GrayChild
Member
I don't think us survival horror fans will ever see another golden era for the genre similar to the period between 1998-2005. We had the privilege to play a new high-profile horror masterpiece every 4-5 months or so, sometimes even more often. What games like Clock Tower, Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil started, soon became a separate niche, where every major publisher wanted to pursue with at least one franchise.
Not every one of them sold well, but fortunately the market back then allowed for more risky projects to be greenlit and put into production. Not that such games don't exist nowadays, but apart from Resident Evil itself coming back to its roots, Alien: Isolation becoming a thing and The Evil Within trying to bring back some of the genre's past glories, we don't get any survival horror games nowadays outside the indie scene and hide-and-seek/walking simulators like Amnesia, Outlast, Layers of Fear and SOMA.
Here's only part of the other games and franchises the genre gave us during its heyday between 1998-2005:
It was glorious, but it wasn't meant to last that long.
Resident Evil 4 came, and fucked it all up:
(chart courtesy of Chris's Survival Horror Quest)
Of course, everyone wanted to have its own version of RE4, with some of its design creeping in newer titles such as Silent Hill: Homecoming, Alone in the Dark (2008) and Dead Space, with varying degrees of success. Obviously, the old-school of doing things was no longer selling.
With the success of Resident Evil 2 (2019) I start to wonder, can we see some of these series back, or at least some new ones which can match them? With the interest towards P.T./Silent Hills it was never a better time to try something new that revitalizes the original formula, and with Resident Evil and The Evil Within being the only active AAA series on the market, there is A LOT of room for competition.
Not every one of them sold well, but fortunately the market back then allowed for more risky projects to be greenlit and put into production. Not that such games don't exist nowadays, but apart from Resident Evil itself coming back to its roots, Alien: Isolation becoming a thing and The Evil Within trying to bring back some of the genre's past glories, we don't get any survival horror games nowadays outside the indie scene and hide-and-seek/walking simulators like Amnesia, Outlast, Layers of Fear and SOMA.
Here's only part of the other games and franchises the genre gave us during its heyday between 1998-2005:
It was glorious, but it wasn't meant to last that long.
Resident Evil 4 came, and fucked it all up:
(chart courtesy of Chris's Survival Horror Quest)
Of course, everyone wanted to have its own version of RE4, with some of its design creeping in newer titles such as Silent Hill: Homecoming, Alone in the Dark (2008) and Dead Space, with varying degrees of success. Obviously, the old-school of doing things was no longer selling.
With the success of Resident Evil 2 (2019) I start to wonder, can we see some of these series back, or at least some new ones which can match them? With the interest towards P.T./Silent Hills it was never a better time to try something new that revitalizes the original formula, and with Resident Evil and The Evil Within being the only active AAA series on the market, there is A LOT of room for competition.
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