| HAUNTED HOUSE |
 
Haunted House is a game programmed by James Andreasen and released for the Atari 2600 VCS in 1982. It's sort of a "Survival Horror" Adventure game of sorts, where you play as some guy represented by a pair of eyes - whose pupils eerily move in the direction you are walking, while Urbexing what I assume to be an old mansion for treasures and objects. While you're in there, you must be weary of tarantulas, ghosts, and bats that like to show up and make your time there an eery living heck. It was one of those titles where you kinda-needed the manual (like Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark) to figure out what the heck was going on.
It holds the distinction of being one of the first 2600 games, or games in general, to provide scrolling over a wide area, and it sort of has vibes similar to "Adventure" with a taste of some "Five Nights at Freddys-like" "peaceful frenetic-ness", something only Atari can provide it seems. This game sold rather well but it's another one of those you don't hear mentioned all that often compared to the bigger games in the genre.Atari Collecting Discoveries part, uh.....My Experiences I became aware of Haunted House when I started collecting in the mid 1990's. The screenshot looked like something from Adventure, and while I had messed with it some in Emulators, there's a part of the whole thing I found a bit, uh, boring at first. So I figured, I'd just land the game when some box of Atari crap comes my way and I buy it all up. Actually, that's how we discovered games in the big bad old days before or at the beginning of the "internet". Basically, you'd go to a thrift shop or flea market, and then you'd buy some big box of old video game stuff for like, $15, and then take it home, and discover at least a handful of games were ones you'd never seen, heard of, or played before. This I think I picked up in a pile of cartridges at an Everett Goodwill, not really sure. It may have been post-internet, but I still force myself to keep that wonderous methodology of discovery. Haunted house surprised me, it's like a cousin to Adventure, and we know how much I love that one. So overall, it's a fun one to play. I also did a video fo it for my YouTube channel. Eventaully we'll do a serious playthrough on there once I figure out how to connect my ATari to my Computer without carrying out a composite mod.Videos
Let's Play Haunted House (actual hardware, 2024)
Let's Play Haunted House (actual hardware, 2022) Walkthroughs/Manuals/Reviews |
