In late 1996, arcade-goers were treated to AM1’s The House of the Dead — a light gun game with a horror theme.
The enigmatic Dr. Curien, hell-bent on discovering the true nature of life and death, began experiments that turned ordinary people into zombies. Tasked with taking him down, special agents Rogan and G infiltrate Curien’s research mansion, facing all manner of horrors as they try to complete their mission.
The game was very well received, and a Saturn port was commissioned with Australian-based Tantalus picking up the conversion duties.
The Saturn port is a mixed bag. The arcade experience was brought home faithfully — all the enemies, branching paths, and cheesy voice-overs made it across from the arcade. However, as the arcade game ran on the final and most powerful Model 2 arcade board variant, the Saturn conversion struggled with performance issues. Inter-level loading, something not seen in the earlier Virtua Cop games, made an appearance in House of the Dead.
Likewise, the visuals, looking crisp and smooth on the Model 2C, took an absolutely massive downgrade, looking exceedingly pixelated to the point of being distracting from the game experience. A rumor persists that Tantalus first put in “placeholder” textures in many of the levels, but then did not have the time to implement improved assets as the game’s ship date approached.
That said, the game was still received relatively well. The overall theme worked well, the branching paths added to the game’s replayability, and the action was fast and furious. The Saturn game also featured a Boss Rush mode, and green “blood” — a code was required to activate the arcade’s red blood. Compatibility with the Stunner light gun was implemented.
This is a great game let down by a weak visual implementation on the Saturn; however, hooked up to a CRT and played with light guns with a friend, is a blast to play — and retains all the adrenaline-pumping fun factor that SEGA was known for at the time.
My brothers and I have a lot of fun with House of the Dead on the Saturn back then, we didn’t have a light gun, but it didn’t deter us from having a good time.
As for the visuals, yeah, both this and the performance could be wayyyy better, for sure, but since there are so many games from the 5th gen that also had this, we didn’t think that this particular game was worse for that. I mean, you shoot zombies in Resident Evil and the blood is pixelated reds, Tomb Raider also has pixelated textures, specially those close to the cameras, and these are to name the bare minimum, we didn’t care, we were happy.