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I wake up in a brass bed in a non-descript room. After mustering the energy to get up, I check my pockets for clues. The only thing I have is a tent stake, but its purpose remains a mystery for now. A quick trip to the window reveals that I’m in a large castle, and the sheer cliff-face below quickly convinces me that this is not a valid escape route. I exit the room as quietly as possible and begin to explore.
The bathroom yields some welcome relief as well as a mirror and a strange pocket watch. A few moments later, I find myself in a sparse kitchen with a dumbwaiter. As I think to myself that the dumbwaiter appears large enough for me to fit in, I hear a bell ring in the distance.
I travel towards the sound and find what looks like the front door of this dwelling. To my surprise, I reach for the handle and find that the door is unlocked. I pick up a postcard lying in front of the now-open portal. As I flip it over and read the addressee, the name fills me with a sense of dread. The recipient is none other than Count Dracula.
I don’t waste any time in bolting outside and running down the mountain road. It’s still early in the morning, and I should have plenty of time to execute a tactical retreat. Much to my dismay, I find an angry mob on the other side of the gate at the bottom of the meandering path. They waste no time conveying to me that they wont let me leave and that they expect me to solve their vampire problem. I resign myself to my fate and head back in the castle.
Further exploration yields surprisingly little. I find a few dark passages but no light source to safely explore them with. I seem to run around in circles until I notice the sun starting its descent. I try to make my way back to the bedroom, but I get stuck in the pitch-black castle; I’m no longer able to move without fear of blundering into unseen hazards. Darkness encompasses me.
Once again, I wake up in the same brass bed, but this time I’m not feeling so great. I look at myself in the mirror and notice the source of my malaise: two small puncture wounds on my neck. I get a bad feeling and check the contents of my pockets again. The last of my hope fades as I realize my stake is gone. Without my only weapon, my hopes of completing my task are virtually non-existent. Dracula has already won.
I first played The Count when I was about ten years old. This experience marked the first and only time I would stop playing a video game because it scared the crap out of me. This game progressed over the course of three days, and you died if Dracula bit you three times. However, I never even got to this point; I would always turn off the game when survival seemed hopeless or when the sun started to set on the third day. I also never beat the game, because my fear prevented me from making any real progress. Eventually, I just stopped playing the game altogether.
The truly remarkable thing about this entire experience was that I played The Count on my Commodore VIC-20, and it had absolutely zero graphics. The title that terrified me the most throughout my entire gaming career was a text adventure. Through descriptions that — in retrospect — often lacked both vivid imagery and verbosity, I battled a war of attrition against a devious enemy.
Although this game seems almost archaic by modern standards, I have to applaud its brutal simplicity. My enemy was smart enough to steal every useful weapon I could find if I couldn’t devise a way to hide them before he came to visit. Certain events that were necessary to complete the game only happened on specific days, and the game kept me tense with a time limit that was absolute to the point of being deadly.
I’ve since played nearly every other scary video game that I can get my hands on, and I’ve still yet to find one that has instilled such an overwhelming sense of dread in me. Even though The Count might possibly be the first horror game ever created for a personal computer, modern developers could learn a thing or two from this classic title. Sometimes the monsters you can’t see are far more terrifying than the ones that you can.
The Count is a creation of Scott Adams, who many consider to be one of the fathers of commercial computer gaming. You can download and play it (as well as all of his other iconic text adventures) from his website.
