The Haunted Hoard: Haunted House (Atari 2600)

It’s seen time and time again in cartoons: the lights go out, and the characters are now only represented by their eyeballs floating in the dark. No doubt, many an animator appreciated this break to animate something easier than a full body, but over on the Atari 2600 where characters were often still represented by squares and other simple shapes, the 1981 game Haunted House actually uses this trope to clever effect. You are represented as just a pair of eyeballs in the dark house, the player easily able to imagine a character that couldn’t be shown through the era’s limited graphical capabilities, and what’s more, you’re actually much like those old cartoon characters in that you’ll find yourself fumbling around in the dark without too much else visible.

 

In a rather unexpected touch, Haunted House sets up its fairly normal haunted house scenario with a bit of backstory in the manual. In the town of Spirit Bay, an old man named Zachary Graves passed away, haunting his house as a specter after it was condemned following his death. Rumor has it, Graves was in possession of a magic urn that belonged to the founding family of Spirit Bay, but it had fractured into three pieces following an earthquake long ago. While many believe the rumors that the urn resides in the Graves estate, few are brave enough to investigate it. You, however, have entered the four story mansion despite the danger, refusing to leave until you acquire all three pieces of the urn even though you soon learn that you’ll be putting your life at risk to do so. Despite your eyeballs looking human, you might as well be a cat since you have nine lives available to help in your search, Haunted House at first seeming like it might be giving you far too much leeway until you start making your way through the different variations that keep upping the difficulty.

Game variation 1 does do a good job of introducing the basics of Haunted House. The four story building you find yourself in will be lit up somewhat in this mode, the walls all clearly visible and making it fairly clear that all four floors are pretty much identical in layout. The differentiation between stories often just comes in which dead ends can instead be staircases and in other variations you’ll have doors blocking some paths. However, each floor will always consist of six rooms arranged in rows of two connected by small hallways, so even when you swap the game variation to one of the others where the walls aren’t visible, you aren’t going to be missing vital layout details in doing so.

 

However, objects of vital importance aren’t automatically visible in Haunted House. Instead, you are asked to light matches on occasion, illuminating anything at the hypothetical feet of your floating pair of eyeballs. The match’s light has a very short range, meaning you won’t be lighting the room up too much, so you do need to often walk around a fair bit and try to make the most of your match’s short-lived flame. Your score at the end of Haunted House ties closely to how many times you’ve died and how many matches you’ve used, but if you care only for the main goal of getting the magic urn, you will be pleased to find your match reserves bottomless. As for what items can be found on the ground, the three magic urn pieces are the main ones, even slotting together as you find them. This is vital though, as your character can only carry one object at a time, so there may be times you even ditch the urn pieces you’re carrying and grab one of the other two items of importance. The scepter, in most variations, makes you impervious to damage, and with Haunted House not always kind in that an enemy can be right on the other side of a staircase, cautiously carrying the scepter as you scope the house out is a solid plan. The other item is important to variations 3 through 9, the player able to pick up a master key that can be used to unlock doors throughout the house. Doors are used to make the layout more mazelike, the player still needing to find a proper route around locked doors by taking staircases since only in one mode is the key location guaranteed to be somewhere reliable rather than random.

The dangers you face in Haunted House vary between game modes, but you’ll always have at least one tarantula, bat, and the ghost of Graves trying to head towards you and scare you to death. Their main difference initially is their movement speed, but as you try out more variations, you’ll find their abilities changing. At first the game simply adds two more tarantulas in Game 5, but in Game 6 enemies can start following you between floors and the ghost can even pass through locked doors. Game 7 makes bats peskier by not only killing you, but teleporting the item you held somewhere random in the house. Game 8 makes the scepter useless against the ghost, and Game 9, the so-called ultimate Haunted House challenge, has all enemies able to travel through locked doors. The last way to tinker with your experience of note is the difficulty switch, the player able to toggle whether occasional lightning flashes light up the floors, but it doesn’t reveal items and you’ll pretty much know the layout, the lightning mostly just giving you periods where the game doesn’t allow you to light a match until the lightning passes.

 

Outside of the very easy Game 1 where the walls are all clearly visible, every other mode runs into the simple problem that Haunted House really is just a game where you bumble around the dark and hope to find what you’re looking for. There’s the minor bit of strategy in deciding if you want to hold a scepter or key for a bit, but most of what you do involves running around avoiding monsters, lighting matches, and hoping you luck into what you’re looking for. The game giving you points on match use doesn’t really feel like it’s tied much to skill, there’s no way to know if an item’s in the area until you’ve lit one, the lives perhaps the better metric of success since you can at least scurry off when you see something dangerous or press your luck and try to outmaneuver it. The variations unfortunately all too quickly extend the bumbling time, the introduction of locked doors not an interesting complication but something that makes the search slower and a bit more tedious. In fact, rather than lightning that is mostly good for being atmospheric, it might have been wiser for the difficulty switch to determine if keys and locked doors are a factor. Scrambling around the mansion would still involve a good bit of blind luck, but at least being able to engage with more capable enemies wouldn’t be hampered by the need to better chart your course through the mansion in a task that is often more of the game lasting longer because of it rather than being made compellingly complex.

THE VERDICT: Playing as a set of floating eyeballs in the dark is a cute way to tackle the exploration in Haunted House, but it can’t make up for the fact this little adventure is mostly about running all about and hoping to find what you’re looking for. There are few meaningful interactions or choices but a good deal of blind luck, but when enemies don’t pop up too close to the room entrance you came in through, they at least add a little excitement to the affair and some peril to make the hunt less rote. They’re not potent enough to inject the extra life Haunted House needs to make up for the fact the main goal is to wander around and hope you run over the items you need, but it’s at least not too difficult nor does it drag on since the mansion is fairly limited in its size and scope.

 

And so, I give Haunted House for Atari 2600…

A BAD rating. Locked doors feel like the wrong way to go to invigorate this haunted house exploration. Changing floor designs would of course be an improvement although possibly not a feasible one, but even just solid walls in place of those doors could encourage more intelligent use of the staircases. That doesn’t really change how basic the main task is though, finding urn pieces more a process of elimination than a task you have much influence over. In the simpler variations it’s at least a speedy quest, running from spooky enemies, hearing your footsteps echo in the quiet, it’s not not exactly captivating but it’s involved and fits the haunted house vibe well enough. Once locked doors are added, you need more time to find routes around and that slows things down too much, making it less a scramble to find things and flee and more a process that isn’t adding excitement on top of the complication. The game design of Haunted House is a bit too strongly linked to its focus on bumbling about and hoping to find something so trying to improve it would probably involve quite a large rework. Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration does do some interesting work with its reimagining of the concept though, varied locations, more active avoidance of danger, and less focus on limited visibility making for more intriguing exploration, but it is built with modern hardware capabilities despite its retro look and can’t really be said to be what Haunted House should have been all along.

 

Haunted House is still a bit of breezy spookiness on its less difficult variations if you want a taste of how video games started to take their first tentative steps into crafting horror experiences. At present, this Halloween appropriate game is more like if someone had an Easter egg hunt chucking the eggs around the backyard and had you look for them at midnight, the task not having enough direction to make the searching that entertaining. Fleeing from some simple baddies only does so much to add a bit of life to the task, but Haunted House was at least a nice attempt at trying to create a spooky experience, and funnily enough, its design is a bit close to one that would catch on decades later. Games like Slender would see you looking for items in a large area while being pursued, but even those often needed to introduce more direction, danger, or other elements to make them deeper than this bite-sized horror experience without much substance.