TIME EXTEND
Alone In The Dark
How Infogrames’ sur vival horror bridged the gap between Cthulhu and Resident Evil
By Lewis Packwood
Developer/publisher
Infogrames
Format
PC
Release
1992
Had Alone In The Dark never existed, there would have been no Resident Evil – at least, not in the form that we know it. Capcom’s survival horror title was originally envisaged as a spiritual successor to the 1989 NES RPG Sweet Home, which was based on the Japanese horror film of the same name. In the end, very little of that game’s DNA made it into Resident Evil, save for the mansion setting. Instead, director Shinji Mikami played Alone In The Dark, and was captivated by its expressive fixed-camera viewpoints. If it hadn’t been for Mikami playing that game, he told Le Monde in 2014, “Resident Evil would probably have become a firstperson shooter”.
In addition to those horror-movieinspired camera angles, Mikami’s game apes Infogrames’ groundbreaking 1992 title in other ways. Both feature a choice of two protagonists, with scarce ammo and limited inventory space. Arcane puzzles abound. Alone In The Dark even had creatures crashing through windows, long before zombie dogs showed up in Resident Evil.
Infogrames had likewise begun with a source material from which it would soon veer away. The French studio acquired the licence to Chaosium’s Call Of Cthulhu tabletop RPG, and the game first reared its head under the same name, appended with the subtitle Doom Of Derceto. However, by the time of its release, the licence had been revoked and the name changed. A few elements of that setting survive, but Alone In The Dark is as influenced by the films of George Romero and Dario Argento as Lovecraft’s writing. The plot also borrows from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall Of The House Of Usher, in which the protagonist is summoned by letter to a mysterious house that appears to have a life of its own.