Readers trade 3DS friend codes and envision a privacy-invading update to Eternal Darkness
This…Isn’t…Really…Happening!
This week, Calum Marsh wrote about the totally meta “Sanity Effects” gimmick in Eternal Darkness, a horror game on the Nintendo GameCube. Calum was interested in the similarities between the technique employed there and those of B-movie auteur William Castle. needlehacksaw recalled attending a great Castle retrospective and offered some thoughts on the subject:
I’m lucky enough to be able to annually attend what most surely must be one of the loveliest film festivals on the planet, the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF for short). Among the many virtues of this festival are its retrospectives: I was got to see projections of proto 3D-classics like It Came From Outer Space and Revenge Of The Shogun Women there. (Being attacked by a flying murder braid never felt so real!) One year, they went all out with a William Castle retrospective, including rubber props, strategically placed actors, and fake screams that all helped transcend the boundary between audience and screen.
It’s actually kind of funny. I pretty much abhor being forced to watch blockbusters that were not even shot in 3D in bad projections for ridiculous prices. And I genuinely am saddened by the thought that movie theaters seriously think about having to add even more gimmicks (4D!) to survive. (After all, Castle did his “enhanced experience” to lure people who would have gone to the movie theater anyway. Struggling to lure people into the theater to begin with is a rather more desperate affair.) But in the atmosphere of the festival, I laughed and screamed along with everybody else when the existential horror of a rubber Tingler was being thrown at me. The important thing, of course, is that everybody was in on the joke. It was a kind of second-order laughter, a campy pleasure.
To be honest, I wonder if it was ever anything else. People sometimes think that moviegoers were more naive “back in the day,” that they really were afraid of the train on the screen or genuinely shocked by Castle’s ploys. If I remember correctly, though, there are scholars arguing that it was always more a case of suspension of disbelief and playing along rather than sheer ignorance.
What does this say about games? For one, it probably says that patenting the Sanity Meter was a strange move, because as a gimmick, its effect is destined to fall under the law of diminishing returns. Once it becomes a regular thing, its utility has run its course. Secondly, I wonder how many of the stories about people switching off their consoles in confusion and anger are actually part of a “meta-game” Eternal Darkness willfully sets up. (Gimmicks are always fabricated to be a talking point, after all.) So it would not so much be that players were actually tricked by the game, but more that they fell in love with a game courageous enough to play such a trick (and maybe the idea that other people are dumber than them, dumb enough to fall for it). It obviously worked: Eternal Darkness has very much become a cult game, well-known to people who have never actually experienced the Sanity Meter, much less fallen for its illusions. Then again, I can’t bring myself to see a cynical move in all that. After all, becoming a sort of urban legend is all too fitting a destiny for a horror game.
And before we get away from it, I want to share this promotional poster for The Tingler, because it’s fantastic. Do you have the guts to sit in THIS CHAIR?
Elsewhere, thesmokeylife wrote about another odd intersection between Eternal Darkness and film:
More Eternal Darkness trivia: To promote the game, Nintendo held a contest for ideas for short films that were grounded in the psychological horror theme of Eternal Darkness but didn’t feature any of the characters. The ten finalists were each given $2,000 to make their short films. The creator of the winning film received a grand prize of $20,000.
The contest winner, Patrick Daughters, later went on to direct the music video for “1234” by Feist, as well as clips for Grizzly Bear, Muse, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.