This Week In Retro: Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (Patreon)

June 23. 2002: Ain't no party like a PARGON party 'cause a PARGON party don't stop!

by Diamond Feit

Readers in their early 30s might not know that Nintendo used to maintain very strict controls over what types of games made it to their consoles, particularly Nintendo of America. While the company presented this as a form of quality control (a sensible approach given the state of home video gaming in the U.S. prior to the launch of the NES), these standards did nothing to prevent scores of low-effort games from appearing on toy store shelves. Instead, Nintendo of America's policies focused on protecting their family-friendly image by excising content from games that might anger parents. These cuts ran the gamut from removing spurts of blood to covering up underdressed women to expurgating crosses from churches and headstones.

While Nintendo of America could comfortably stick to their (soft, non-threatening) guns during the 1980s and early 90s, things changed as gaming entered the 32-bit era. Increased graphical fidelity facilitated an exploration of new genres and themes, and edgier video games became more common as the decade wore on. The success of Mortal Kombat played a role in this tonal shift, but that series' over-the-top graphic violence did not single-handedly change the medium. If anything, the proliferation of competing platforms opened the doors to more developers and publishers willing to take a chance on more adult content. After all, millions of elementary school kids who got an NES in 1988 headed to college in 1996; if those same teenagers spent their weekends driving to the mall to see R-rated movies, then they might also enjoy video games with less magic mushrooms and more moaning corpses.

With "mature" games gaining in popularity and the company's own share of the video game market receding, Nintendo of America had no choice but to soften their strict standards and allow previously unthinkable imagery onto the Super NES and Nintendo 64. However, this loosening of restrictions had no impact on the games that Nintendo produced internally. Just because Mortal Kombat had free reign to decapitate martial artists on Nintendo platforms, that didn't mean Shigeru Miyamoto or the teams under his supervision started slipping blood and guts into Super Mario games. Rather, games developed externally which Nintendo published began to experiment with more "realistic" violence, as seen in Rare-produced titles such as Killer Instinct and GoldenEye 007.

Yet even with these releases finding an audience, Nintendo's family-friendly image persisted into the 21st century, becoming an obstacle to overcome for the GameCube which supporters of Sony and Microsoft derisively nicknamed the "KiddieCube." It didn't matter that both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox offered titles for the entire family; the perceived lack of "mature" games coming from Nintendo created an unfair image problem for the company.

I say "unfair" because in 2002, in the face of all this online name-calling and self-satisfied mocking, Nintendo actively tried to push back against these criticisms by releasing Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. While still developed by an outside company, in this case Canadian studio Silicon Knights, Nintendo published this horror game exclusively for the GameCube, making Eternal Darkness their first M-rated title.

Eternal Darkness tells a mīllennia-long story of ordinary people stumbling into extraordinary circumstances and facing undying, unspeakably evil behemoths known as the Ancients. Set in the then-modern year of 2000 AD, the lead protagonist Alex Roivas discovers generations of her family have participated in this struggle, thanks to a ghoulish book hidden in her recently-deceased grandfather's private library. As Alex reads from the Tome of Eternal Darkness, each chapter details one man or woman's adventure from the past, with the player assuming control of that character and experiencing their story first-hand.

While the playable heroes come from a variety of backgrounds and time periods, their individual episodes follow a similar pattern: Regardless of their location in our world, each one of them finds the aforementioned Tome of Eternal Darkness, granting them access to the book's magical powers and tying their fate to all the other protagonists past and present. With the odds against them, few of these people survive their encounters with the sinister forces of the Ancients, but their efforts empower Alex to gather their collective knowledge and gain all their strengths. Ultimately, Alex must use everything she has learned to prevent the Ancients from invading our realm and conquering all of humanity.

As a 2002 video game, Eternal Darkness arrived amidst many other survival horror titles modeled after the successful Resident Evil franchise. Certainly, Eternal Darkness bears a superficial resemblance to Capcom's horror-action series, as both make use of fixed camera angles to define what players can see and primarily pit their heroes against slow-moving zombie-like monsters. Yet Resident Evil's enemies are biological weapons created by mad scientists working for faceless corporations (all in the name of capitalism), inevitably concluding every game with a battle against a man-made monster. In Eternal Darkness, the Ancients predate humanity's very existence; they view us as little more than ants toiling away in total ignorance of our insignificance compared to their power. Even if the player succeeds and Alex manages to disrupt the Ancients' plans, it feels less like a triumph over evil and more like a respite from annihilation, as if all the people we meet in Eternal Darkness risked their lives not to prevent but merely to postpone armageddon.

In contrast to the scientific horrors of Resident Evil, Eternal Darkness revolves around the supernatural, and the game's mechanics reflect this. In addition to a health meter that tracks remaining physical strength (standard fare in any horror game), every character in Eternal Darkness has a magic meter and a sanity meter. Casting spells, be they offensive or defensive in nature, drains the magic meter, requiring players to carefully manage their available resources else they run out in the middle of an attack. Encountering the Ancients' minions drains the sanity meter, as the very existence of monsters from another world damages the psyche of our human protagonists. While the magic meter refills slowly over time, the only way to refresh the sanity meter is to slay monsters and deliver a finishing blow to their downed corpses.

The sanity meter stands as Eternal Darkness' most memorable innovation, as the game strives to simulate the madness on-screen for the player sitting at home. Unlike the health meter which will end the game if emptied, running low on sanity poses no real danger to the protagonist. Instead, the game triggers "sanity effects" which make the game more frightening. These begin as subtle alterations such as unintelligible whispers in the background, tilted camera angles, or fresh blood dripping from the ceiling. Continuing to play with low or no sanity produces effects that specifically target the player, such as insects crawling on the camera lens, a fake Blue Screen of Death suggesting the software has crashed, or even a phony warning that pretends to delete all save games on the memory card.

As a GameCube owner and a Resident Evil fan, I enjoyed Eternal Darkness tremendously. Any horror game on that console would have caught my attention, but the fact that the game carried Nintendo's backing pushed it from a curiosity to a must-buy. I'm sure I didn't know what lay in store for me beyond a few good scares, so Eternal Darkness' tale of god-like beasts scheming to infiltrate and subjugate humanity exceeded all my expectations. The Ancients did not conform to any antagonists I had seen before, as each being seeks to undermine its peers in order to fuel its own advancement, yet no one Ancient has enough strength to lead the group. Instead, they exist in perpetual opposition to one another, like a sentient incarnation of rock, paper, scissors, hence the sensation at game's end that Alex and the others have achieved a stalemate rather than a victory over evil.

Eternal Darkness and its sinister cabal of Ancients introduced me to cosmic horror, a subgenre associated with the writing of H.P. Lovecraft. I had grown up during a time when "horror" built its reputation on blood and gore. Even Resident Evil, which had wowed me just six years earlier, used zombies, giant spiders, and other conventional movie monsters to frighten me (and it worked). Eternal Darkness has its share of zombies, but they never pose a real threat to the player. Instead, the Ancients loom over the entire game, initially appearing as an unclear blend of body parts and shapes, speaking to their followers on an interdimensional viewscreen. These scenes gave me a chill 20 years ago, as I found their twisted non-visages combined with their ominous speeches deeply unsettling.

The quality of the voice acting in Eternal Darkness helped cement the game as an immediate personal favorite. Again, I love Resident Evil, but that first game includes awkwardly-written dialogue and infamously stilted line-readings that makes even die-hard fans guffaw. I don't know what sorcery enabled Silicon Knights to gather such a top-notch cast, but the actors in the game include well-established voices like Michael Bell and Cam Clarke along with future stars like Jennifer Hale. No one phones in their roles here, but I must award special honors to William Hootkins, a career character actor you might remember as Porkins in Star Wars or as the corrupt Lt. Eckhardt in Tim Burton's first Batman movie. In Eternal Darkness, Hootkins plays Doctor Maximillian Roivas, Alex's great-great-great-great-great grandfather. During Max's chapter, players can examine fallen monsters and perform an impromptu autopsy, adding detailed notes about the creature to the game's internal menu. These files can be accessed anytime but, unlike the documents players normally discover in survival horror games, they include an audio component. Hootkins' deranged rantings as he delivers these entirely missable chunks of dialogue still astonish me to this day; fans have thankfully preserved them on YouTube for all to enjoy.

I wish I had good news to deliver as an epilogue to this love letter to one of my favorite video games, but I'm afraid the tale of Eternal Darkness has no happy ending. Despite Nintendo's corporate weight behind it, the game sold fewer than 500,000 copies, a pittance compared to the console's flagship hits like Super Smash Bros Melee or even other horror titles like Resident Evil Zero. Nintendo's gambit to lure "mature" gamers to the GameCube did not reap any rewards, so the company never announced a sequel or re-released Eternal Darkness on any future platforms. Developer Silicon Knights would struggle to remain relevant in the years that followed, eventually filing for bankruptcy after a disastrous legal battle with Epic Games. Key personnel behind Eternal Darkness later formed a new studio and attempted to take the "spiritual successor" route to crowdfund a new, similar experience, but by that point any dwindling fondness for a 2002 horror game that underperformed at retail had long since evaporated.

If a silver lining exists on this pitch-black cloud, no elements of Eternal Darkness of critical importance lie trapped within Nintendo's corporate clutches. While the characters, mechanics, and story specifics remain property of the publisher, cosmic horror as a genre belongs to no one (least of all Lovecraft, who died nearly 90 years ago). The rise of indie gaming has empowered any developer who wants to dedicate themselves to horror a license to do so, with a quick scan of the Lovecraftian tag on Steam revealing nearly 1000 options. Perhaps Alex and her brave colleagues won the battle and lost the war after all, for in the video game world, the Ancients seem stronger than ever.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.