Forbidden Forest

As the Halloween season draws ever nearer, I’d like to present one of the first games that I ever found truly terrifying (of course, I was four years old at the time).  No, it’s not a survival horror…it’s an old Commodore 64 action classic called Forbidden Forest.

The work of a single programmer, Paul Norman, the game was being programed as a means of learning 6502 programming.  At the time Paul worked for a small software company which was going out of business, and representatives from another company, Cosmi, were visiting for the purpose of buying office furniture, saw Paul at his desk working on the game, and hired him on the spot.  The game was released in 1983 under the Cosmi label and became one of the more well-known and highly-regarded Commodore 64 games released.

The plot of the game is simple: you are an archer journeying into a haunted forest to find and slay the Demogorgon, an immense beast terrorizing the land.  During your hunt you will have to fend off giant spiders, dragons, snakes, skeletal warriors and eerie phantoms.  Each level was unique, with a new foe to face before you could progress.  Some levels required simple action tactics as you fought off waves of spiders creeping out of the trees.  In others, you yourself were the hunted as a dragon would stalk you through the woods, giving you little time to react before roasting you alive.

The game is notable as an early example of parallax scrolling (multiple background layers moving at different speeds to create the illusion of depth) as well as being one of the first games to feature animated blood and gore.  The latter is perhaps one of the title’s most defining aspects.  Rather than just a simple graphical representation of blood, the game contained fairly brutal death scenes.  Capture by a giant spider would result in an extended scene of the player writhing back and forth as the spider attacked, spraying animated blood in increasing amounts as the brief scene played out.  The game also had a day-night transition, complete with a moon that slowly crept across the sky from left to right as the forest grew darker and darker as one progressed.  By the time one reached the Demogorgon, the forest would be pitch-black and one’s foe could be seen only during flashes of lightning that revealed his location as he crept ever closer, stalking the player in the dark.

The game was popular enough to result in a sequel, released in 1985 under the title Beyond the Forbidden Forest.  An even more ambitious title, it was advertised as being in “OmniDimensional 4-D”, meaning that the player could walk and shoot into and out of the foreground, in addition to just left and right.  An aiming mechanic was also added, as two bars appears at the side of the screen to show the up and down angle one’s arrows would travel, which could be adjusted according to where one wanted to shoot.

Unfortunately this mechanic over-complicated the control scheme and resulted in gameplay that was clunky and inelegant.  Despite its ambition the sequel just wasn’t as much fun and isn’t as well-remembered today.

In 2003, the series was revived somewhat with a release in 2003.  Titled simply Forbidden Forest, it was a budget title co-developed with Webfoot Technologies.  The gameplay was brought into the third dimension, but although the theme of the original could have translated into an excellent survival-horror game, the resulting budget-priced title boasted lackluster graphics, a “forest” that felt more like a pleasant woodland resort and enemies who were far too generic to be frightening.  The best thing about the title was the re-orchestrated main theme and the fact that the CD contained a Commodore 64 emulator and copies of the original two titles.