While early horror games were mostly simplistic adventures booby-trapped with cheap jump scares, we were soon bombarded with clever twists on established formulas and even homages to some of our favorite scary movies. It was around this time that many of us turned to an alternative source of interactive scares… browser-based flash games!īrowser games had already been around for years at this point (I know I’ll never forget the infamous maze game that surprised players with the screaming image of a possessed Regan MacNeil) but there was a content explosion toward the mid-2000s that turned the flash game scene into a thriving community. Don’t get me wrong, the seventh generation of consoles did bring a few memorable horror titles to the table (most notably Dead Space and Al an Wake), but AAA titles dominated the market, leaving the creative spirit from the previous generation behind. However, as technology evolved and gaming became more complex, smaller developers simply weren’t able to compete with big publishers, quickly losing their hold in the industry.

This resulted in the PlayStation 2, GameCube and original Xbox becoming home to some of the greatest horror titles of all time, with hits like Silent Hill 2, Fatal Frame and even hidden gems like the Forbidden Siren series. Back then, coming up with decent graphics and clever mechanics wasn’t as prohibitively expensive as it is now, so developers took more risks. If you ask any survival horror fan about the glory days of the genre, they’ll almost inevitably point to the sixth generation of console gaming.

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