than zombie mobsters, but the final game of the trilogy went a long way to return to the atmospheric tone and psychological scares that made the first game such gold, and it toned the gun-slinging down to a comfortable middle ground. As the first game in the series available exclusively on CD-ROM, it made much better use of narration, voice acting, and cinematic moments, and upped the size of the adventure to epic proportions. The long investigation was rife with unexpected turns, eventually delving into sci-fi territory reminiscent of 1950s horror movies.
Alone in the Dark 3 took great strides toward getting the series back on track. Unfortunately, by the time it released in May of 1995, the flat, unshaded, untextured polygons were really showing their age. The first game in the series was cutting-edge when it launched to market alongside games like Wolfenstein 3D. The third had to complete with a new generation of 3D games on PC and consoles.
The game was a success, but it was apparent that Infogrames had milked the series for as much as they could for the time being, and the audience was getting bored. The trilogy was complete, and the company decided to retire the series and move on.
Reclaiming a Legacy
Infogrames was done chasing the success of their first attempt, but others would soon step up to the challenge. The trilogy had travelled far, and it made some fans over in Japan, inclueding Capcom's Shinji Mikami. Inspired by Alone in the Dark and a Famicom RPG called Sweet Home, Mikami set out to make his own tribute to the zombie genre.
Resident Evil, as it would be called in the West, was billed as a "survival-horror" game. It was the first time the genre label had been used and, unlike most genres coined by developers, the term stuck. Only after the Alone trilogy had been completed and retired was it suddenly in fashion. Resident Evil's mix of classic AitD-inspired gameplay and B-movie schlock and gore gave way to a string of sequels that are still going strong, and an entire genre of imitators and contenders like Silent Hill, Clock Tower, and the Lovecraft-inspired Eternal Darkness.
By the end of the decade, Alone in the Dark was no longer just a uniquely frightening action-adventure, it was now the godfather of an entire genre. When Raynal left Infogrames, he wanted to move away from darker themes as they became the trend in the wake of Doom. In 1999, while working under the SEGA umbrella at his company, newly redubbed No Cliché, he decided that the time had come to return to the genre he started.
Agartha, as he called it, had no official connection to the series he left behind, but the spiritual connection was strong. This was Raynal stepping up to show that the man that created the genre could push it to the next level. It moved away from the cramped indoor environments and static camera systems that were the hallmark of survival horror, instead using intense darkness and dense snowfall to shroud its environments in mystery. The use of a flashlight in pitch dark areas seemed a particularly compelling addition at the time the game was revealed.
Alas, SEGA pulled the plug on their European development before Agartha could ever be completed, but Raynal wasn't the only one interested in staking a claim to the legacy. At the same time he was working on Agartha, Infogrames was preparing their next move; a complete reinvention of the franchise that would bring the series into the new decade, and its hero into a new century.
No longer interested in internal development, Infogrames sought an outside studio to take the reigns. Then, an upstart developer called Darkworks pitched them a game called 1906. While Infogrames wasn't much interested in producing the arctic action game, they were impressed enough by the demo that they recruited them for the fourth Alone game.
Darkworks interpretation of the series was not a sequel. It shifted the continuity into the 21st century, and created a new Edward Carnby with little resemblance to the mustachioed detective of the original. Carnby was now a long-haired rebel, and his enemies, the Shadows, looked more like aliens than the ghouls and demons of games past. It also borrowed generously from newer games like Resident Evil, and sported a more console-ized design. Turnabout is fair play, after all.
Interestingly, their game would also place a major emphasis on the use of a flashlight, showing that they may have been more in sync with Raynal than we realized. The innovative engine allowed for dynamic lighting on pre-rendered backgrounds. It looked credible, and it allowed for some truly suspenseful moments as players tried to penetrate the pitch black with the flashlight while being hunted by monsters.
The story took a slight turn toward Hollywood. No longer content to focus on survival, Carnby was not out for revenge on whomever or whatever killed his friend, Charles Fiske. In a betrayal of the game's title, he was no longer alone, either. The lovely Ms. Aline Cedrac accompanies Edward to Shadow Island to help develop the story – and add a little sex appeal. It was a pretty far cry from H. P. Lovecraft, but it was just as far from zombie mobsters. The story was dark and creepy, even if it did try too hard to play mainstream.
Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare finally made it to just about every relevant system it could in 2001, including an ambitious Game Boy Color version that did what the cancelled Resident Evil port never could. Critics praised the use of lighting and spooky presentation, but slammed it for treading too close to the Resident Evil formula without creating a strong identity of its own. The use of pre-rendered backgrounds was particularly controversial as technology seemed to outgrow the need.
The New Nightmare wasn't an unsuccessful game, but it didn't reignite the fire the series once had, and Infogrames opted to put the series on hold once more.
The Road Ahead
Alone in the Dark has been sitting on the shelf for years, but has never completely disappeared from view. In 2005, it got theatrical film adaptation by infamous videogame enthusiast Uwe Boll. It was hailed as one of the worst movies ever created.
In every way that Raynal's original games took risks out of respect for the audience, Boll's movie underestimates them. Writer Blair Erickson famously related his stories of frustration as he attempted to write the screenplay in the face of such criticisms from Boll as: "Edward has to be mysterious like in The Crow and Blade, he has to have special abilities and weapons." Eventually he hired new screenwriters with no respect for the source material to write a barely-recognizable adaptation filled with car chases, martial arts battles and anti-monster tactical squads.
We may never know why Uwe Boll felt a compelling need to water down the zombie/monster genre, but the commercial and critical failings of his adaptation won't be the death of the Alone in the Dark legacy. In fact, it got people talking again about how to restore the series' good name.
This week, Infogrames, now under the label Atari, is shipping their latest reinvention of the series to store shelves. It's a complete reboot once again, with a new engine, and, in the proud Alone in the Dark tradition, a new team at the helm. It's hard to say if this will be the game that finally restores the franchise to its former glory, or at least gains enough traction to merit a proper sequel. But, like an ancient evil resurrected once a generation, we've learned by now that Alone in the Dark isn't going away.