The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Seminal 1974 slasher film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is like a desert, hot and dry as hell. Its dirty, nails-on-a-chalkboard melancholy helped set the tone for generations of slashers after it, and that can’t easily be boiled down into a game, or even another movie. But the 1983 Atari game The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tried and, for the most part, failed. Credit must be given to one of the first licensed horror games, but playing a slow-moving 8-bit Leatherface sucks all the scary out of one of the most hellish of horror films. The movie’s exhilarating tension never comes from rooting for him—you’re hoping the girl runs away.

What critics said: The Angry Video Game Nerd eloquently puts it in his video, “As far as Atari goes, there’s not much point of complaining about the graphics, but couldn’t they have at least made his chainsaw a different color than his body? It just blends in. It’s like his arms are, like, tangled together, or he has, like, a big jagged dick coming out of his chest.”