The House of the Dead (video game)

The House of the Dead (ザ・ハウス・オブ・ザ・デッド) is a 1997 horror-themed light gun shooter arcade game developed by Sega AM1 and released by Sega. It is the first game in the House of the Dead series. Players assume the role of agents Thomas Rogan and "G" as they combat an army of undead experiments created by Dr. Curien, a mad scientist.

The game was developed for over a year on the Sega Model 2 arcade hardware. Targeting an adult audience, AM1 devised a story and atmosphere inspired by Western horror films. AM1's plans for detailed environments, non-linear level designs, and a gory aesthetic were challenged – and often limited – by the Model 2 hardware and other factors.

The House of the Dead was well-received by critics. It has been, along with Resident Evil, credited with popularising zombie video games, as well as re-popularising zombies in wider popular culture from the late 1990s onwards, leading to renewed interest in zombie films during the 2000s. The game has also been credited with introducing fast running zombies, which became popular in zombie films and video games during the 2000s.

A remake of the game was developed by MegaPixel Studio and published by Forever Entertainment for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Stadia, Windows, and Xbox One in April 2022, for Xbox Series X/S in September 2022, and for PlayStation 5 in January 2023.

Gameplay
The House of the Dead is a rail shooter light gun game. Players use a light gun (or mouse, in the PC version) to aim and shoot at approaching zombies. The characters' pistols use magazines which hold 6 rounds; players reload by shooting away from the screen. When a player sustains damage or shoots a civilian, one point of health is removed. The continue screen appears when all health is lost. If the player runs out of continues, the game is over. First-aid packs are available throughout the game which restore one point of health; some can be obtained from rescued hostages, while others are hidden inside certain breakable objects. Special items can be found within other breakables, granting a bonus to the player who shoots them. The player can earn additional health at the end of each level based on the number of hostages rescued.

Throughout the course of the game, players are faced with numerous situations in which their action (or inaction) will have an effect on the direction of gameplay. This is exemplified in the opening stage of the game when a hostage is about to be thrown from the bridge to his death. If the player saves the hostage, they will enter the house directly through the front door; however, if the player fails to rescue the hostage, the character is redirected to an underground route through the sewers.

Players can score additional points by shooting enemies in the head, rescuing hostages and finding hidden items.

Plot
The renowned biochemist and geneticist, Dr. Roy Curien, becomes obsessed with discovering the nature of life and death. While supported by the DBR Corporation and its own team of scientists, Curien's behavior becomes more erratic and his experiments take an inhumane and gruesome turn. The Curien Mansion, which serves as his home and laboratory, experiences an outbreak of undead zombies.

On December 18, 1998, AMS Agent Thomas Rogan receives a distress call from his fiancée, Sophie Richards, from the Curien Mansion. Rogan and his partner, "G", fly to Europe and arrive at the estate, finding it overrun with undead creatures, which Curien unleashed. A mortally wounded scientist gives them a journal containing information about Curien's creations and their weaknesses, and urges them to rescue the survivors still inside.

Rogan and G reach Sophie, only to witness her being carried away by a flying gargoyle-like monster called the Hangedman. The two enter the house, and later find Sophie, just before she is attacked by the Chariot, a hulking, heavily-armored mutant armed with a bardiche. After killing the mutant, Rogan and G attend to a wounded Sophie, who warns them that they must stop Curien at all costs, before collapsing from her wounds. Furious, Rogan and G push further into the mansion, and upon reaching the rooftops encounter the Hangedman. In the ensuing battle, Rogan and G are nearly thrown to their deaths, but manage to shoot it down. Fighting deeper into the mansion’s laboratories, the two eventually find Curien, who is protected by a massive, arachnoid creature called the Hermit. After killing it, Rogan and G continue their chase.

Upon arriving at the mansion’s underground laboratory, Curien unleashes his masterpiece, the Magician, a powerful humanoid creature with pyrokinetic abilities. However, the Magician refuses to serve any master and kills its creator. To prevent it from escaping, Rogan and G fight the Magician, and after being defeated, the Magician explodes, but not before warning the players that they "have not seen anything yet". With both Curien and the Magician dead, the agents leave the mansion.

Endings
The game features three different endings, which are determined by the player’s score, number of continues used and rank. The first two endings feature Sophie in the mansion’s foyer, either alive having survived her injuries or as having become one of the undead zombies (which the game developers referred to as the “true” and “normal” endings respectively). In the third ending, only a far view of the mansion is shown (leaving Sophie’s fate ambiguous).

Development and release
Development started in December 1995 and took one year and three months. None of the development team could speak English, so they arrived at the name The House of the Dead by taking various horror-themed phrases in Japanese and picking the one where the English translated text had the most "cool" visual, without concern for what sort of connotations the phrase might have to English speakers. The team saw people in their 20s and 30s as their target audience, and hoped that the game would primarily be experienced as a two-player game.

The House of the Dead was built on the Virtua Cop game engine. The developers wanted to have a more complex system of path branches, and to have the system impact the game's story, but eventually realized these ideas were too ambitious to fulfill within the time allotted to make the game.

The enemy designs were drafted quickly, going from idea directly to design drawing without any rough sketches. Anticipating that foreign markets, particularly Germany, would require the violence be toned down, they built in an option for operators to change the color of the game's blood, with green, purple, and blue available in addition to the traditional red. To avoid potential controversy the developers removed an elderly looking female zombie, and several enemies dressed in suggestive attire. The Chariot was animated by using motion capture with an actor wielding a broom, but the other enemies were all animated manually, using motion capture for reference only.

Sega AM4 designed the game's cabinet using screenshots and illustrations given to them by AM1. The House of the Dead came in two cabinet formats, both upright: one with a 50-inch monitor and one with a 29-inch monitor.

Ports
In late 1997, Sega confirmed that work had begun on a port to Sega Saturn, as an early version had been delivered to them. The port was handled by Tantalus Interactive and released in 1998, with a port to Windows (PC-CD) by Sega arriving the same year. Aside from game modes were added to both ports, which include selectable characters with different weapons and a boss rush mode.

Both the Sega Saturn and PC editions have slightly remixed soundtracks. On Chapter 2, there is a reference to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, as the words "Challenger, go at throttle up", spoken by Richard O. Covey from the mission control room only seconds before the explosion, can be heard three times before the music loops. These words do not appear in the arcade version; a snickering laugh is heard instead. The title, and boss themes are reversed on the PC port as well.

A version for mobile phones was released in Japan, and aimed to recreate the gameplay and locations from the arcade version. The pre-installed trial version containing the game's first chapter was included with Vodafone V603SH in February 2005, and utilized the phone's accelerometer functionality to control the camera.

Remake
In April 2021, it was announced that a remake of the game was to be released for the Nintendo Switch. The House of the Dead: Remake was developed by MegaPixel Studio and published by Forever Entertainment under license from Sega. In January 2022 news outlets reported that the game was expected to launch in March 2022,  but it was ultimately released on April 7, 2022. Ports for PlayStation 4, Stadia, Windows, and Xbox One were released on April 28, 2022, followed by Xbox Series X/S on September 23, 2022, and PlayStation 5 on January 20, 2023.

Sega reportedly lost the source code to the arcade version of The House of the Dead, requiring MegaPixel Studio to remake the entire game from scratch in the Unity game engine. Due to licensing issues, the original soundtrack by composer Tetsuya Kawauchi was replaced by a new soundtrack that is heavily inspired by the original.

Like the original home versions before, the remake uses an analog controlled crosshair for aiming by default. The Switch version also includes an alternative control by utilizing the controller’s built in “gyro aiming” system to emulate the use of a light gun, and the subsequent Xbox One and PS4 ports also had alternate control methods, such as USB mouse control and the PlayStation Move/Aim controllers respectively.

Reception and legacy
In Japan, Game Machine listed The House of the Dead on their May 1, 1997, issue as being the second most-successful dedicated arcade game of the month. The arcade game was also a major hit overseas. It went on to be the highest-grossing dedicated arcade game of 1998 in Japan. By 1998, it had sold 8,600 arcade cabinets worldwide, including 1,600 in Japan and 7,000 overseas.

Reviews
The 1996 arcade version of The House of the Dead received positive reviews upon release. Computer and Video Games magazine called it "the best shooting game ever!" Next Generation reviewed the arcade version of the game, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "Overall, this is an excellent take on the light-gun genre - a sheer bloody scream." The review praised the branching levels, story, creature design, graphics, and destructible environments. In a retrospective review, AllGame awarded it 4.5 out of 5 stars, likewise praising the story, graphics, and destructible environments, but particularly focused on the game's intelligent challenge. The reviewer dubbed it "one of the best shooting games to hit arcades in the late 1990s."

The Saturn version of The House of the Dead garnered generally favorable reviews. It had a 71% rating on review aggregation website GameRankings based on five online reviews.

The Nintendo Switch remake received mixed reviews. Starburst praised the new soundtrack, added game modes, and the exciting atmosphere. They concluded that the remake is "a fantastic revival of an old favourite". Gaming Bible similarly commented that the graphical upgrades and extras are appealing. Nook Gaming was laudatory of the game's "clever camera angles and situations" that encourage efficient play. Reviewers criticized the gyro and thumbstick controls. Nintendo Life felt that unlike the Wii, the Switch is unsuitable for light gun games due to its lack of a sensor bar, without which the gyro controls cause the cursor to twitch when firing. They concluded that while the gameplay still held up and the graphical upgrades and extras were reasonably well done, those who are not fans of the original game might not have the patience for it.

Cultural impact
According to Kim Newman in the book Nightmare Movies (2011), the "zombie revival began in the Far East" during the late 1990s with the Japanese zombie games Resident Evil and The House of the Dead. The success of these two 1996 zombie games inspired a wave of Asian zombie films, such as Bio Zombie (1998) and Versus (2000). The zombie revival later went global following the worldwide success of Resident Evil and The House of the Dead, which inspired a wave of Western zombie films during the 2000s, such as 28 Days Later (2002) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). In 2013, George Romero said it was the video games Resident Evil and House of the Dead "more than anything else" that popularised his zombie concept in early 21st-century popular culture.

The House of the Dead has also been credited with introducing a new type of zombie distinct from Romero's classic slow zombie: the fast running zombie. After appearing in The House of the Dead, they became popular in zombie films and video games during the 2000s, including the Resident Evil games and films, The House of the Dead film adaptation, and the films 28 Days Later (2002) and Dawn of the Dead (2004).

Controversy
When the American city of Indianapolis attempted to ban violent video games in 2000, it argued that The House of the Dead was obscene and so unprotected by the First Amendment. This required U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner to review the game at length, ultimately finding Indianapolis' ban was unconstitutional. Unimpressed by the graphics, Judge Posner wrote "The most violent game in the record, The House of the Dead, depicts zombies being killed flamboyantly, with much severing of limbs and effusion of blood; but so stylized and patently fictitious is the cartoon-like depiction that no one would suppose it 'obscene' in the sense in which a photograph of a person being decapitated might be described as 'obscene.' It will not turn anyone's stomach."