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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Lots of gaming things scared me as a kid but are also some of my fondest memories of overcoming my fears. Some included:

- The guillotines in PoP.

- The death animation for victims of the TOZT Napalm Unit in Marathon.

- The "red alert" warning combined with Kestrel fighter escort launching sound in Escape Velocity.

- The wolf 4 screens left in King's Quest 1 (I played this at about age 4 and did not comprehend the idea of going somewhere else. I just kept trying to outrun it)

- Ampire Bot in Robot Odyssey

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- The skeletons stabbing you to death in Beyond the Forbidden Forest (C64)

- The entire Chiller[0] arcade game. I still sometimes have nightmares about it, and I've only ever walked by it once.

They both turn my stomach just thinking about them.

[0]http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/chiller/

The moment when a Wight burst in your cluster of archers in Myth, and the game voice just said “casualties”.

The butcher in Diablo 1, filled with a room of dismembered corpses.

Thanks for that, they were awful. The alien chatter from Marathon is up there too and hearing that close by was terrifying. The rocket launcher noise offset it a bit. More recently, the Half-Life face suckers were pretty bad.

I don't think I've ever heard a more satisfying rocket launcher sound effect than Marathon. That game had fantastic sound engineering.

The original Forbidden forest I think was the first game I ever found creepy/scary. It did a lot better job at creating an atmosphere fitting the subject matter than most other games of that era that were very arms-length in presenting peril to the character on screen without making it translate.

Aztec Challenge came close in creating tension, but not enough to feel scary.

To go slightly further back in time... the whole C64 Forbidden Forest game... the dragon, the reaper/ghost, the demogorgon all made 4 year old me crap my pants.

I didn't play much of it because it was so horrifying. The way your character struggled and bled as he died was too much for me to deal with.

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