Game news This jumpscare is probably the most unjustified and terrifying in video game history
A small childhood trauma like thousands of others, this jumpscare from a flash game for children terrified an entire generation.
Remember Horror Channels? This sweet and tender trend of the 2000s during which your inbox was teeming with long messages that made slightly feverish 12-year-olds shudder with fear and which generally began with something like: “Send this message to five other people or you will die in excruciating pain…”. It was at the same time that prankish parents were having fun showing their children this Dailymotion video of a car driving on a country lane when suddenly a zombified face appeared on the screen. A must-have in the big fashion for jumpscares on the internet, this cinematographic technique today used indiscriminately as an easy device to make the spectator jump out of his seat, sometimes leaving him to curse with embarrassment. The site Screamer Wiki, the unofficial catalog of all Internet scares, is witness to a hundred gags, pages, flash games and other sensations from an era during which HTML codes were still archaic and jumps were so easy. We all probably have a handful of screamers that our brain has never been able to erase from its memory. Mine is that of the “big man” from the film It Follow who appears in a doorway (those who have seen him obviously know what I’m talking about). For others, it’s that of a nightmarish apparition in a Scooby-Doo flash game.
The Scooby-Doo trauma
Since 1969, Scooby-Doo has undeniably been one of the most enduring animated franchises, maintaining a reputation almost intact over the generations thanks to around ten feature films and just as many television series. Every episode, it’s the same refrain: Sammy, Scooby-Doo, Fred, Vera and Daphne embark in their Mystery Machine to new haunted places to explore. A myriad of wild theories have emerged from the popularity of the saga; it was said that Scooby was a Soviet space dog, that the whole gang was actually part of a cult, or that Fred always took the wheel of the Mystery Machine because its real owner, Sammy, was too high to do so . So many extravagant hypotheses from fans which were embellished with a slew of more or less credible arguments. But until now, no one has managed to explain why, in 2004, a Scooby-Doo flash game intended for children hid a jumpscare that was as frightening as it was disturbing.
Scooby Doo: Escape From The Coolsonian is a browser game with point-and-click gameplay as we saw hundreds of others on sites like Miniplay and jeux.fr in the early 2000s. No developer is listed in the credits, the software is simply released without much ceremony to players to promote the long- Scooby-Doo 2 film in theaters, which marks the return of director and screenwriter James Gunn at the helm. Freshly become the local celebrities of Coolsville, Scooby-Doo, Sammy, Velma, Daphne and Fred are invited to the inauguration of the Coolson Criminology Museum which houses some new mysteries to be solved. The principle of the game is quite simple and takes the framework of the feature film: Scooby-Doo is locked in the museum and must find the exit through three exhibitions, at the risk of ending up in the hands of a monster simply made of cotton candy. At a very specific moment in the game, it is possible to open a sarcophagus with a crowbar, the interaction of which reveals a black screen on which is displayed a sentence so small and illegible that it forces you to squint. eyes and bring your head closer to the screen. And it was at this moment that a white skeletal face with atrocious yellow pupils appeared, releasing a horrible shrill laugh.. And in a few seconds, thousands of children find themselves traumatized in their chairs.
But why ?
The Scooby Doo jumpscare is still an unforgettable childhood memory in the minds of adults who share their past fright on discussion networks like Reddit, without anyone ever being able to justify the developers’ approach. “Using the crowbar unexpectedly, for example earlier than expected, was considered cheating (because you are supposed to complete the given puzzle) and jumpscare is a punishment for that”, suggests an Internet user. Quite a punishment for a slightly clever kid; some will even say that the approach is cruel: “It’s grim. Not only is it a jumpscare in a children’s flash game, but it’s also a relatively scary face. That would make anyone jump. But on top of that, they screw up the little child who is playing by making him read a little blurry text and drawing him towards the screen!”. Another recalls another death scare caused by a Flash game called Garfield’s Scary Scavenger Hunt 2 and adapted from the stories of the big red tomcat. In the same vein, the player is asked to study an image very closely before a horror appears on the screen. Perhaps there really isn’t any tangible explanation for these jumpscares that unfairly frightened children; they’re probably just a symptom of a crazy 2000s trend of online scares for the thrill of adrenaline.