Sunday, October 13, 2024

Intellivision's "Night Stalker," my first survival horror video game

Thanks to Dad's business connections, we were among the very early owners of an Intellivision home video game system. Sometime in 1979, we hooked it up to the hefty television set in our living room in Clayton, New Jersey, and played Major League Baseball, The Electric Company: Math Fun, and Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack.

(Interestingly, our next-door neighbor was an early adopter of a different sort — upstairs, he had a massive personal computer that, from my memory anyway, took up a third of a room with its CPU, monitor, and disk — or cassette — drive. He wowed my friend Mike and I with a computer baseball game, a game that involved exploring underground passages and avoiding a troll and, as I very hazily recall, a detective game that was mostly text. It seemed, in retrospect, to be something that he put together himself, not one of the smaller commercial computers that would have been available at the time, such as an Apple II or TRS-80. But I'm trusting my memory as an 8-year-old here.)

Over the new few years, we acquired many more Intellivision cartridges through Dad's ongoing business relationship with Mattel. It was an awesome perk, and it made us bit of an outlier in a world where the more-popular Atari home video game system was outselling Intellivision about 6 to 1. 

One Intellivision game we eventually had was Night Stalker, which was released in 1982 and became a family favorite, although perhaps not quite as addictive or popular within the household as Astrosmash. (Other family favorites included Snafu, B-17 Bomber, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin, and Utopia, which was a bit ahead of its time as a sim game.)

Looking back, I view Intellivision's Night Stalker as forerunner of the gaming genre that would eventually be called Survival Horror. That term came into popular usage around 1996 with Resident Evil, and, generally speaking, it describes games in which the player has limited resources and other obstacles to overcome while facing overwhelming supernatural enemies. The website Retro Refurbs agreed in this 2021 post that Night Stalker fits the bill as early survival horror.

I haven't played a ton of survival horror over the years, because I'm fairly mediocre at videogaming. But some that I've played are Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Resident Evil – Code: Veronica and Realms of the Haunting (a PC game). I dabbled with Silent Hill and Dino Crisis, but didn't get very far. I think Infocom's The Lurking Horror also counts, even though it's a text-based game. The Lovecraftian writing by Dave Lebling is terrifying at times. The most recent survival horror I've played, probably, was a Slender Man game on my iPhone. That creepypasta creep is too creepy for me.

Anyway, Night Stalker is a great game that's still deeply embedded in my memory. All you can do is try to survive to until the next level. There is no winning. It's just mounting panic and stress until your lives run out and you die. Fun times! The gist is that you're stuck in a maze with bats, spiders and an endlessly spawning battalion of killer robots that are increasingly deadly. Your ammo is limited and it's a constant scramble to acquire more. So, half the time you're totally defenseless, unless you choose to hide in your centrally located bunker, a strategy that merely delays the inevitable. The killer robots start out stupid and escalate to Terminator level, even gaining the ability to destroy your only sanctuary. The most advanced killer robot is invisible. Death is inevitable, and there is no catharsis beyond shutting off the gaming console and going outside for some fresh air. Maybe I'm taking the analogy too far, but it was perhaps a fitting game for the 1980s, in which we lived with the constant fear of nuclear armageddon.

Retro Refurbs wrote: "There’s no way to win. But in many ways, this means that it is survival horror in the purest sense: the entire point of the game is simply to survive for as long as you can. And that’s it."

Night Stalker's sound effects are limited mostly to bullets being fired and explosions. But behind them on the soundtrack, there's an unwavering electronic pulse that fits perfectly with the game's existential dread. As one YouTube commenter noted: "I remember the sheer terror and excitement of this game. That deep, twanging bass noise in the background haunts me to this day."

As a final note, I wonder now if the title of this 1982 game is a tip of the hat to the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, which featured the debut of Carl Kolchak, the journalist who investigates supernatural phenomena. Killer robots would have been right up his alley, though he would have found a way to actually defeat them.

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