Before I begin writing an article, I’ll search around to determine the general consensus on the subject. Not to parrot ideas, but more to get the noggin’ joggin’. With this subject, I could only find a thread on r/NES. I wasn’t using reddit on purpose. Google inevitably dragged me there; like a child to a doctor. The threads title, “Unintentionally creepy games or moments in game” is wrong. Citing examples that are clearly intentional, redditors once again fail to follow even basic logic. I went in looking for inspiration, and instead found a comprehensive database of every purposefully creepy moment in NES history.
It’s easy to scare a child with an NES. The hardware is primitive and the uncanny presentation leaves room for the imagination to run wild. Even at their most whimsical, NES games are weird as hell. It wouldn’t be until the Sega Genesis, or perhaps, the Super Nintendo, that games began to look and sound coherent. Title Screens were often black voids with a logo and maybe a jingle. Music and sound effects were distinctly alien. We grew up with these machines, and because of cultural osmosis, kids today did too to a lesser extent. It’s easy to forget how strange these games truly are.
Take Duck Hunt for instance. You turn on the power, and immediately, a weird tune plays and the words “Duck Hunt” appear on the screen in a black void. Imagine being a five year old with no concept of video games, witnessing this for the first time.
Duck Hunt is the first of several NES games that absolutely terrified me as a child for no good reason. The title screen music is in an uncommon key, and has several descending notes that make it sound unintentionally ominous. It makes me wonder if the music was composed from the Ducks’ POV as opposed to mine. The jingle is only 5 seconds long, after which is total silence. There’s no demo, so the game will wait on this screen permanently until you make a selection. It’s super strange, even for back then. While many NES games are like this in spirit, Duck Hunt stands out specifically because of the weird key of its Title Music. It makes no sense and I don’t know what they were going for here. Once you start the game the mood becomes far more jubilant, and you watch a dog jump into some grass. Either you gun down some ducks or don’t.
It doesn’t actually matter because no matter what happens next it terrified me. Yeah, it was just a cartoon dog popping out of the grass. I have no idea why this scared me so badly when I was little. The title screen is definitely ominous even now. This dog popping out, regardless of context, isn’t. One could argue the noise it makes when it laughs at you is weird, but never creepy or scary. Maybe I’m wrong. You tell me. What makes even less sense is that I was willing to play Mach Rider without any issue around the same time.
What the hell’s going on with Dr. Mario? The concept gets more horrifying as I age, not less. Consider how every game inevitably ends in failure. Pills go in, corpse comes out. It’s not a puzzle game, it’s an unintentional commentary on the American health care system. Dr. Mario is what I now call a “grandma game”. My grandma never played Tetris like a normal person. She had it, but Dr. Mario was her jam. I’d watch until it was clear she was gonna lose and run outta the room.
See, at the tender age of four, the viruses in this game both intrigued and terrified me. I had no concept of death beyond “you’ll die if you bleed too much” so the inherently morbid concept of the game was lost on me. Who are these guys? Why are they so angry looking? Why are they hanging out with The Devil? Questions a four year old would ask. A four year old terrified of weird colorful blobs with faces. I wanted to know everything about these guys. They were just creepy enough to make me curious, and outright scary once they started laughing at the player’s failure.
failure in Dr. Mario is a dissonant experience regardless of age. On one hand, you have cartoon viruses laughing at you while Mario makes an “I dunno” pose. It’s completely ridiculous and makes it clear this isn’t a huge deal. Then again, you’ve just killed a man via malpractice. None of that mattered to me as a child. All I could focus on was the yellow virus and his massive teeth. They’re not meant to be scary. The only other sprites of his give the impression he has no teeth at all. He makes the same face my grandma did. It is a vague, gum sucking motion he’s doing. I still see it, even now. I know he’s supposed to be considered fat, but in that sprite I just can’t see it.
Bart Vs. The Space Mutants is a game where it’s hard to tell what the intent was. It’s initial release predates the first Treehouse of Horror episode by six months. Kang and Kodos did not exist yet, hence they latched onto the Space Mutants film series that was popular in universe during season one. Since it was developed by the American equivalent of Micronics, it’s hard to tell what went into this. This game utilizes the rare yet generic “Aliens invade a licensed sitcom” video game trope. I really do think that the core idea of the game is lazy, even if I like the designs. I don’t know who designed these aliens, but they’re perfect. You can see one right now in the banner at the top of the page. They’re brilliant and whoever designed them needs a raise. They fit the Simpsons art style like a glove. What’s strange is that these guys don’t appear in the NES version of the game. If I had to guess, the green guys specifically were designed after the game had already gone into production, and so they never got any defined sprite in the NES version. Rather, they only show up as a silhouette.
The aliens within the game don’t fit the simpsons art style at all. They look like something out of Ghoul School, another game developed by the same team. I think they recycled some designs or something. This was another set of characters that I was mercilessly curious about. Where were these aliens from? Were they a collective or was there some kind of hierarchy? Why are the green aliens so great? Seriously, those green aliens are one of my favorites designs in the entire series, and they only appear on the box art of this game. I would kill to see how the show would treat them.
What about this game could be unintentionally scary? It’s a game heavily inspired by They Live based on a cartoon with heavily stylized, sometimes grotesque characters on a console that can just barely display the color yellow, let alone do said designs justice.
Yes. These dogs scared the shit out of me. The hideous eyes freaked me out. By the time I’d played this, I was already old enough to get that the game has an uncanny vibe. Intentional or not. The dogs here must have just pushed it over the edge a bit. I didn’t beat the first level until I was in my twenties, so the incredibly dissonant boss “music” never had the opportunity to scare me. Matter of fact, the entire soundtrack is all kinds of strange. I’m no musician, but it seems insane to license the Simpsons theme, which is tremendously complex, only to butcher it with a Nintendo. There is no question, the theme HAD to be in there. However, this circles back to my previous point. The hardware can just barely graphically render the characters. The music is the same thing. It’s there, it works, but it’s wrong. Everything about it is wrong. What is that ominous sound at the beginning? Was that intentional? Even if it was, it’s the least freaky part of the entire theme. It made me uneasy as a child.
things that scare me intrigue me more than anything else in this world. I think that maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't have been anywhere near as interested in the NES had I not been terrified by it so often as a child. I always, always want to know more about the things that scare me. I think the best horror is the kind of horror that is unexplained, and lets be real, most NES games are lacking in context. Where does Duck Hunt take place? Presumably, in the United States. What's the dogs name? Max? Wolfie? Satan? Nobody knows. Super Smash Bros. didn't even try to give the dog a name. They know he's a terrifying villain even now. You know what sucked the most about the Independence Day sequel? It wasn't the horrible writing, poor acting, or CGI overuse. No. It was the fact that they explained the aliens. You don't explain the monster. Ever. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I needed a conclusion and here it is.