6 Reasons Why Horror Is Gaming's Most Important Genre

Horror in video games continues the legacy of board gaming narratives and themes, as fantasy, sci-fi, and horror found themselves the predominant genres of choice for board game and subsequently video game treatment.

If there's a cultural historian reading and in need of a new project, tracing the development of science fiction, fantasy, and horror from pulp trade magazine through board games and into video games would make for a fascinating read.

Particularly in its early days, an awful lot was borrowed from board games by their electronic counterparts, perfectly understandable considering how tabletop games already had complex systems developed that could be largely imported to electronic projects.

Aside from the systems, however, the narratives and genres of the tabletop world also gained a foothold in the imaginations of developers, with these speculative genres (horror amongst them) naturally transitioning into the new medium.

Titles like Call of Cthulhu (based on Lovecraft's work and released in 1981) and Dungeons & Dragons were major influences on early narrative games, with the former being directly translated into gaming with titles like Shadow of the Comet (1993) and Prisoner of Ice (1995).