While Nintendo had cultivated an image as one of the biggest, most family-friendly video game companies in the entire global gaming industry but, by the Nintendo 64 era, the company began to quietly move to shift this perception somewhat and appeal to older, more mature gamers. The N64 boasted a significant library of first-person shooter and horror titles as part of this strategy but it wasn't until the subsequent GameCube era that Nintendo would deliver one of its most unapologetically mature titles ever with Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.
More than just the first M-rated video game published by Nintendo, Eternal Darkness also remains the scariest game that Nintendo has published to date. Eternal Darkness is a second-party game, developed by Silicon Knights, that was originally intended to be released for the N64 before the development team decided to make it an early title for the upcoming home console the GameCube and take advantage of its more advanced technical capabilities.
Rather than serve as an outright survival horror game, like the Resident Evil franchise, the developers leaned more into psychological horror for Eternal Darkness while taking inspiration from influential horror author H.P. Lovecraft. The 2002 video game followed a young woman named Alex Roivas who returns to her grandfather's mansion in Rhode Island after his horrific death. As Alex reads her grandfather's research on the Ancients, old gods festering in the hidden parts of the world, players follow characters throughout the course of history involved in the Ancients' longstanding plot for resurgence to dominate humanity.
Apart from the exploration and puzzle-solving gameplay as players face the Ancients and occult book the Tome of Eternal Darkness across several centuries and an ensemble cast, Eternal Darkness is perhaps best known for its "sanity meter" feature. Patented by Nintendo, a character's sanity has its own gauge alongside health and magic, with sanity depleted by scripted events and witnessing the mind-shattering monsters that the Ancients command. The lower the sanity meter, the more likely the character is to be subjected to a variety of hallucinations before snapping back to reality.
What makes Eternal Darkness all the more unsettling is that some of these hallucinations are designed to directly mess with the player rather than the characters themselves. The game's volume controls are deliberately altered or the screen is swarmed by flies as the characters' sanity steadily degrades over the course of gameplay. The game could fake out players with the GameCube's reset screen or even present the dreaded blue screen of death to make them think for a moment that there has been a sudden hardware failure before resuming gameplay as if nothing had happened at all. If there is ever a proper way to play Eternal Darkness, it's with the lights out and letting one's sanity meter run as precariously low as possible to experience these sanity effects and hallucinations in all their glory.
While Eternal Darkness was widely acclaimed among critics upon its initial release and has seen even greater appreciation over time, the game was not a particularly strong seller. Plans for a sequel or spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness have repeatedly stalled out, with Silicon Knights shutting down in 2013 though many of Eternal Darkness' development team have expressed interest in developing a follow-up of sorts.
For its part, Nintendo has continually renewed its trademark for Eternal Darkness as recently as 2020, though no new game or re-release has ever been made. In the meantime, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem showcases just how dark and scary Nintendo was willing to go with its second-party properties remains something of a hidden gem from the GameCube era that will hopefully resurface in some capacity beyond the random Super Smash Bros. Ultimate sticker.