The House of the Dead

The House of the Dead was launched by Sega in 1996 as a light-gun arcade shooter, where the player blasted their way through a mansion full of zombies and mutants created by the experiments of the mad scientist Curien. The series was built on fast pacing, clearly readable on-screen targets, and a deliberately over-the-top B-movie horror atmosphere that, together with campy character dialogue and outlandish plot twists, made it a cult favourite among arcade shooter fans, best enjoyed with a friend at the next cabinet.

The House of the Dead 2 in 1998 moved the action to a larger city, added more weapon types and alternate paths through each level depending on which targets the player hit, while House of the Dead III in 2002 improved the graphics, pushed the story years forward, and also reached Xbox as a console port. Home conversions of the earlier games landed mainly on the Sega Saturn and later the Dreamcast, a natural fit for Sega's arcade shooters of the time thanks to similar underlying hardware.

The House of the Dead: Overkill in 2009 on Wii then remade the series as a deliberate grindhouse parody with crude humour, foul-mouthed dialogue, and explicit violence, a marked departure from the more serious tone of earlier entries, showing the brand could also work as a self-aware genre joke. Across every entry, the series stayed firmly tied to arcade cabinets and the light gun as its natural controller, which is why it's still remembered today as one of the pillars of the so-called rail-shooter genre.