Brace yourself, bats and ghouls! For the next four Saturdays, “Growing Up 2600″ shall shamble along as “Scaring Up 2600,” in which we shall take a look at the more macabre entries in the Atari VCS library of titles.

First up is Haunted House, a 1981 action-adventure published by Atari and a game considered to be one of the first examples of the “survival horror” genre…though “horror” is perhaps too strong a word in this case. I acquired my copy of the game on the Christmas morning of 1982…or rather my brother acquired it, which amounted to the same thing barring the perdiodic dust-up between the Weiss siblings resulting in “You can’t read my X-Men comics/Then you can’t play with my Star Wars figures/Well, both of you better shut up before I break out the belt” scenarios.

The premise of the game (outlined in the manual, as was the prevailing custom in the pre-cutscene era) is that the player has been tasked with braving the haunted mansion of Zachary Graves in order to retrieve the three parts of an antique urn. (Old school Atari fans might notice a similarity between that objective and the vase-related goal of Adventure. I can only assume that Atari wanted to spotlight the company’s next-gen proprietary container-rendering engine.)

Though the mansion’s floorplan follows a consistent two-by-three room layout on all four floors, the player’s exploration of the house is complicated by locked doors and a stock cast of appropriately creepy inhabitants — bats, spiders, and the rather diminutive ghost of Graves himself — that can not be battled nor dispatched, only avoided.

Such obstacles can be overcome by obtaining a “master key” or “scepter of invisibility,” respectively, but the items must first be located and the player is limited to carrying only one item — including the jumped-up soup tureen that is the objective of the quest — at a time. In addition, items (and, at higher difficulty levels, the floorplan of the mansion itself) can only be located via limited circle of illumination provided by the player’s infinite stock of matches.

Despite (or perhaps “because of”) the game’s simplistic graphics and gameplay, Haunted House has aged better that most of its more ambitious peers. Enough, in fact, that the usual cursory refresher play-through I do in preparation for these posts became a prolonged session capable of distracting me from the high-res sophistication of my weekend Xbox 360 gaming binge.

If there’s one thing my journeys in retrogaming have taught me, it’s that the datedness of a given title tends to be directly proportional to the programmers’ ambitions to supersede the limitations of the hardware. Titles from the mid-eighties tend to be the worst in that regard (though there are plenty of examples to be found in any period of gaming history), where efforts to bridge the gap between a designer’s vision and existing technology only serve to illustrate in hindsight the failures of such attempts. (Seriously, try and play Final Fantasy VII today without benefit of Aeris-lust or fanboy nostalgia, I dare you.)

That’s why I’m always pleasantly surprised to discover or revisit a game that doesn’t overreach for purposes of transitory hype, and instead efficiently makes do with the materials at hand. One of the things I particularly appreciate about Haunted House is how the programmers decided to incorporate the technical limitations of the VCS hardware into the overall aesthetic of the game — the reduction of the players avatar to a pair of eyes against a black background and the system’s notorious flicker effect put to use for the nimbus of matchlight and the periodic flashes of “lightning” that occur while exploring the mansion.

They’re concessions (or at least unspoken acknowledgements), but ones that ultimately benefited the game.

Recommended listening: Jumpin’ Gene Simmons – Haunted House (from a 1964 single; collected on Haunted House: The Complete Jumpin’ Gene Simmons on Hi Records, 2001)

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Pure, uncut Tupelo rockabilly. Accept no name-copping, bloated, over the hill, shamelessly mercenary substitutes.

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  3. Halloween Countdown: October 10 – Go back and pretend