28 Developers Share Their Picks For Best Horror Games Ever

We ranked the Top 25 Horror Games of All Time for our recent Game Informer issue celebrating everything horror. But we're not the only ones interested in naming and ranking the best the genre has to offer – 28 developers from the game industry have shared their individual Top 5 Horror Games of All Time lists with us.

The participating developers include the creators of games like Left 4 Dead, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Resident Evil, Dead Space, Alan Wake, Borderlands, and more. Have fun finding your favorite developers, comparing their picks to yours, and looking for the most popular choices. Check out our analysis of these developers' choices at the end of the article to see which game received the most votes, discrepancies between our list and the developers' picks, and more.

Also be sure to check out our other developer choice-driven article where 32 different devs rank their favorite horror films of all time.

Thomas Grip

Frictional Games Creative Director
Best Known For: Penumbra, Amnesia

1. Silent Hill
2. Silent Hill 2
3. Resident Evil
4. System Shock 2
5. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Chris Ashton

Turtle Rock Studios Design Director and Co-Founder
Best Known For: Left 4 Dead, Evolve

1. System Shock 2
2. Resident Evil
3. The Walking Dead Season 1
4. Slender: The Eight Pages
5. Limbo

Bruce Straley

Naughty Dog Game Director
Best Known For: Uncharted, The Last of Us

1. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly
2. Resident Evil 4
3. Dead Space 2
4. Condemned: Criminal Origins
5. Outlast

Phil Robb

Turtle Rock Studios Creative Director and Co-Founder
Best Known For: Left 4 Dead, Evolve

1. State of Decay
2. Left 4 Dead
3. The Walking Dead Season 1
4. Resident Evil
5. Limbo

Neil Druckmann

Naughty Dog Creative Director
Best Known For: Uncharted, The Last of Us

1. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly
2. Manhunt
3. Silent Hill 2
4. Resident Evil
5. Condemned: Criminal Origins

Steve Papoutsis

Visceral Games General Manager
Best Known For: Dead Space, Battlefield: Hardline

1. Resident Evil
2. Doom
3. Dead Space
4. System Shock 2
5. The Walking Dead Season 1

Ted Price

Insomniac Games President
Best Known For: Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, Sunset Overdrive

1. Resident Evil 4
2. Doom
3. Left 4 Dead
4. Dead Rising 3
5. Parasite Eve

Drew Murray

Insomniac Games Game Director
Best Known For: Resistance, Sunset Overdrive

1. Resident Evil 4
2. Call of Cthulhu (pen-and-paper)
3. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
4. Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly
5. Alan Wake

Swery65

Access Games Director
Best Known For: Deadly Premonition, D4

1. Splatterhouse (1988)
2. Nanashi no Game
3. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
4. Alone in the Dark (1992)
5. Silent Hill

Matt Gilgenbach

Infinitap Games President
Best Known For: Neverending Nightmares

1. Silent Hill 2
2. Silent Hill 3
3. Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly
4. Deadly Premonition
5. Fatal Frame

Gary Napper

Creative Assembly Lead Game Designer
Best Known For: Alien Isolation

1. Dead Space
2. Siren: Blood Curse
3. Dead Rising
4. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
5. Dead Island

Garth DeAngelis

Firaxis Games Senior Producer
Best Known For: XCOM: Enemy Unknown

1. Silent Hill
2. Resident Evil
3. The Thing
4. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
5. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines

Mike de Plater

Monolith Productions Director of Design
Best Known For: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

1. Silent Hill 2
2. Dead Space
3. Resident Evil 4
4. Limbo
5. Manhunt

Steve Gaynor

The Fullbright Company Designer and Co-Founder
Best Known For: BioShock 2, Gone Home

1. Resident Evil 4
2. Silent Hill 2
3. System Shock 2
4. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
5. Fatal Frame

Kevin Stephens

Monolith Productions Studio Head
Best Known For: F.E.A.R., Condemned, Aliens vs. Predator 2

1. System Shock 2
2. Left 4 Dead
3. Limbo
4. Doom
5. Dead Space

Matt Allen

Monolith Productions Director of Technical Art
Best Known For: F.E.A.R., Condemned

1. Silent Hill 2
2. System Shock 2
3. Dead Space
4. Fatal Frame
5. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Michiteru Okabe

Capcom Producer
Best Known For: Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, Resident Evil: Revelations 2

1. Resident Evil
2. Siren
3. Dead Space
4. Fatal Frame
5. Silent Hill

Yoshiaki Hirabayashi

Capcom Producer
Best Known For: Resident Evil (2002), RE 4, 5, 6

1. Resident Evil
2. The Last of Us
3. Dead Space
4. Siren
5. Enemy Zero

Richard Rouse III

Paranoid Productions Director, Designer, and Writer
Best Known For: The Suffering

1. Silent Hill 2
2. State of Decay
3. The Walking Dead Season 1
4. The Lurking Horror
5. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Akira Yamaoka

Composer
Best Known For: Silent Hill, Shadows of the Damned

1. Silent Hill
2. Siren
3. Dead Space
4. Manhunt
5. Prototype

Randy Pitchford

Gearbox Software President and CEO
Best Known For: Borderlands, Battleborn

1. Doom
2. BioShock
3. Resident Evil 4
4. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem
5. Splatterhouse (1988)

Mikey Neumann

Gearbox Software Chief Creative Champion
Best Known For: Brothers in Arms, Borderlands

1. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem
2. Kim Kardasian: Hollywood
3. Silent Hill 2
4. Left 4 Dead
5. Condemned: Criminal Origins

Oskari Häkkinen

Remedy Games Head of Franchise Development
Best Known For: Alan Wake, Quantum Break

1. Silent Hill
2. Resident Evil
3. Dead Space
4. The Walking Dead Season 1
5. Limbo

Suda51

Grasshopper Manufacture CEO
Best Known For: No More Heroes, Killer7, Shadows of the Damned

1. Shadows of the Damned
2. Fatal Frame
3. Siren
4. Silent Hill 2
5. The Evil Within

Glen Schofield

Sledgehammer Games Co-Founder and General Manager
Best Known For: Dead Space, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

1. Silent Hill 2
2. Resident Evil 2
3. Condemned: Criminal Origins
4. System Shock 2
5. Fatal Frame

Dean Evans

Ubisoft Creative Director
Best Known For: Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

1. Minecraft
2. Silent Hill 2
3. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
4. Resident Evil
5. Condemned: Criminal Origins

Dan Pinchbeck

Creative Director The Chinese Room
Best Known For: Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs

1. Silent Hill 2
2. Metro 2033
3. Penumbra: Black Plague
4. Resident Evil
5. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Alex Tintor

Founder/Director at Blue Isle Studios
Best Known For: Slender: The Arrival

1. Resident Evil (Gamecube Version)
2. Silent Hill
3. F.E.A.R
4. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
5. S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl

Breaking Down the Developers' Top 5 Lists

After looking through the lists and tallying up the votes, here are some interesting talking points we discovered:

• The top vote-getting game was Resident Evil, racking up 12 votes. Silent Hill 2 and Dead Space were tied at second place with 9 votes. Silent Hill is fourth place with 8 votes, and Resident Evil 4 scored 7 votes.
• The developers' combined top three games match our Top 25 Horror Games of All Time list perfectly.
• The developers' aggregated top five games only includes three franchises: Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Dead Space.
• Four games were received five votes each: Fatal Frame, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Siren: Blood Curse, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.
• Resident Evil is credited with kickstarting the horror genre, and after over two decades it's still king according to these developers.
• Capcom cleaned up as the most popular publisher, securing 24 votes between the Resident Evil and Dead Rising series.
• Games for our Top 25 list that didn't receive a single vote from developers: The Suffering, Sanitarium, DayZ, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Blood.
• Some developer-selected games that Game Informer didn't necessarily qualify as horror for consideration in our list: Limbo, Doom, BioShock, and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow.
• A few oddballs appeared within the lists: Minecraft, Prototype, and Kim Kardasian: Hollywood.
• Despite the current trend of first-person horror games, third-person games dominated the top of the list.
• The most-popular indie horror games are Limbo and Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
• The most-voted for first-person horror games were System Shock 2 and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which both edged out Condemned: Criminal Origins by a single vote.
• While Resident Evil is the most popular series on the list, no developer voted for a game released in the series later than 2005.

---

We have a full month of horror-themed coverage set up for gameinformer.com, complete with video features and more. Be sure to visit our hub to see all the exclusive stories.