What The Hell Happened To Alone In The Dark?

A lot of hay is often made about the juggernauts of survival horror. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and newer franchises like Amnesia and Outlast - all of which are more than worthy of the praise they get, but a series that seems to escape being mentioned a lot lately is Alone in the Dark. This is interesting because Alone in the Dark precedes almost every other game that we would call survival horror. The original game’s art style of polygonal foregrounds and more detailed pre-rendered backgrounds is one that might ring a bell for fans of the original few Resident Evil games, but again, Alone in the Dark preceded Resident Evil by several years.

With that level of innovation for the horror genre, which was barely even its own genre at that point, you would expect that the game would receive several sequels and live on as a timeless classic survival horror franchise. Well, you’d be right about that but also wrong at the same time. The last game to release in the series was in 2015. Not exactly an eternity from now, but six years is still six years. You rarely see successful franchises go more than three or four years without a new entry, let alone six. So what happened? Why would a series that set the bar for its genre, and possibly deserves most of the credit for inventing its genre, go so long without a new game and sink into obscurity as much as this series has? What the hell happened to Alone in the Dark?