Just like movies and music, the relatively new medium of video games has given birth to tales of cursed titles killing players or driving them mad, as well as unleashing supernatural threats. CHRIS WHEATLEY explores a digital stew of urban legend, online rumour and outright hoax.
Endless debate continues concerning the identity of the first ever computer game (1958’s Tennis for Two and 1962’s Spacewar! are generally put forward as top contenders), but the roots of the video game industry can pretty securely be traced back to 1971, when Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, the founders of the Atari company, produced Computer Space, the first commercially available video arcade machine. Computer Space wasn’t a great success, but its successor, Pong, which launched the following year, was, leading to the birth of entirely new entertainment sector. 1
In the 1980s, video games spilled out of arcades and into homes when the first mass market, games-orientated computers became available. In the UK, Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum, launched in 1982. With its simple design, low price and rubber keys, the Spectrum became ‘the people’s choice,’ vying for supremacy with the Commodore 64, which also surfaced that year, and which dominated the American market. Tales of cursed or haunted video games date right back to around this time. Our first entry, Berzerk, was originally marketed in 1980, and since then stories of supernatural software have cropped up regularly.
Many of the earliest of these tales are surely linked to the predictable moral panic which seems to greet any new technology or trend, particularly those aimed at children (witness the fear and unrest sparked by the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and ‘Satanic’ elements in children’s toys, games and TV programes; see FT426:28-33). Middle America, especially, grew concerned over kids who haunted ‘seedy’ game arcades and spent hours staring at a TV screen or monitor, performing repetitive actions in a trance-like state. However, as you will read below, the idea of the cursed video game may be an old one, but it has never gone away, and probably never will. Digital nightmares await!
BERZERK (1980)
Loosely based on the Berserker series of novels by American science fiction writer Fred Saberhagen, the video arcade console Berzerk, released by Chicago-based Stern Electronics, was one of the first to feature speech synthesis – novel and startling for th
