Haunted House (video game)

An Atari 2600 Action Adventure game from 1982, and quite possibly the Ur Example of the Survival Horror genre. Not violent, but very scary given the graphics of the time.

You play a disembodied pair of eyes wandering around a darkened four-story house. You're there to find the three pieces of an urn that once belonged to a man named Zachary Graves. But the house is haunted by Zachary's ghost, and occupied by tarantulas and a bat. If they touch you, you'll be 'scared to death' and lose a life. You have 9 lives.

The house is completely dark, but you have an infinite number of matches to light a small area around you. The match works for a limited time and another one has to be lit. The match also goes out when there's a monster in the same room with you. With a match lit, you can find items in the rooms: A master key to open locked doors, a scepter to protect you from the monsters, and the urn pieces. You can only carry one of these at a time (the urn assembles as you collect the pieces, and is considered one item).

The monsters wander from room to room and floor to floor. If a monster enters the room, or you enter a room with a monster in it, it'll give chase. At lower difficulty levels, if you leave the room, it'll go back to wandering; but at higher difficulty levels, it'll keep chasing you from room to room. Zachary's ghost can pass through locked doors, and the other monsters can too at higher difficulty levels. When there's a monster in the room, the wind blows, blowing out your match, and lightning flashes (or not, depending on the left difficulty switch setting).

There are nine Difficulty Levels, ranging from Easier Than Easy to Nintendo Hard. At level 1, there are no doors, the walls are lit, and you can see if a monster is in another room. At level 2, the scaring starts. It's completely dark, and the rooms are separated by doors, so you don't know if there's a monster in the next room. Even if you stand still, a monster could wander in from any direction. Higher levels lock some of the doors, have three tarantulas instead of one, make the monsters more aggressive, make the bat steal your item, speed up the monsters, make Zachary's ghost immune to the scepter, and let the other monsters move through locked doors.

No relation to the 4K TRS-80 Text Adventure Haunted House.

Remade for the Wii and Xbox Live Arcade.


 * Action Adventure
 * All There in the Manual: The plot.
 * A Winner Is You: The screen flashes and some spooky music resembling the Twilight Zone theme plays.
 * Back Tracking: If you don't have the master key, you'll do a lot of this.
 * Bedsheet Ghost: Zachary.
 * Blackout Basement: The whole house.
 * By the Lights of Their Eyes: Even when you've lit a match, only your eyes are seen. This is changed in the remake.
 * Collision Damage
 * Cut and Paste Environments: All four floors are exactly the same; six rooms in a two by three grid. Only the locations of stairs and locked doors are different, and in the dark, you can't see them! Only the status bar can tell you which floor you're on.
 * Difficulty Levels: Used to great effect.
 * Dismantled MacGuffin: The urn.
 * Easier Than Easy: Difficulty level 1.
 * Empty Room Psych: Well, there are 24 rooms, five objects, and three or five monsters, so...
 * Excuse Plot
 * Fan Sequel: The homebrew Haunted House 3D for the Atari 5200.
 * Featureless Protagonist: Two eyes, with pupils that point where you're going.
 * Averted with the remake, which starred two siblings investigating the death of their grandfather.
 * Game Over
 * The Golden Age of Video Games
 * Haunted House
 * Inventory Management Puzzle: Very tricky with only one item.
 * Locked Door: Starting at difficulty level 3.
 * Meaningful Name: Zachary Graves.
 * Nintendo Hard: Difficulty levels 6 or 7 and above.
 * Palette Swap: The tarantulas.
 * Preexisting Encounters: Difficulty level 1.
 * Replay Value: Pretty high with all those difficulty levels.
 * Roaming Enemy
 * Scoring Points: You get a score based on how many matches you use and how many lives you lose. Lower the score, the better it is.
 * Survival Horror: May be the Ur Example (which would also make it Older Than the NES).
 * Top Down View
 * Video Game Lives: Nine.
 * Video Game Remake: The PC/Xbox360/Wii remake, which gave the game 3D graphics and a more complex story.