Though it's about 20 years old now, Uninvited is still a great game. The adventure opens with your character regaining consciousness in a wrecked car. It seems that while traveling with your kid brother at night, a shadowy figure appeared on the road in front of you, causing you to swerve off the highway and crash your car. With your brother missing, you have no choice but to explore the mansion next door to find him. If you think this intro sounds suspiciously familiar, get used to it: throughout this article you will notice common events and themes that repeat throughout the history of horror games.

Resident Evil introduced horror games to the mass market, effectively creating the survival horror genre as we know it today. But looking back at the titles that pre-dated it, we can see that the development team at Capcom was directly influenced by earlier horror games. Alone in the Dark in particular seems to be the direct parent of the Resident Evil game design: fixed cameras, static backgrounds, a character-centric control scheme, pivot-in-place combat mechanics, Victorian mansions, rationing of ammunition and health, and two playable characters (one male, one female), just to name a few obvious similarities. The direct line of influence on Resident Evil from Sweet Home is also clear: both Capcom games take a hard line approach to item management (though the blow was slightly softened in Resident Evil, as the player was granted more inventory space and inter-connected item boxes). Even Uninvited seems to have left its mark in the way that every area in Resident Evil must be throughly ransacked for items, clues, and notebooks. Both Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 employed a constantly re-appearing antagonist that can not be killed and may surprise the player at any time, much in the same way that Clock Tower used Bobby the Scissorman to induce fear. Resident Evil even has a version of the verb palette used by the first graphical adventure games, though it has been streamlined dramatically over the years (the player can shoot, examine, use items, and combine items).

Of course, this sort of influence was not limited to Resident Evil. Silent Hill also draws from lessons and themes from Uninvited, Alone in the Dark, and Clock Tower. Perhaps most importantly, Silent Hill shunned the approach taken by Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil to item rationing and management. Instead, it focused on narrative and puzzles, and relied on unpredictability and exploration to prevent the player from for breezing through the game. Like Clock Tower, Silent Hill also provides multiple endings to encourage the player to think about how they play. The Pyramid Head character in Silent Hill 2 is another version of Clock Tower's Bobby. Even more recent games like Siren and Fatal Frame have drawn heavily on mechanics defined a decade earlier (consider Siren's approach to sneaking, hiding, and combat as compared to Clock Tower and Alone in the Dark).