It’s easy to forget that the sixth generation of consoles was a virtual killing floor for a lot of games with niche appeal, and horror is an innately niche genre from the jump. Both fans and journalists have told Shibata that they simply weren’t able to finish it. Its creator, Makoto Shibata, has half-seriously suggested in interviews that the original Fatal Frame in particular might have been too scary for its own good. Trying to figure out why Fatal Frame bombed so hard is down to reading tea leaves.
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Every other game in the franchise has struggled to crack the 60,000 mark. The best-selling game in the core series, 2008’s Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, is a Japanese Wii exclusive that only moved 75,000 copies.
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According to a 2014 report by Famitsu, all five core games in the Fatal Frame series only sold 1.2 million units total between 20. Fatal Frame, to my surprise, has consistently been one of the lowest-selling series in its publisher’s lineup. To Koei Tecmo’s credit, it’s stuck with Fatal Frame for a lot longer than it arguably should’ve. The Tale of the Tape Ah, blurry 2003 graphics. Fatal Frame should’ve been a success story, but through mismanagement, mistakes, and pure bad luck, it’s become a genre footnote.
It is, however, a good time to look back at one of the great, dead franchises of survival horror. It’s a good move for game preservationists, as Black Water is one of the last Wii-U exclusives to get ported off the system, but it’s not likely to give the franchise the bump it needs. This week marks a Hail Mary for Fatal Frame, as its publisher Koei Tecmo is rereleasing the latest, currently last, and worst-reviewed game in the series, 2014’s Maiden of Black Water. A lot of horror fans, like me, will wax poetic about Fatal Frame if you give them any chance at all, but that never translated into retail success. Ultimate, if nothing else -but it’s largely neglected.
Fatal Frame as a franchise isn’t exactly forgotten-it’s got a couple of trophies in Super Smash Bros. Unfortunately, they never managed to be more than cult classics. This either means nothing to you, or it’s a gut-punch. They take cues from Japanese horror, Resident Evil (resource scarcity), and Silent Hill (phenomenal sound design and use of darkness to build atmosphere), and wrap them up in a challenging, violent haunted-house photo safari. The first three Fatal Frames, which make up an uneven but complete story, are easily some of the scariest games of their console generation. It doesn’t sound like it ought to be a horrifying experience, but it absolutely is.
In Fatal Frame-also known as Zero in Japan and Project Zero in Europe-you defend yourself against hostile ghosts by taking pictures of them with an antique camera. The first time I heard of it, it sounded ridiculous, like something between a theme-park ride and Pokemon Snap. Fatal Frame has always deserved better than it got.
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