Life can be pretty stressful. Mounting bills to pay, the crushing weight of responsibility, irreverent memes that don’t quite make sense to you (no, I do not know de way, dammit – so stop asking me!!) Video games are a great way of relieving that tension. There’s none of society’s ills in the Mushroom Kingdom, just a friendly mustachioed man with an unhealthy disdain for turtles, so you can simply put your mind at ease…
At least, until something takes you by surprise, terrifying the absolute bejesus out of you. If you’re playing a Resident Evil or Silent Hill, you’re prepared for a fright or two; conditioned to know it’s coming sooner or later, and even the best jump scares don’t completely catch you off guard. It’s when more kid friendly titles dabble in the dark arts of utter spookiness that you’re thrown for a loop. Now that we’re cynical, jaded adults, we can look back on the moments in gaming that stripped us of our innocence (unless you were already a cynical, jaded child, in which case we’ve got no answers for you).
The Eel (Super Mario 64)
Once we evoked the memory of unnerving Mario moments, we were well aware of where most people’s minds would go, and it’s time to put this to rest once and for all: the haunted piano is not the scariest thing in Super Mario 64. Unexpected, yes, and the first time you encounter it can definitely be startling, but it’s easy to avoid, and once you nab that red coin in the room, you need not ever bother with it again.
The same cannot be said for Unagi. Jolly Roger Bay’s most infamous resident lurks down in the depths of the water – already a disconcerting place to be with a dwindling air supply – and his dead-eyed stare will haunt your dreams for the remainder of your life. Most of the time, he isn’t outwardly aggressive, but even just lovingly brushing past him will cause you immense pain to the tune of three health units. For context, colliding with Bowser only causes two points of damage, and he is clearly out to do you harm. Unagi doesn’t need to try, he just obliterates.
Whether he’s leering at you from the sunken ship or swimming in endless laps, the eel is always an intimidating foe, but he’s at his most horrifying in the challenge titled ‘Can the Eel Come Out to Play?’ From his vantage point in the murky cavern, he watches and waits for his prey to approach. Once your curiosity gets the better of you and you swim too close, he comes shooting out, roaring as he snaps his jaws at you – clearly, he’s hungry for some Italian! Assuming you’ve survived this encounter, you’ll have to chase him down after he leaves to do his morning constitutional and snag the star attached to his rear end like it was the Gummi Venus de Milo. It was a harrowing experience that put hairs on your chest; or if you were unfortunate, your shoulders.
Tyrannosaurus Rex (Jurassic Park)
5 NOPE Moments That Ruined Our Childhood
Alright, so Jurassic Park on the Sega Genesis could already be considered a fearsome game, what with all of the raptors strutting about, but they can be easily felled with a few shots from the trusty tranquilizer gun. However, you will never know true trepidation until you walk past a conspicuously cracked section of the wall in the power station. The screen rumbles, and the bricks shatter away – the t-rex has arrived! How did it know you were there? Why did it choose to target that one damaged part of the building? And considering how high you’ve just travelled in the elevator prior to this, why is it fifty feet tall?
None of these questions will be answered however, as it begins to reach out its gaping maw, hoping to gobble you up whole. Your only way to progress through the stage is by running right past it in the deadliest game of cat and mouse ever. Its reaction time isn’t great, it can be stunned by explosions and flash grenades, and indeed, it spends most of its time vacantly staring ahead without any particular idea of what to do, but regardless of all this, it’s still enough to alarm even the bravest of risk takers.
Not content with that encounter, the t-rex stalks you in later levels, including popping its head into the visitor’s center, and even attacking you from inside of a waterfall. It’s unclear how it got in there, or why it has so many suitable vantage points to stage its assault from, but it’s clearly an excellent strategy to employ against that tasty looking noisy thing with the white hat (formally known as Alan Grant).
Completely random side note: in the opening cinematic, the t-rex’s snarl sounds a lot like it’s saying ‘mommy’. You may have never noticed this before, but it’ll be hard to get it out of your head now.
Sinistar (Sinistar)
5 NOPE Moments That Ruined Our Childhood
Picture this: you’re floating through the endless cosmos of space, taking out whatever pitiful enemies and smartass planetoids get in your way. It’s all going well until you hear the phrase ‘beware, I live’ being shouted at you. This is the trademark quip of the titular Sinistar, a gruesome antagonist with a penchant for munching on spacecraft as if they were Skittles. You only have a few brief moments to prepare yourself before it comes flying onto the screen at a fantastic speed, so you’d better pelt it with a whole bunch of laser fire, unless you want to become a scrap wedged between its teeth.
The true motives and nature of Sinistar are never fully explained – it could be a tyrannical warlord from a distant star, or it could simply be the neighborhood bully. It’s not too difficult to defeat it, and the goal of the game is in actual fact to destroy as many Sinistars as you can, but it’s still an imposing figure, despite this. It’ll mock you the whole time, declaring that you’re a coward and imploring you to ‘run, run’, but the worst part is the way it shrieks at you as it chases you down. In space, no one can hear you scream. But you can sure as hell hear the Sinistar.
Yeti (SkiFree)
5 NOPE Moments That Ruined Our Childhood
We hate the yeti. We truly do. SkiFree is a simple computer game from 1991 that consisted solely of skiing. That much may be apparent from the title, but the ‘free’ part is something of a misnomer, for in actual fact, you are fleeing from the perpetual threat of the yeti. Perhaps it should have been called ‘SkiFlee’?
Like all of the other villains on this list so far, its sole purpose in this life is to eat you (that wasn’t an intentional choice; apparently everything that’s scary just also happens to be fond of human flesh). Alas, there is no reprieve from this fate, as this mountain happens to be of the eternal variety – the sweet embrace of death is the only thing that prevents your perpetual decline. In this sense, not only is the SkiFree yeti petrifying, it’s also far more symbolism than we’re ready to handle at this point in our lives. The worst kind of aggression is that of the existential variety.
Giygas (EarthBound)
5 NOPE Moments That Ruined Our Childhood
Hoo boy. To say that EarthBound is unlike other Nintendo games would be something of an understatement. It’s quirky and optimistic in some ways, but there lies a sinister kind of wickedness underneath it all; the morality of the people, the inner turmoil of Ness’ fears and self-doubting, the utter creep factor of the cameraman following your every move, and constant references to the wetting of pants, among others. It all comes to a head in the final battle against Pokey Minch, when he deactivates the Devil’s Machine and reveals the true form of the ultimate evil.
This is about as close as you’ll get to hell in a Nintendo game without it being said outright. Surrounded by the visage of Giygas, who himself is in a great deal of suffering, under a constant barrage of attacks that defy comprehension, your whole party will be wiped out if you’re not careful. All the while, Giygas will tell you how much it hurts, and how he is filled with misery and dread. There’s some seriously bad vibes going on here, and the only way to quell this dark power is to pray into the abyss. Considering the grim things we’ve seen in gaming over the years (ever wonder what it would be like to be a fly on the wall of a Mortal Kombat fatality brainstorming session?) this boss fight may not sound quite so bad, but note when this game was made, and who it was predominantly marketed towards. The battle against Giygas was jarring – were you doing the right thing here? Could it be that this creature was ultimately a puppet being exploited by the greed and temptation of man? There are so many mysteries surrounding this bizarre adversary, very few of which will ever be fully explained. At the very least, Giygas doesn’t want to eat you alive, which is a refreshing change. He does, however, want to consume all of humanity, which is arguably a fair bit worse.
Published: Feb 1, 2018 02:33 pm