10 Horror Franchises That Should Be Turned Into Video Games

Directed by Steven Spielberg, and staring Roy Scheider, Jaws is an undeniable classic, and has proven remarkably influential since its release back in 1975. Essentially, the film’s about an enormous great-white shark, which has been terrorising the residents of Amity Island, a fictional New England coastal town located somewhere in the United States.

To this day, the film is still one of the highest grossing movies ever made, and is often considered the defining precursor to the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster.

The Game: In the past, Jaws: Unleashed made the mistake of allowing players to control the shark, which contradicts the whole point of the original film. I mean, the shark itself is just a random force of nature, an animal wreaking havoc for no singular purpose. It has no goal besides feeding itself, and you can’t exactly develop a meaningful experience around that.

Instead, Jaws should be about human characters, working together in order to overcome a singular, unrelenting threat. Like in the films, the shark shouldn’t appear right away; it should be teased, kept in the distance for the first few hours of the game, obscured below the water, an ambiguous shadow of indistinct proportions lurking somewhere beneath the player.

If you’re struggling to picture what that might look like, try searching the following term: thalassophobia. It’s essentially the fear of large things underneath the ocean. It’s a very particular phobia, but any game designed around such a concept would scare the pants off me, and probably a lot of others.