You wake up in a spooky castle and, believe it or not, you have amnesia! At first, it seems like a pleasant adventure game where occasionally you’ll hear a spooky sound or see a door open on it’s own. “Amnesia” is so important that I have only been talking about its feats and not about how it actually plays. Then “Amnesia” came along and scared everyone silly, and started a sort of “horror revolution.” Horror games were cool again! Thanks, in part, to the let’s players, everyone remembered that being tense and frightened was fun! They were seen as financial suicide by publishers. Aside from the occasional “Dead Space”, spooky games were either bad or just weren’t being made.

When it released in 2010, horror games were a thing of the past. We have one more thing to thank “Amnesia” for. Today, that’s half of YouTube, and the most successful channels are let’s play channels. These videos were so popular that they singlehandedly kickstarted the “let’s play” movement. I wasn’t the only one smitten by the smell of brown pants that “Amnesia” left everywhere it went everyone with a microphone played “Amnesia” and recorded it back in the day. In fact, the first one I made was with a little horror game called “Amnesia: The Dark Descent”. Actually, I can’t complain because I’ve made “let’s play” videos with my friends too. You know, the people who scream at a game and then scream into a mic and get a million, billion views. Whether you love them or hate them, “let’s players” have completely changed the way YouTube works in the last seven years. Check back at every day for a new installment! Here we will be taking a look back at everything spooky in both film and video games and analyze how horror has evolved over the last century. Welcome to Spinnaker’s History of Horror.

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