Mountain King
Maybe you think games of the Atari 2600 era couldn’t actually be scary. If so, you were never a six-year-old playing Mountain King in the early 1980s.
Along the bottom of the titular mountain a giant, speedy spider crawls, seeking its next prey. Watch it come out of nowhere and ensnare the poor player in its giant web. Then behold as the player struggles in vain to escape, as the spider soon returns to gobble up the pathetic human, starting at the head and working its way down to the feet. That horrific death fueled many a child’s nightmares back in the day, and offered many, myself included, their first experience of real video-game fear. —Carolyn Petit
