Alone in the Dark. One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge for Saturn (1996)

Original ad published in the September 1996 issue of EGM 2 (no. 27).

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A crappy port of a decent PC game

Sensing Resident Evil’s impending success in the console realm, Infogrames decided to fight back and recapture their original survival horror panache by porting Alone in the Dark. One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge to both the Saturn and PlayStation systems. The move made no sense.

Alone in the Dark, released in 1992, will always be remembered as the truly first 3-D survival horror game for the PC. It’s sequel was released just one year after and was basically the same game in a different setting. Both were artificially hard because they were DOS games meant to be played with your keyboard. They instilled fear in any gamer because of these limitations. 

But Alone in the Dark. One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge was published for Sony’s and Sega’s machines in 1996! The terrible gameplay was taken verbatim from the PC game. This was of course unacceptable for the majority of gamers. And even though Resident Evil featured now ancient tank-like controls, they were worlds better than the aforementioned game. The graphics were outdated, as well. The music, in contrast, was atmospheric and quite good.

The print itself is another curiosity. It occupies two column’s width of the magazine and has a nice “piratey” motif. That’s interesting in itself, because the game made little connection with that idea. This is a case study in how NOT to bring a PC game to the console world.

Alone in the Dark. One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge for Saturn print ad copy

dangerously concealed in shrouds of darkness,

evil awaits you

and you’re all alone

alone

alone

Alone in the Dark

One-Eyed Jack’s Revenge

For PlayStation and Sega Saturn

Kokopeli Digital Studios

I Motion