20 Scariest Video Games Of All-Time

19. Half-Life

Half-Life pioneered a lot of what we have come to know about the "first-person shooter" - so much so, that people tend to forget about how scary it was to actually play through. The key to a good horror game, after all, lies within the atmosphere - and the tone rendered by Valve in the original Half-Life was notably uncomfortable, as physicist Gordon Freeman finds himself trapped deep beneath the ground in an underground laboratory fighting off alien forces who have escaped to Earth through an inter-dimensional rift.

At first, Gordon is armed only with a crowbar (his trademark weapon, of course), as he attempts to escape to the surface. The fact that the A.I. in Half-Life was so good meant that the other characters felt like real companions - watching most of them succumbing to horrible deaths was downright terrifying, as was being chased down by zombies, avoiding lasers beams and hearing the sound of a head-crab lingering in a vent shaft somewhere.

The situation, coupled with the lone hero aspect of Half-Life, made it very, very eerie.