Well lads, I'm just gonna pin this at the top here for any newcomers to the channel. This is a very dated video, at the time I was so inundated with college and work that I didn't put a huge amount of research into the video. It's full of really silly mistakes on my part, like saying the PS1 was a 16 bit console despite the fact my script clearly said 32 bit. It's a video I hope to revisit because as it stands, it's a mess. That being said I'm glad it's brought a whole heap of people my way and I do appreciate all the comments critiquing and praising it. You're all legends :)

To me, it's no different than the film grain and low quality of movies in the 70s. The poor tech actually enhanced the horror by giving films a dreamlike quality.

The opening sequence of the PS1 needs to go down in history as the greatest console intro. I'm 51 now and it still sends a pleasurable shiver down my spine.

I always tell people that old games with bad graphics are way more immersive than any new game with ultra realistic graphics and 4k resolution.

that akamano gameplay almost gave me a heart attack

That chase sequence is honestly more terrifying than anything in Outlast.

The PS1 opening screen itself even scared the shit out of me as a kid...it was wonderful

Reminds me that the brain percieves things it cant recognize as a threat. So seeing these shapes might subconsciously tell us somethings wrong even though we know its just crappy graphics

I feel like the graphics and low poly aesthetic Leaves you to interpret things with your imagination. The human mind can create some horrible things no other person could possibly imagine Basically you create your own horror in your head. That's why low poly game that were not meant to be scary can be unnerving. Low textures and low poly lets your mind fill in the gaps.

Silent Hill didn't just use fog. It used the flashlight for the same purpose. Instead of fog it was the darkness itself. At the time that flashlight effect was really impressive. Few games ever used light you could just control and paint onto the dark around you.

I think a fairly important and overlooked aspect is the low resolution, having low poly graphics but at 1440p just doesn't hit the same

The PS1 era was the perfect blend of graphics, sound and creativity! Before then we had high creativity, but that creativity was stifled by the limitations of the 2D consoles. Nowadays, we have the best graphics and sound imaginable, but creativity has waned. Games today- you are just watching them… but in the PS1 era- you were fully immersed.

The PS1 felt like it was just ment for horror games, just like how VHS for horror was.

For me a combination of the uncanny valley graphics and the black voids. Even something meant to be cute and fun like Crash Bandicoot gave me the creeps at some levels.

The jagged, jerkiness of the graphics added to it for sure for me. I wanted to play SH1 and Resident Evil, but they really were scary simply for the fact that you actively had to figure out what it was exactly that was attacking you, lol. Hated it especially when they REALLY added details, too. You just couldn’t win either way, and that made it terrifying. Wonderful video! Keep up the good work 🥰

PS 1 has some of the weirdest sounds. We used smoke a bit and in early 2000s played all types of games in a commune in London...you know...as you do.... While playing Brian Lara cricket, it struck me how strange the crowd ambient noises were and the weird murmurs started sounding freakishly like some sort of demonic dungeon shit happening in the background after a few days.

I'll never forget my first time in Silent Hill walking down a school hallway and hearing the radio static go off, alerting me of a hostile presence. The hallway was pitch black but I could hear the sound of a muffled child's cries. As I turned on my flashlight, I was greeted by decayed, rotting hands reaching toward me as I realized this school was full of demonic children. The play of sight, sound and fear of the unknown was incredible and still holds up today.

7:01 Had me in instant panic mode as im at the office and it got very loud for all to hear. Jesus christ did that ever scare the piss out of me and embarrass me all at once.

7:05 The way it has you running into a locked gate is fucking perfect. Imagine having to fumble with a key while this thing is bolting down the hall

Twitching polygons, scanlines and warping textures have a lot to do with it plus the scratchy visuals also the fact of CRTs themselves give off a certain feel and flavour as well. All contribute to that unsettling feeling even when playing Tenchu lol

Puppet Combo’s Murder House is what made me fall in love with this aesthetic! They perfectly nailed the PS1 style, both visually and audibly.

I'm not going to lie, I was scared to death of the original Tomb Raider. I laugh about it today but something about it at the time was so strange, especially underwater areas. I felt the same with Ocarina of Time and Mario 64. THAT FREAKING EEL!!!

These kinds of graphics often makes it seem, at least subconsciously, like your surroundings are alive in some half-broken metaphysical way as they warp and shift in that sharp, blocky fashion, hinting at something endless and vast even within their tight limitations

Many old horrifying games feature pitch-black darkness. Lots of games today, horror or not, are too bright.

Nobody ever knows what I'm talking about when I say this. It seems old 90s pc games and ps1 games just had a darker dirtier atmosphere. Games that come to mind are sanitarium, twisted metal black, diablo, thrill kill, nightmare creatures, even bully on ps2 had a darker feel than gta. They just all have a dark gritty nihilistic view.

Actually, with the PlayStation’s sound chip, audio comes through not really all that compressed or bit-crushed. It does have a unique charm of kinda rolling off the lows and highs and focusing on the mids with its audio. It also has an even-harmonic distortion that gives its audio its charm. I think overall it is unsettling still because rather sounding weak its more just punchy and crisp and that can do a lot for horror games too.

It's like abstract art. It communicates a feeling/atmosphere more than presenting a scene

the game 'Nightmare Creatures' will always be my biggest fear playing as a kid

I absolutely love this style of horror. It's at its absolute best when mixed with cosmic horror because the PS1 "tampered with" vibes adds a LOT to the cosmic horror's. Coming back later, whoa this video exploded. Swear it had only a hundred or so comments.

Sorry to be that guy but what you were referring to as "field of view" is actually draw distance. Not that the field of view wouldn't add to this feel too, a low FoV would mean that we are always tunnel-visioned and can't see too much around us because it's like if we were constantly zooming in, giving a claustrophobic feeling that complements the very limited draw distance in making us feel like there could always be a threat around the corner, it would be literally standing next to us but because of our lack of peripheral vision we wouldn't see it, or it could be a few mere meters in front of us, but we're not going to see it until it's right up our face. I don't know if PS1 games had a low FoV though, but some old games were terrible in that sense, for example the original Halo kinda makes me sick if I try to play it nowadays because of the ridiculously low FoV.

The symmetry used on wall textures in games of that era would often create demonic or distorted looking faces which I always figured had a subliminal effect on people who didn't tend to notice them. When you turned colour down on TV so it was black and white they would often pop out more visibly. The subconscious I gather would pick up on this and stimulate areas of the brain that deals with potential threats.

"The face clearly looks like it's been tampered with" that's gonna stay with me for some time

Silent Hill was my all time favorite horror. The music in that was never steady or even. It never gave your mind anything to get comfortable or familiar with. I remember walking around the school and there was that little grey or black ghost child and it never bothered you so you learn to ignore it. Then BAMB the next time you walk through it sure as heck goes to attack you. Nothing was safe lol. Great game. GREAT game.

Even the Sony Computer Entertainment screen's sound scared me as a kid. These games look really cool, but Jesus that Aka Manto part scared the shit out of me. Great video, keep up the good work!

Long time ago, remember playing Silent Hill 1 at night at my cousin's house, the intro freaked me out so much I couldn't sleep all night. The scariest thing for me were the graphics. The rough "ugly" and gritty PS1 graphics definitely enhanced the horror.

I was born in 1998 and I remember playing games on PS1 and them scaring me as a child. Just starting the system up with those PlayStation sounds would sometimes freak me out lol. I played Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Medal of Honor Underground and numerous others my dad and brother had. PS1 and PS2 are the best systems ever made

Also the midi music on PS1 can make the experience pretty unnerving since the instruments sound to be not of this world. Take One Winged Angel. Later reorchestrations show Sephiroth's splendor and fearsome power, but the original PS1 version always sounded more unnerving to me. You can usually tell what the instruments are supposed to be, but they always sound off, fake, and like they cannot exist. Combine that with Safer Sephiroth's indistinguishable polygonal lump of a body, and that's a recipe for unsettling.

I agree that there's something deeply unnerving about the sound design in PS1 games. The limited technology can only imperfectly mimic real world sounds. The environment is almost always deathly quiet save for some nearby objects. There's no echoes or sound reverb, giving you an almost claustrophobic impression that you are in a very small limited space, like you're trapped in a small wooden box. Meanwhile all you can see before you is a vast endless blackness. The disconnect between seeing the environment stretch into eternity, and sounds that indicate you're in a small enclosed space give PS1 games an unsettling quality. It's very close to capturing the feeling of being in a dream/nightmare state where normal everyday logic does not apply.

Great video! Also some nice choices of RE1&2 tracks for the background. 1:25 Resident Evil 2 OST - The Marshalling Yard (The Latter Half) 4:15 Resident Evil 1 OST - The Underground 11:53 Resident Evil 1 OST - Save Room

Outstanding transitions & use of sound. I was wimp to play horror games (by myself) but I was always mesmerized watching others play them. This reminds me that Super Mario 64 also has an eerie, lonely aura to it even though it’s not a horror game. I guess many games from that era that were some of the first 3D games - whether they were on the N64 or PS1 - inadvertently give off a haunting vibe

The lack of a hardware integrated z-buffer and lack of FPUs (Floating-point units) were very much responsible for the warping of textures and irregular movements of visual elements. The z-buffer is highly essential for computing perspective perfectly since the z-axis represents depth. With it's lack of hardware integration PS1 game devs had to resort to software emulation of the z-buffer or just employ a hacky way of substituting it, this resulted in warped textures and disappearing polygons. The lack of FPUs also explains why PS1 pixels and character models seem so twitchy. FPUs can handle sub-pixel movement and animation, effectively smoothing the motion displayed. Without FPUs the game will stick only to hard integers making it look like things just snap in place instantly; combine that with a 240p resolution you get character animations which look like they're having some sort of head twitching scene in some horror movie.

Ah yes, the PS1's impeccable 16 bit graphics.

Even non horror games were scary to play back then at times. Dracula, Alien: Resurrection, Hexen, Resident Evil and even Doom was scary as a kid.

Imperfections make things scarier. It allows your mind to really just piece together the absolute worst. It's like when a serial killer has bad handwriting, it gives you such a feeling of discomfort, like you have no idea what they're capable of, but you can't imagine it ever being good.

The example you used with the screaming creature (I don't know anything about the game, so please excuse my ignorance) scared the crap out of me. I was looking through my email in a different tab when it happened.

7:01 ... I CAN'T be the only one bobbing my head to that brief banger.

I think part of what makes the sound design of the PS1 (and the time in general) so eerie, is that it lands in the sweet spot between completely artificial sounds, like the '80s had, and the more modern and realistic sound that won out in the late '00s. This mix between the two that we had in the '90s had proper uncanny valley vibes - it was just familiar enough for us to recognize it in a deeper level, yet it was also alien enough for us to feel estranged to it.

00:58 is just pure nostalgia fuel OMG

I've had many trippy dreams based off this retro horror asthetic, they were some of my best dreams. Such as one where I was in a dark resident evil game and had to hunker down in an old dark wooden phone booth for some sanctuary from the madness.

Perfect example of limitation breeds innovation.

Metal gear solid 1 scared the crap out of me when is was little. That shit felt so real and important

That low poly jittering in your face was the most realistic thing you could play with back in the mid 90's... No one thought of it as unnerving, it was absolutely fantastic...

It feels like you are mixing up field of view and draw distance. I'm not exactly an expert myself but the higher the field of view the more the camera can show in a single frame. For instance, the wide angle camera on your phone has a higher field of view compared to the main lens. If the FoV is too high you get the so called fisheye effect. If it's really low it can make a game feel claustrophobic and reduce spatial awareness. Dead Space for instance has a pretty low FoV by default. Silent Hill on the other hand has low draw distance, which means that objects are only rendered within a few feet of the player. It was pretty common back in the day to add a fog effect in order to mask this limitation.

This is a cool video with some really knowledgeable insights behind the ps1 graphics & style. I love low poly horror games & its clear to see why they can be so intimidating and unnerving, the scene being chased through the corridors in aka manto made me jump and brought it all back to see why ps1 horror games really are scary even to this day. Great Video.

7:30 I'm watching this in broad daylight in my backyard and that segment still scared the shit outta me

I think like VHS graphics, it's the Nostalgia mixed with fear. When you add Nostalgia it brings you back to feeling like a little kid watching your older brother playing RE 1 or Alone in the Dark late at night when you should be in bed.

Just throwing my 2 pence in. I have an older brother that I didn't get on well with and he lived with my grandmother. When I visited and he wasn't home I would sneak into his room as he had a lot of cool stuff I didn't. Anyway, I remember when he got a PS and that loud droning opening noise that's become so iconic made it feel even more like I was toying with something even more forbidden than being in my brother's room already was. Still sends shivers down me years later. I wonder now if others felt the same because the sinister opening gives rise to the graphics and more adult-centric games being spooky to us more used to the kid-friendly Sega/Nintendo era.

In my opinion older consoles pull off the uncanny valley effect to great, uhh, effect. Seriously, even the title screens of some games would be pulled for being too creepy if they were released nowadays. There's a strange feeling you don't get these days, of being home alone and booting up the console, already tense because the console could decide to not load your game and instead send you to a strange debug menu. But in the event your game loaded you'd be greeted by a still image with no sound, a black background, lifeless looking character staring right into your soul... And somehow developers thought that such imagery wouldn't creep people out? Idk but shit like that is unnerving. Some argue that less is more in horror, because as they say nothing's scarier than what your mind can come up with to try and fill in the blanks when faced with something that's all flavours of wrong.

I think a huge reason why the graphic limitations are so unnerving is that the low FOV, low draw distance, and fuzzy sound combined with clunky controls (like the tank kind used in Resident Evil) makes you feel trapped. And it’s that feeling of trapped inside of something that you can’t get out of that really makes the fear sink in deep.

I've been stressed with life lately, and this video about old horror games made me think about those long and simple days gone. Thanks, and have a sub.

Found this on a whim, thoroughly enjoyed it!

I love how PS1 has a "grainy filter" on its graphics. It makes some games looks very detail and colorful, better than N64 and even Dreamcast IMO.

Dude, even aspects in kids' PS1 games creeped me out as a kid, but the games shown take it to a whole new extreme. I had never even heard of these titles before watching this video, so thanks for that! I'm definitely a fan of low poly horror aesthetics! Not only because of the reasons you mentioned, but also because there seems to be this other sort of feeling that I can only describe as "nostalgic eeriness."

Resident Evil 1 & 2 had me and my brother scared 😂 we had no memory card so we pretended to turn off the PS and left it on all night. Every step we took was calculating and all the puzzles in the game actually made us look up the dictionary to learn the words to solve the puzzle and then we had to use our herbs and ammo rationally.. it really was survival and trying to think smart because we didn’t wanna die and start again. We where 11 and 12 years old and later on we ended up getting a memory card and we clocked the game

“Fog of War” was something that was always creepy to me, it wasn’t just exclusive to PS1 either. Also with games like the Resident Evil 1-3 and Silent Hill etc. the low graphic fidelity helped make the world seem more “gritty” and “dirty” if that makes any sense. I mean just look at RE2 and then RE Code Veronica , CV looks clean and sterile compared to RE2.

7:00 bro I was just listening to this at 1am while vibing and playing games, the audio and room goes quiet then this shit happens

AMAZING doc bro! Yeah, the low poly graphics make everything unworldly, sometimes your graphics can be too good. Respect for showing some unknown games, not the obvious masterpiece that is silent hill

PS1-inspired horror is, in my opinion, one of the best styles of horror specifically because of how unreal it feels. ray-traced 4k horror *can* be scary, but it's so much more unsettling to be chased by a low poly creature hidden in the shadows, surrounded on all sides by darkness and walls that warp around you. the fear of the unknown is a hell of a thing. (on an unrelated note, is that personified fear i keep hearing?)

Really really really good video on so many levels. I was already going to sub, but I’m definitely subbing after seeing Wallace as your profile pic lol

i'm so glad that you mentioned aka manto. that game scared the hell out of me and i'm glad to see other people also talk about it as well. modern horror games are great, but the psx-styled horror games and especially low-quality ones make it so much better

The warping, for me, makes the worlds look *less* designed somehow. More dreamlike. Almost Lynchian. Which, with the limited draw distance, to black usually, feels like so much is hidden in plain sight, and anything could emerge. A bit like the night cycle of Dragons Dogma. You never know what's just a few feet ahead. In dreams too, you can step into a room, or around a corner, and be somewhere totally unexpected. Modern games are more like waking. PS1 games, more like nightmares. In a good way ☺️

I absolutely loved your analysis in this video. I never really thought about it before but it all makes sense. Would love to see more videos like this!

Excellent video. Had this shown up on my feed out of the blue. Definitely subscribing. That jump scare during the demo of Aka Manto though nearly gave me a damn heart attack. That's what I get for watching this at nearly five in the morning though. XD

This is why the Bloodbourne demake worked so perfectly. The low poly sound compression just perfectly captured the sound of pain most of the enemies give off, especially the Cleric Beast and Gilbert. Besides , I also love how crunchy and satisfying each blows sound which makes it more violent than it really is.

That cursed school bit where the monster began chasing you was terrifying. Crazy how easily you can make survival horror games work with such limited technical capacity.

I remember being unsettled by the trees that would always face me on one of the rally games. And that horrid face hugger attack on alien. All those pixels somehow went right through me. Same with point blank!

Bro I used to be TERRIFIED of Rainbow Six Lone Wolf as a kid. I would jump out of my chair and climb under my desk and scream for my mom. She eventually took the game away from me and I didn’t get it back for like 5 years until I was like 12 lol

I think it also has to do something with the uncanny valley,I mean just looking at something that isnt possible in reality like polygon structures,models are really just creepy.It isn't normal nowdays like the rest of the games now that are getting the rtx boosts,we've seen the body structure of a human being quite alot now and even in monster concept that it just because cliche and boring to our minds. rise up retro gamers :/\

Great video! Another aspect worth mentioning is how limited the control scheme was. I know game developers did as much as they could with the technology they had back then, but ps1 horror games have this almost minimalistic approach when it comes to control; there was not much you could do, your options were always limited and when you were to face danger you had almost no time to react. Again, I don't think that was on purpose, but it sure helps selling the feeling of defenseless that make this games so memorable and terrifying.

The PS1 always unsettled me as a kid. Even the more innocent and kid friendly games seemed almost threatening in a way, like I was playing a cursed system and their was always something lurking in the dark parts of games..

I think part of it is that the 32 bit graphics remind a lot of people of their childhood and so false nostalgia starts taking over giving you an eerie feeling that you seen this before but can’t remember in it so the mind struggles to figure out why you remember it. This actually happened to me while playing Super Metroid despite which helped give the game more of a unnerving atmosphere

fantastic video here my man! I've been playing a lot of survival horror games lately and anything I can find for the PS1 is an easy go-to; I just love this aesthetic so much. I seriously hope you grow! You seriously deserve it!

I have just found you through this video, and you’re articulated what I’ve never been able to! Amazing work, and you’ve earned a new subscriber.

I don't think they're unnerving as such, but some of the games used those limited graphics to eerie effect. I'm talking things like Silent Hill's low draw distance being exploited to create an unsettling fog. Mostly, PS1 graphics just looked like ass. A few games, like FFVIII and FFIX, did something beautiful and atmospheric with those limitations.

The fetus monster sequence from Resident Evil 8 brought that old school dark environment style back

What I like about the Playstation's aesthestics was... a lot of the Lightings are actually artificial instead of the light reflecting against the lightsource. They make it more unnerving and unreal, like that's now how you perceive light.

Using Personified Fear as the transition sound effect scared me more than anything in my life

About 16-bit sound. CD has 16-bit 44.1kHz sound, so bits don't make PS1 sound janky. PS1 also supported 44.KHz sound, so in theory it could do high quality audio. However since audio chip has 512 KB memory there is not lots of room to hold high quality audio. So, developers most likely decided to drop down both sample rates and bit depth, so you are almost never hearing 16-bit sounds in PS1 games.

Aka Manto looks interesting. But after looking at some images my reaction was: "nope". Not a huge fan of those types of horror games, but I'm definitely intrugued. The YT algorithm recommended me a gem of a video. 👍 The blue and red toilet paper made me thibk of Ghost stories of all things. 😂 Blue or red? Yellow! (charmander or something)

I grew up playing PS1 and have owned every generation of PlayStation & Xbox, I have also played a lot of PC games. Something I did notice is that I always found older horror games scarier, especially PS1 horror games & I definitely think the graphics is the reason why. You would think a more realistic game would be scarier but for me it's the opposite, you perfectly explained something I have thought for over 10 years now.

Holy crud, that screaming monster chase scene in the school was nightmarish, I shouldn't have had that playing in the background...

I appreciate the incredible amount of work and time you put into this. I just now discovered it. I bought an N64 and loved it for what it was, Goldeneye, Zelda, etc. But I also absolutely LOVED the PS1 and eventually bought it BECAUSE of it's powerful horror games. It was like watching R rated movies as a kid. My friend scared the hell out of me when he turned off his basement lights and showed me Resident Evil 1 the first time...Then Silent Hill....I bought the PS One version of the console and then the PS2 which was also equally unnerving. It's hard to describe the feeling, it's just, so mature and visceral. Thanks for the video!

of course you can convince us a game is scary by slipping in one of its jumpscares lolol 7:01

I love akamanto game. Have to point out technical mistakes you made, PS1 is 32 bit system, and it's spu is great actually (first series of ps1 use to be very popular among audiophiles) Texture warping is not limitation of the time, it ps1 hardware limitation. (you could make 3d games at the time without any warping just not ps1) Instead of FOV you probably meant to say rendering distance. That's it. Great video. It's not a history video wraped in an interesting topic.

LSD: Dream Emulator is for sure one of the most unnerving PS1 titles

There’s a specific technical reason that the PS1 had warped geometry: the hardware was incapable of perspective-correct texture mapping. This was specific to the PS1, other machines like the N64 could do this. It was just one of many limitations that the developers had to deal with, but as mentioned it has become a signature/hallmark of PS1 era graphics. It also lacked the type of anti-aliasing the n64 could do, giving it shaper but more jagged polygons. Field of view is also a side-effect of the memory bandwidth of the hardware, games with a large FOV could be rendered, but there would be very little memory left for other assets to load. The uncanny valley is hard at work on PS1 horror games, that’s what gives them it’s creepiness.

As a young kid I used to find my first ps1 experiences so enchanting and engendering a sense of curiosity in me. I found the worlds so huge compared to the super nintendo. Despite the limited viewing of what could be generated, all the games felt so fully realized and always had me wondering what was going on in the background. It's weird, when I play newer games I don't feel that at all. Though when I play old ps1 games now I still sort of do for some reason.

Uhm, correct me if I'm wrong, but Field Of View is how far to the Sides(your periphery, if you will)you can see, not how far Ahead - that's Draw Distance you're talking about, no?

My main issue...is how the PS1 did not have texture warping that bad. It tended to do more of a zig zag kind of thing as opposed to being massively stretched to infinity.

5:30 Yes! I love you! this is the first time I have EVER heard anyone use the Abe's Oddysey music in a youtube doc. It's so perfect for doc music as well