Retro spotlight: The House of the Dead

On-rails shooting galleries were not new with Sega’s The House of the Dead, not by a long shot. Konami released Lethal Enforces into arcades in 1992, five years prior. Namco dropped the first Time Crisis in 1995, the same year as Time Warner Interactive’s Area 51; Sega’s own Virtua Cop beat those to market by over a year. And arcade games utilizing a light gun for shooting had been a thing for two decades already by the time Sega unleashed zombies on the masses — even 8-bit home systems had their own light gun accessories.And yet, Sega managed to do plenty that stood out here in a well-established market, between the branching pathways based on your success or failures, your action and inaction, and enemies that shambled toward you. As planner and director Takashi Oda explained in an interview in Sega Saturn Magazine in 1997, what made The House of the Dead different from, say, Virtua Cop was that enemies moved toward you rather than just being the graphical equivalent of a carnival’s…