What is your scariest video game experience?

The moment in Metroid Fusion when Samus’s clone appears and turns toward the player

It was blood-curdling to 12-year-old me. The sudden loud music and the face of the clone really did it to me.

Earliest one was this really simple game from the 80s where I was a cat, and I don’t remember the aim of the game, but you’re in an alley doing something, and every so often a dog would show up and chase you, and that scared the hell out of me.

The Ocean House Hotel in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines gave me the chills when I first played it.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent was unnerving, and then got scary when I reached the bit with the invisible monster.

@Kropotkin is this the cat game you are talking about?

@Mimishu1995 LOL YES.

I’ve played thousands of video games, mostly not exactly scary… I’m trying to think what might’ve been the scariest…

Certainly the one that claims the prize for “most joysticks broken [in violent defensive maneuvers]” would go to Encounter on the Atari 8-bit computers. There these missile/drones/kamikazes that start at a distance and home in on you, getting faster and faster as they get close, making a humming sound whose pitch increases the closer they get to you, and the higher-level ones dodge and try to sneak around behind you to avoid you turning to shoot them, which is the only way to avoid them getting to you… and the only effective way to do that is to move quickly backwards while turning, but the landscape is full of obstacles, and you can’t see backwards as you reverse! ( example )

It also has parts where you need to fly through an asteroid field way too quickly, which gets quite scary too, though maybe even more “stressful” than scary.

Scariest video game I played was a table top version of Pong that had a crack in the screen. My opponent spilled his beer and it leaked into the screen and shorted it out.

Thought I might be electrocuted.

@zenvelo hmmm… I have a good story too.

My friend from grade 4 said that I could play his nes during lunch hours while he was away. I took him up on the offer and walked into his apartment and started up the nes’s Mike Tyson Super Punch Out . I did not notice his father watching tv at the same time. He put a Bowie knife to my throat. I apologized and put his lunchtime tv back on. I did not return ever.

@RedDeerGuy1 God that’s horrible! Even screaming at you would have been less horrible.

This isn’t a scary gaming experience, this is a scary real life experience.

@Kropotkin I played that game a long time ago when I was young. I didn’t know the objective either. I didn’t have any recollection about the dog.

And now that I just watched the video, I finally remembered it. And the hairless dog that appears after you are attacked is… really creepy. And I’m saying this as an adult looking back at a childhood game.

The flying bats in ColecoVision’s Smurf: Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle (1982)

I think Doom is scary AF. I used to play it as a kid in the mid-90s.