The Cthulhu mythos in gaming

The gaming industry has been using motives and ideas from other types of media since the very beginning. So nobody should be surprised that it has been using one of the most ideas from one of the most revered horror authors H.P. Lovecraft.

Cthulhu, that weird tentacled monster, the God embodying all the horrors of our world has millions of fans, its own wikipedia and was at least indirectly a part of hundreds of games. And he even shows up personally in a few dozens of games. Nothing that surprising about it. Lovecraft's stories have such an unique aura and atmosphere that the horror is very attractive for both the developers and the gamers.

We will be finally getting an official Cthulhu game later this year with Call of Cthulhu: The Official Video Game. So this seems like a good time to take a look at three games that used this amazing mythos to create their world.

The Lurking Horror

Probably the first ever (and preserved) game with Lovecraftian themes is the text based adventure game The Lurking Horror that came out in 1987 for the 8-bit Atari and then later made its way even to the Amiga.

The story of a student that is trying to make his homework in and purely by chance finds that there are miles and miles of abandoned tunnels under his school filled with monster and dark cultists didn't exactly include Cthulhu directly, but the inspiration was completely obvious.

Alone In The Dark

What new can be said about the legendary Alone In The Dark? Not much. The game came out in the year 1992 and you were playing as Edward Carnbyho a private detective. Again, you wont directly find Cthulhu in this game, but the inspirations are obvious. You can even find Necronomicon in game.

One of the interesting things about Alone In The Dark is the fact that even once you finish the game, if you try to open the powerful Necronomicon without the ritual, you will die. The aura of the Old God is just so powerful, that even finishing the game won't stop him from killing you.

Shadow of The Comet

Shadow of The Comet was probably the first "classical" graphical adventure game with the Cthulhu mythos and it came out in 1993. Here you become John Parker a photographer that goes to a little fishing town called Illsmouth.

Sadly, Shadow of The Comet wasn't the best Lovecraft inspired game. The dialogs weren't great, but the true horror of the game were the controls. As the game didn't support mouse control, you had to do everything with your keyboard and that was truly scary.