George Lucas is rightly credited with changing a lot of thing (including to a large or small degree the lives of anyone reading this site), but I’d bet that one credit he rarely gets is for creating the first video game jump scare. Writing over at Slashfilm Alex Riviello looks back to 1985 and the LucasArts game Rescue On Fractalus and the moment in question.
Back when LucasArts was Lucasfilm Games, and even before it became beloved for its adventure games such as The Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Loom, they had the whole universe open to them. The early employees were allowed to work on any kind of game they wanted with one notable exception, and that was any Star Wars games. It seems unthinkable now, but Lucas had already sold the game rights to Parker Brothers and Atari and was making too much money from it to give it to his own team.
Rescue on Fractalus seems fairly innocuous at the beginning. You fly a spaceship called the Valkyrie (“Don’t call it a V-Wing,” the instruction booklet humorously notes) in the middle of a war against the Jaggies, an alien race whose name is a nice nod to the game’s jagged, aliased graphics. The war has claimed many fellow pilots and it’s your mission to venture to alien planets and rescue any survivors. After landing near a pilot, you have to turn off the ship’s shields and open up the airlock for them to board and be whisked away to safety. This is an easy task at first, as you shoot down enemy saucers and gun emplacements and collect a number of stranded people, but then there’s a pretty big twist – once in a while, the pilot is an alien in disguise attempting to get in your ship and murder you.
See, if you don’t open the airlock right away the pilot will knock on the door. The banging sound is unsetting in the void of space, but also reassuring, as only humans knock. Jaggies rear up in front of the windshield with a synthetic screech and pound at it with their fists, smashing through and killing you if you don’t get the shields up in time to fry it.
It’s utterly terrifying for a first-time player, and (programmer David) Fox did this all by design.
