There’s something incredibly nostalgic about demo disks, isn’t there? If you’re a horror fan who’s been gaming a little longer than you care to admit, this curious little effort is going to be music to your ears.
Gamers of a certain age could be forgiven for feeling more than a little jaded about the industry at the moment. Enormous day one patches, microtransactions, season passes, content being (supposedly) held back to be released as separate DLC later; none of these nefarious practices existed back in the day. Heck, they weren’t even really possible, for the most part.
Granted, making arcade titles as difficult as possible so we’d keep pumping quarters into them wasn’t exactly a-okay either, but the industry didn’t have a lot of the issues that plague it today. What did we have instead? We had magazines; real, print gaming magazines on actual paper (remember those?), and the glorious demo disks that often came free with them.
Nineties gamers will surely have their own memories of these disks, of squeezing every little droplet of entertainment possible out of these brief glimpses of various titles. Maybe you even discovered a new favorite game, series or genre by taking a shot at something on a demo disk. It’s tough to replicate that sort of magic these days, with the scarcity of print media, but a plucky band of indie PC horror devs are doing just that.
Haunted PS1 is a community for fans and creators of retro horror games. On February 6, the community will launch their 2020 Demo Disk (yes, they’ve capitalized it and everything), which will offer gamers bite-sized tastes of 17 very different horror experiences. From Dread Delusion to Heartworm and Killer Bees, there’s a variety of unique and creative titles to sample here. Not only that, but as Destructoid reports, the collaborators have bent over backwards to give the whole package an incredibly nostalgic vibe. It’s not a genuine PlayStation demo disk, of course (it’s for PC, after all), but everything from the art used to the concept itself just screams nineties.
For more on the Demo Disk and everything the Haunted PS1 community is working on, check them out here.
Source: Twitter, Destructoid
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