YoIt’s one of the most memorable introductions in video game history: As part of a five-person team sent to investigate a communications blackout aboard the mining ship USG Ishimura, engineer Isaac Clarke turns on the ship’s computer as his colleagues walk by. nervous. Suddenly, the lights go out and dark monstrosities appear from the walls, impaling two team members as Clarke watches helplessly before turning on him, pursuing him unarmed into the bowels of the Ishimura, where even more horrors await.
Fifteen years, two sequels, and countless books, comics, and spin-offs later, Dead Space has become synonymous with video game sci-fi horror. Their enemies, the zombie-like necromorphs, are hideously metamorphosed humans, perverted by the machinations of the Marker, a strange alien artifact that has spawned a disturbingly familiar religion known as Unitology. It’s an experience that few gamers forget and that new fans are discovering this year thanks to the new version of Motive, but it almost wasn’t made.
Before it became the behemoth we all know and love/hate (delete as appropriate) in the mid-2000s, Dead Space publisher Electronic Arts seemed mostly content to license movies and sports franchises to make them in video games through its internal developer. , redwood shores. The PGA brand’s James Bond, Lord of the Rings and Tiger Woods rides had all been hits, and Redwood Shores general manager Glen Schofield felt he had enough clout to push the front office to let him work at a totally original game.
“Glen went up to the bosses and said, ‘I want to try something of my own,’” recalls Ian Milham, Dead Space’s art director. “We had delivered enough on those licensed properties that we had a bit of political capital. But that leash was short. We had maybe six months to produce something good. There was a lot of pressure because these opportunities were so rare; on the contrary, there wasn’t much pressure either, because we had a great shot and nothing to lose. But if you had asked me when we started, he would have said the odds were three to one that we would get canceled before we even made it.”
A huge horror fan, Schofield wanted a terrifying, visceral game that would test players’ resolve. “Most of the crew were huge horror fans,” recalls senior producer Chuck Beaver; the key influences were Alien and Event Horizon. A pure horror game set in space became the concept, including a brief plan to set the game within a prison world (a plot that would resurface in last year’s The Callisto Protocol).
But then along came Resident Evil 4. Capcom’s fourth entry in its blockbuster survival horror franchise redefined third-person video gaming. As with Epic’s Gears of War series (and many others), the Dead Space team embraced Resident Evil 4’s over-the-shoulder camera angle and focused, story-driven action. “Resi 4 in space – it’s a very fast and powerful Hollywood-style launch,” laughs Milham.
Starting in January 2006, Redwood Shores focused on differentiating its game from other contemporary sci-fi shooters like Halo and Gears. In May 2007, Electronic Arts finally gave the green light to the project. Says Milham: “Our artistic pillars, our color palette, our designs—everything kept in mind the idea that when you look at any screenshot, you know it’s a horror game.” Another design decision was to make sure the USG Ishimura wasn’t some shiny, fancy spaceship. “We were looking for architectural styles that the player would accept; our idea was that you have to believe in something to be really scared,” says Milham. This is a work ship full of mechanical items that have practical uses in your mining activities; Like Alien’s 1979 Nostromo, it’s all rugged and hard-edged, built for the rigors of deep-space quarrying.
The equipment also inspired the most disgusting and fun part of Dead Space combat: dismemberment. “We thought: the environment is a weapon, and he is an engineer, he will use mining tools,” Beaver recalls. Welding, pushing, pulling, and cutting tools form the foundation of Dead Space’s arsenal, and one in particular stands out. “The plasma cutter is almost too fancy for its own good,” Beaver smiles. “It’s so perfect, almost the best weapon for the whole game.” Cutting off his limbs is the only way to kill Necromorphs, and Beaver is right: nothing gets the job done as efficiently and cleanly as the first weapon Isaac acquires.
It turns out that these hideous enemies are not random aliens, but the former crew of the huge mining ship, turned into ghostly Necromorphs. The work of designer Ben Wanat, these slimy monsters were influenced by John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s films: pieces of themselves stick out at unnatural angles, reminding the player of their origin. Milham recalls creative director Bret Robbins telling them, “Okay, now we’re going to do a variant on the enemy where shooting them in the body is not only less effective, but makes the problem worse.” The result was Pregnants, wobbly beasts that spawn dozens of smaller creatures when shot in the belly.
Believability aside, the most effective way that horror video games (and movies) inspire terror is immersion, to the point where you forget you’re in a cozy living room. “Every decision we made was vetted against that understanding, does this make it more or less immersive?” says Castor. Passing this scrutiny was the health bar on Isaac’s spine, pop-up messages, and a holographic inventory. The player could no longer pause a battle to spend a few minutes checking his weapons and health. Instead, everything in Dead Space happens in real time; all the tropes that remind you that it’s a game are removed, plunging the player into Isaac’s nightmare.
That level of immersion, and the dedication of your colleagues, is one of the main reasons for the game’s success. Few people, with the lights off and headphones on, could have completed it without their heart rates skyrocketing. “We had an incredibly strong focus on what the game was going to be: make one of the scariest games ever,” Beaver recalls. Milham remembers that the players told each other not only what happens, but also “how they felt when they were playing it, the memories they have or the heart palpitations they had.”
The brilliant audio design was another facet of its terrifying: even in the quietest of times, there’s always the noise of something. in some place – just like his less is more attitude, with fewer enemies to kill than the average marksman. This was unique at the time and was the main source of arguments in an otherwise focused development. “There was a lot of conflict about adding monsters or making the hallways boring,” Milham explains. “But when you look at a segment as a designer, it’s hard to objectively assess whether or not it’s working in context. A lot of my job was to build trust with the rest of the team just to let the art team finish and not try to preemptively fix it.”
Dead Space launched in the fall of 2008 and battled against big titles like Fallout 3, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Call of Duty: World at War, and the original Electronic Arts game Mirror’s Edge. But Redwood Shores had worked hard to make its quirky little sci-fi horror game the best it could be. He had survived his trial by the publisher: “We thought our stuff had to be unbelievably good,” says Milham, but he looked as dead as a splattered Necromorph when judged by the public.
“Not a lot of people were playing Dead Space when it came out,” says Milham. “But what he had were really long legs. People discovered it months or years later, after those other great games had disappeared. Lack of faith from its publisher and a small marketing budget meant Dead Space built its following quietly, spread by the most powerful and elusive marketing method: word of mouth. “We were jealous of those big projects that would definitely come out and get big ad budgets,” Milham admits. “But in the end, we survived.”
