 ssssssssssssss I'm drunk Hello. Halloween is coming up again, so let's take a look at the best horror-themed arcade games. In the past, I've covered the best Super Nintendo-Halloween games and the best Super Nintendo-Halloween rom hacks. But, for sheer carnage and insanity and gore, it's hard to beat the arcade. This list is gonna span from the early eighties all the way to twenty-fifteen, so I'm gonna try and cover as much as I can. I should mention quickly that most arcade horror games tend to be light-gun games games, so there's a lot of flashing lights in this video just to let you know. But we'll start with Splatter House, made by Namco back in 1988, and this is a super obvious one, and for good reason. It was one of, if not the first game, to have crazy, gory visuals like this, whether you're slicing these monsters in half, or smashing them against the wall in the background, or shooting rabid zombie wolves, or kicking whatever this baby thing is. This game is a great time just for the spectacle. The gameplay is really simple, but it's still a lot of fun. It's available through the arcade archive series on Switch, Xbox One, PS4, and Windows. If you're looking for more of a Final Fight type game, there's Night Slashers, and this game is freaking awesome. Right off the bat, you're in a van running over a herd of zombies, before you and your robotic arms get out to punch vomiting, armless zombies so hard that they melt. And I don't know if I'd eat a hot dog on the ground in a graveyard next to a bunch of pools of blood and various other fluids. That bread might get a little bit soggy. This one was made by DataEast back in 1993, and received a Nintendo Switch port a few years ago, and a remake is in the works as well, so keep an eye out for that. But really, you can't go wrong with the original game. It's got some of the best pixel art of the era. Here's a couple more older games that I want to include. The first being Make You Hunter G. And if this game looks familiar, that's because it was re-skinned in the US as The Real Ghostbusters back in 1987. This is the original game, also made by DataEast, and it's a top-down directional shooter that can get pretty difficult, so if this kind of challenge is what you're looking for, then here you go. I like the original game, but the Ghostbusters re-skin isn't too shabby either, and it's much more forgiving when it comes to that brutal arcade-style difficulty. But now, let's go all the way back to 1983 with Sinistar, made by Williams Electronics. Hey, wait a second, what's so scary about this game? It's just kind of an asteroid's clone, and oh dear god. Imagine playing this at the time when you're used to stuff like Pac-Man. Hell, I'm playing this now, and that voice is still haunting, and it doesn't help that this game gets ridiculously hard, too. Sinistar is available on Super Nintendo as part of the Williams Arcade Greatest His compilation, but there's a lot of other places you can find this one. Alright, let's get slightly more modern. Here's a couple third-person action arcade games starting with Zombie Revenge, developed by Sega in 1999, and it's a spin-off of The House of the Dead series, which I'll get to in a bit. But the general gist is that a secret US government project has gone awry. They had the brilliant idea of raising the dead so they could be used as soldiers. I guess someone in charge just finished reading Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King or something, but surprisingly, things don't go so well. So the US government doubles down with another brilliant idea, sending exactly three secret agents to take out an entire town of zombies. Thankfully, the game is a lot better executed. This is a really fun one that's reminiscent of other Sega arcade games like Dynamite Cop, and it got a Dreamcast port in 2000, but if you can't find that, then this is one you'll have to play any way you can. Here's another game with a similar gameplay style called Chaos Heat, made for arcades in 1998 by Taito. This one has much more of a sci-fi horror motif, where you use machine guns, grenades and flamethrowers to fight your way through a biotech laboratory. And that's where you fight giant bugs and monsters that look like they're made entirely of denim. This is a really impressive game, though. That's well worth your time with just the right amount of challenge. Unfortunately, Chaos Heat never left arcades, so this is yet another game you'll have to keep your eye out for. Now let's move on to the light gun shooters, starting with The House of the Dead. There's a whole bunch of these games. There's four games in the main series, and a few spinoffs like Typing of the Dead and Pinball of the Dead, but I can't help but like the original the best because I've played it so much. And it's the easiest to find where you might see arcade games. And hey, what do you know? In this game, the zombies can actually run and actually have some, you know, beer league quickness to them. I don't know if this is the best game in the series, but it's the one I've spent the most time with, and it's never a disappointment, especially with a second player. House of the Dead got a remake in 2022 that's available on all modern consoles, but if you find a way to play the original, I recommend doing so. It's a good time. Let's go in. Sure. Why not? Let's drop back to 1990 real quick with Space Gun. Is that name generic enough for you? It was made by Taito, and this is another one where the pixel art is just awesome, where you have to rescue hostages stuck in walls of alien egg slime or whatever this is. What's interesting is that this arcade cabinet also featured foot pedals like a racing game, which is pretty cool. At first, it's easy to abuse backpedaling anytime you get to an enemy, but the time limit makes that tough. It's a bit tricky to play today, but I like this one as a bit of a change of pace. Next is Zombie Raid, made for arcades in 1995 by American Sammy, and this one's a little different too. It's a scrolling light gun shooter as opposed to on rails like you see with House of the Dead, but you're also tasked with finding four items randomly placed throughout the game in order to get the proper ending. And doing that is not easy. This is among the most challenging light gun games I've played. Everything happens so quickly. It feels like you need about 12 cups of coffee just to keep up with this game. I can't help but love the style of the graphics here, though, so I needed to make sure I mentioned this one. Zombie Raid was never released outside of arcades, so this is another one where, yeah, I've already said it a couple times in this video, so you get the idea. Evil Knight, otherwise known as Hell Knight, was made in 1998 by Konami and 90s Konami games are usually pretty well made, and this is no different. And what makes this one stand out is that it's up to three player compatible with players one and three wielding handguns and player two wielding a shotgun. And I'm willing to bet everyone was shoving each other out of the way just to get to the shotgun. Evil Knight was made in a similar spirit to House of the Dead, but it didn't catch on and it's since faded away over the years. But if you can find it, it's a fun playthrough. That wasn't Konami's only foray into the genre. A few years earlier, they also made Crypt Killer for the arcade in 1995. It got ported to Saturn in PlayStation and this game is just ridiculous. We're fighting skeletons, mummies, creatures from the Black Lagoon, Captain Picard shows up to give us some instructions, then he got serpents and pharaoh things and it's just a huge grab bag of random stuff and I guess it's considered horror? So I had to include it here because it's just big dumb fun in the most 1995 way possible. Here's one based on Alien 3 called Alien 3 the Gun, made in 1993 by Sega. It's got settings you'll recognize if you've seen the movie and jeez Louise this one is hard, but hard in a good way. And plus the Alien franchise just lends itself perfectly to video games and especially arcade games. Everything is really fast and intense as hell. Similar to other Sega light gun games like Railchase and Jurassic Park. Games like this make me wonder if it's not too late for arcades to make a comeback because this game holds up so well and again there's no other way to play this one since it was never ported anywhere. Now if you're looking for a scary game that maybe your kids could play there's Luigi's Mansion Arcade. Yes Luigi's Mansion got its own arcade game back in 2015 made by Capcom and it's based off of the 3DS game made a few years earlier Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon featuring the same settings featured in that game. It's still your typical light gun shooter on rails but it's a fun inventive game that takes a long while to complete. The game starts out really easy but gets surprisingly tough later on and if you've been to it, Dave and Buster's recently you might have seen this game there. And since this hasn't been released on any Nintendo platform that's gonna be your best way to play it. Another option for kids is Ghoul Panic made by Namco in 1999 and this one is set up as a series of minigames that you have to complete against a time limit. It's probably not as good or as interesting as other games in this video but hey, it's a cute harmless shooter. This one got a PlayStation port in Japan and in Europe so if you like what you see in this one that's probably the best way to go play it today. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Namco churned out Dark Escape 4D in 2012 and yeah, this game is intense as hell. If you're looking for more of a modern horror themed light gun game then this one has what you're looking for. You're trapped in a dungeon full of mutant zombies and whatever the hell these things are and of course you've got a villain who helpfully drops by to hang out once in a while. But yeah, this game is insane. Dark Escape hasn't gotten a home console release but this game is a hundred times better at The Arcade. It's a sit-down cabinet with air vents behind you so you can feel zombies creeping around. So if you happen to see this cabinet anywhere, definitely check it out. Here's another out of nowhere arcade game that I had no idea existed until recently. It's Silent Hill The Arcade Game made by Konami in 2007. Wait, what? Yeah, this obviously does not play anything like the other Silent Hill games of the time. It's yet another light gun shooter but this one is slower paced which after playing the other games on this list actually makes it kind of creepy. And it's got Heather from Silent Hill 3 and Pyramid Head and, well, not a whole lot else. But it's still a nice playthrough. This one never made it to North America but it's a fun curiosity if nothing else. I saved my personal favorite horror themed arcade game for last Beast Buster's Second Nightmare made by SNK back in 1998. The original Beast Buster's is fine but this game is way over the top with lots of spines and brains and blood and monsters and zombies and explosions and it's just non-stop. It is gloriously ridiculous. They shoved everything they could into this game. The only problem is once again you have to play this one any way you can and it can be kind of tricky to get it to work properly. The audio kept flaking out on me so I didn't even get the full experience but even with janky audio this game is still so much fun because it's so ridiculous and it's the game I go back to the most out of any on this list. Definitely check this one out. All right, that's 17 games for you and I wanna thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.