The History of Fatal Frame

The concept came to director Makoto Shibata shortly after he finished work on Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness, and he has said it was inspired by his own dreams and by encounters he felt were supernatural. Development began when the PlayStation 2 hardware was first introduced to Tecmo, under the codename Project Zero, with producer Keisuke Kikuchi overseeing and a staff drawn in part from the Deception team. Shibata wrote the story himself, with Tsuyoshi Iuchi writing the script; the story was the first part of the game to be finished.

The team took a technical cue from a rival: the positive reception of the polygon characters in the Silent Hill series was a starting point, and Tecmo pushed further toward the feeling of seeing things just off screen. The haunted mansion setting had been an early Shibata idea for the Deception games, passed over there because it limited the trap setting gameplay. To keep the isolation total, the setting was moved back to 1986, before mobile phones could rescue anyone.

Some of what was planned never shipped. Scenes considered too graphic were cut, among them a flashback of the Himuro family head committing seppuku and a fuller depiction of the Strangling Ritual that sits at the story's centre.

Character designer and CGI director Hitoshi Hasegawa set the game's key colours as black and white: white for hope, black for fear, with a long effort spent on lighting and shading so that Miku's torch could cut the mansion's dark. A third colour, red, runs through Miku's clothing and stands for life.

The rituals at the plot's core were new territory for the team, who had little experience with such material; Shibata drew on the spirituality motifs of Yokai Hunter, Daijiro Morohoshi's manga. The atmosphere was studied from Japanese horror films, high budget and low, and from war films.

The famous weapon arrived late. The Camera Obscura was not in the initial discussions between Shibata and Kikuchi at all: the first idea was that ghosts would simply be avoided and repelled by light. The team decided the player needed an offensive power, and the camera was created to be it. Kikuchi was initially opposed, then came to see that it fitted the game's context as development progressed. Its design was based on a German military camera. Sound was treated as a weapon of its own: an early decision put the game in stereophonic sound, with sound director Shigekiyo Okuda testing tools until the team settled on Arnis Sound Technologies to project sound in three dimensions. Okuda and Ayako Toyoda composed the music.

Sales were modest at home and a surprise abroad. The game sold just over 42,000 copies in Japan in 2001, inside the year's top 300, and the European PlayStation 2 edition sold 12,000. Kikuchi and Shibata later called its success in North America and Europe unexpected, and credited the popularity of Japanese horror films such as Ring at the time.

Fatal Frame's real invention was a rule: to hurt the ghost, you must keep looking at it, through a viewfinder, while it comes at you. Every later entry in the series kept the Camera Obscura, the film grades, and the reward for waiting until the last possible moment to shoot.

The game's North American box carried a line its Japanese box never did: Based on a true story. That claim has its own page on this shelf, and the record behind it is thinner, and stranger, than the box suggests.