The Clock Tower series reached the West in pieces. The second and third games crossed the Pacific, the spin-offs crossed, and yet the one that started everything stayed in Japan for decades. Clock Tower: The First Fear, the 1997 PlayStation port of Human Entertainment’s Super Famicom original, received a complete English fan translation in May 2015, courtesy of a translator working as arcraith. It closed one of survival horror’s longest-running gaps: the first appearance of Scissorman, playable in English at last on the version Human itself had expanded for the PlayStation.
Clock Tower The First Fear in English at Last
The original Clock Tower launched on the Super Famicom in September 1995 and was never released outside Japan in its own era. It put players in control of Jennifer Simpson, an orphan adopted into a remote mansion, and replaced combat with something more frightening: a point-and-click interface, a heroine who could run, hide and improvise, and a small boy with enormous scissors who appeared at the worst possible moments and could not be killed, only escaped. Bobby Barrows, the Scissorman, stalked and then, when he found you, the game became a frantic search for the one hiding place or weapon the room might offer.
The PlayStation port followed on July 17, 1997, retitled The First Fear, and it was more than a straight conversion. Human added new scenes and FMV sequences and adjusted the presentation for the CD era, making this the definitive contemporary version of the game. It also stayed exactly as Japanese as the original. Western players who wanted the complete story had to wait for the fan translation community, twice over.
Two Translations, Sixteen Years Apart
The first rescue came in 2001, when Aeon Genesis translated the Super Famicom version and introduced the game to English-speaking horror fans in the form most of them still know. The PlayStation version, though, was the richer text, and it waited until May 2015. The patch, catalogued at Romhacking.net, was the work of a translator using the name arcraith, and it covered the port’s expanded script, including the material that did not exist in the game Aeon Genesis had translated. Releases like this rarely make headlines, but they are how the medium’s history actually gets completed: one volunteer, one script, one long-untranslated edition at a time.
Why did the port deserve its own translation rather than a footnote? Because The First Fear is the version that shows what Human wanted the game to become on stronger hardware. The added scenes change the texture of the story, the mansion feels more present, and the multiple endings, ranked from S down through the failures, reward the careful, unpanicked play the design asks for. A player coming from the sequels can finally see the series’ grammar being invented, room by room.
How the Fear Actually Works
The mechanics repay attention, because so much modern horror descends from them. Jennifer explores the mansion through a cursor, examining furniture, gathering items and solving the small logistical puzzles of a house that wants her dead. When Scissorman appears, the game shifts key: a portrait of Jennifer flashes with panic, and in that state commands can fail and her stamina drains, so a player mashing inputs in fright will be punished by a heroine doing exactly the same. Hiding places are contextual and finite. Some rooms offer a bed to slide under, a curtain to stand behind, a trap to spring; others offer nothing, and the only answer is to run and hope the pursuit music ends. Scissorman himself erupts from scenery, from bathtubs, boxes and doorways, in set-pieces scripted to break whatever route the player thought was safe.
Layered over the chases is a structure of choices and discoveries that sorts Jennifer’s story into a ladder of endings, the best of them stamped S. Who survives the night, what Jennifer learns about the family that adopted her and the twins at the mansion’s heart, and whether she escapes at all are settled by what the player examined, whom they trusted and how they handled the final confrontations. In 1995, on a cartridge, from a studio better known for wrestling games and occult adventures, that ambition was extraordinary. The PlayStation expansion let Human furnish more of it, and arcraith’s translation lets English players weigh all of it.
Human Entertainment and Hifumi Kono
The game came from an unlikely stable. Human Entertainment was a mid-sized Japanese developer-publisher known in the West mostly for the Fire Pro Wrestling series, but at home it had a flair for the occult and the unsettling, and Clock Tower was the creation of director Hifumi Kono, who designed the game around a simple inversion: the player should feel like the prey in a slasher film, not its hero. The scissors were the masterstroke, a weapon too absurd to be cool and therefore genuinely frightening, wielded by an enemy whose appearances the game doles out like jump scares in a well-cut film. Kono carried the concept through the sequels, and the series’ identity, chase, hide, survive, never really changed, because the first game had already stated it completely.
History eventually caught up with the original. After decades in which the West knew the first Clock Tower mainly through fan translations like Aeon Genesis’s and arcraith’s, the game received an official English release in 2024 as Clock Tower: Rewind, an enhanced edition that finally sold Jennifer’s first night in the mansion to the world. Rewind exists because the fan era kept the game famous; you do not remaster a title nobody can play. The translations were the bridge that carried Clock Tower across the thirty years between its release and its official homecoming, and the PlayStation version’s 2015 patch is the span of that bridge horror historians should thank.
The Horror Game That Taught a Genre to Run Away
It is hard to overstate how unusual Clock Tower’s design was in 1995. Survival horror was coalescing around inventory puzzles and scarce ammunition, and here was a game whose central mechanic was weakness. Jennifer cannot fight Scissorman to a standstill. She can hide under a bed, set a trap, climb, flee, and when panic sets in the interface itself gets harder to use. Modern indie horror built on the same foundations now fills entire storefronts, and the line back to this mansion in Norway is direct.
The 2015 translation arrived in a good moment, then, just as the genre was rediscovering the virtues of the helpless protagonist. Clock Tower: The First Fear in English is not a curiosity for completists. It is a founding document of horror design, fully readable at last, in the edition its makers chose to expand. If Scissorman’s scissors have ever chased you through the later games, this is where the sound of them began.
Play it today and the patience of the design is what lingers. The mansion is small by modern standards, the cursor slow, the scares rationed, and yet the dread accumulates in a way louder games envy, because The First Fear understands that fear lives in the interval before the event. That understanding was designed in 1995, expanded in 1997, and made legible to the West in 2015 by a volunteer with a script file. Horror history is full of lost chapters. This one, at least, can be read cover to cover.