[static]
- I started thinking about Dead
Space around 2005 and 2006.
The hardware at the time, I wanna say,
was we were just going to I think
the second version of the Xbox
and the PlayStation 2, maybe 3.
Dead Space was I wanted to
do something kind of special,
so in order to do a prototype
that everybody would approve
we actually took the dev kit of the Xbox,
which can hold a lot more
memory, a lot more of everything,
and we filled it with just three rooms,
with speeding lights
and fans and everything,
'cause we wanted to just
see what it would look like,
what we really wanted would look like,
and then we found out
after that it was easy
to actually give it to the engineers
and then they knew exactly what we wanted.
So actually by accident
we found a good way
to develop and create newer engines,
'cause they saw what we wanted
and they were able to make it.
I had just come off of
directing From Russia With Love,
which was James Bond.
We went with From Russia With Love
because they were in
between Bonds at the time,
so we went and got Sean Connery.
Before that I did Lord of
the Rings Return of the King.
In between I worked on a
couple, here and there,
go jump on Godfather,
we need some production.
But I directed James Bond just before it.
So it was good third
person action experience
and I already had had it,
but it was good to have
that because then we could
take the cameras and everything,
stuff we had learned from
that and bring that over,
even though they was much much
more advanced on Dead Space.
On Dead Space my goal
was to scare the heck
out of one person.
I wanted to make the scariest game.
You have to go in and go I wanna make
the scariest game ever.
You don't go in and say I
wanna make the third scariest.
But I also wanted a game that was like
exactly what I wanted to make.
You know I had made a
lot of licensed games,
I'd made a lot of games that
people wanted me to make,
and I was happy doing 'em
'cause it's making video games.
But this one I wanted to really make
my creative side just really happy.
I think you can see it in the end project,
it was just really a hand crafted game.
Resident Evil 4, it's one of
my favorite games of all time.
That giant game and the mood,
and the feeling of dread in some places
and the oppression.
But then when I got out of a situation
I felt so good about it, right,
that I really just loved Resident Evil 4.
I love Resident Evil 2 and 3 as well.
Prior to Dead Space, I had just
finished making James Bond,
From Russia With Love, and
that was a third person
action game where...
It was great.
I got to work with Sean Connery, you know,
just starting to work with
some really great actors.
Right before that I had jumped on,
I believe it was the Third Age
and directed the co-opt version of that.
And then before that though
I had spent my entire time
on Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
I started right from the
beginning on that one
and that was a great game.
It had some scary moments in it,
some darker moments like in Shelob's cave.
That was sort of like
getting used to some of that.
I'd made that kind of game
a little bit, you know,
in some of the stuff that I'd
made over at Crystal Dynamics,
and so I really wanted to get back to
making something that was scary.
Some of my influences to make Dead Space,
from the game industry was definitely
the Resident Evil series,
and Resident Evil 4 had just come out
when we were starting on this game
and Resident Evil 4 was
actually one of the things
that I would say to the team is
we're gonna make Resident Evil in space,
and you got it right away.
Oh, you know, space ship or
he's on a plane or whatever,
but you understood what
we were gonna make.
I find that Resident Evil 4 is one of
my top five games of all time,
and I just like the mood.
The mood was suppressive
sometimes, it was dreadful,
but it was...
I don't know, I just got caught up in it.
And whether you were in the village
or inside the buildings
or wherever it was,
I was always worried about
what was around the corner,
but I always wanted to see
what was around the corner too,
I wanted to be in the world.
And I think that was a giant game,
and if I remember it was on two disks,
and so there was a lot
of playing in that one.
And then there was a couple of enemies,
I'm not gonna remember the name
but there was a blind enemy,
and that thing was so scary and so hard
that when I finally got
it I was like cheering,
but then I don't know, what's it,
20 minutes later they
throw three in a room.
And that's a different kind of scary,
there's this tension in playing
and then there's this like running away.
But yeah the game had all different
types of scare moments in there
and that's one of the things
that I really looked at.
Resident Evil 4 was
probably one of the places
where we got the most,
I guess, inspiration.
There was a lot of movies though.
But with Resident Evil 4 one
thing that we wanted to do
was the first thing I said is like
let's get to parity
with the main character,
meaning like it moves the same speed
or close to it and the moves,
and as soon as we get to parity
you make the player walk and shoot.
That was the big innovation
in the horror games
at that point was, you
know, in Resident Evil
you walk and then you wanna
shoot, you gotta stop,
and that's what made it really scary
but I also thought that
sometimes took me out,
'cause I'm like no I wanna
be running and shooting,
I wanna get away from the character.
So that's what we did.
That was also one of
the biggest fear moments
'cause it's, for me, making
the game, sorry for the pun,
but I was worried the player would then
run through the game.
That was just really was a worry
that we probably had for a year.
We let people play it
and they would play slow
and we're like yeah you're
doing that on purpose.
Then after a while we
realized no people are going
through the game slow,
it's perfect for us.
Actually in all the Resident Evils,
when you're walking you're not shooting.
You have to stop and
place, shoot, turn, shoot.
If I wanna run I gotta run,
but I can't shoot at the same time.
And that made for a really
dreadful experience.
I mean dreadful was what
they wanted in a good way.
But I also thought that
it kind of took me out,
here and there, a little
out of the reality,
it's like no I can run and
shoot, I wanna walk and shoot.
So we started with our
character, with Isaac,
and he would walk, stop and
shoot, the very beginning,
and as soon as we got the
moves and all that working
we made him start walking.
I didn't want him to
stop and have to shoot,
I wanted you to be able to turn, shoot,
just like you would in real life.
It made even more sense because it was
a third person experience, right,
where you saw the character.
So seeing, to me, I thought
when I saw my character
just stop and have to shoot,
that just was a nice place to innovate.
Video games is what pushed me
to wanna make another video game,
and I think because I
thought that video games
hadn't yet become as scary
as movies, at least overall.
Now I will say that Silent Hill,
the town and the whistle
and just the nurses
and oh my god the feeling in that room
when it would go from nice to awful,
was one of the best moments
in video game history
for a scary...
Also, the moment that the dog
jumped out in Resident Evil 1
still goes down as probably the top five
scariest moments in video game history,
and I think it always will.
It's one of those things
that is brought up
whenever you're discussing almost anything
and jumping in a video game.
In many of our meetings
that scene comes up.
There were so many influences,
there always are with anything, you know,
you're looking at so many different things
but movies were sort of
the key for me to look at
for scaring in video
games because at the time
I wanted to make the scariest video game,
so I was looking back at
some of the video games
but when I was looking for scare moments
or you know, things
that would influence me
in creating tension or dread
or oppression or whatever it is,
I looked to movies.
There was just so much more that I could
get out of the movies.
I could watch a movie for two hours,
maybe get three or four
good things out of it,
and so I watched hundreds of
movies, two, three hundred.
I watched horror, I
watched science fiction,
and horror science fiction.
I mean that for me is, at the
top there is Event Horizon,
Alien, The Thing, the first,
well it's the second Thing,
that was John Carpenter's The Thing,
was a big inspiration.
But just the idea of a
spaceship going to hell
in Event Horizon just always is like
man, that's something just crazy,
and I wanted to create
something like that,
something that was science
fiction, which I've always loved.
I was a member of the Association
for Science Fiction
Artists a long time ago.
Like I can remember in
college they would say
you have to do a western picture
and I did a Space Cowboy.
I had to once do the Mona
Lisa and I made her an alien.
So like all my stuff has always been,
you know, science fiction somehow.
I found Event Horizon to be successful
in creating loneliness.
It felt like the character,
no matter where they went,
even if there's two of them,
they felt alone and kind of helpless,
even if they had...
Maybe vulnerable is a better word,
'cause even if they had a
weapon they felt vulnerable.
And then the storytelling
that was just done
in the background,
there's one scene where,
and I'm gonna get part of it wrong
but I think it's Sam Neill,
or one of the characters,
is standing with their
back to the cockpit,
in the cockpit, and a light goes on,
and it kind of blinks and you see that
the glass behind it is
just covered in blood
and it's not normal looking,
it looks like just
something awful's happened,
and this character here has no idea
that anything has happened.
And just that like you know,
you're like oh no no no no no,
and I wanted to get that feeling somehow
all throughout the game.
We wanted you to have
moments of relaxation
but not too much.
Alien was another huge influence.
Obviously Alien and Aliens
and the third Alien,
they were all a big part of it,
and actually Alien 3, I
believe that was Fincher,
we really looked at his lighting,
he did some really great lighting
and there's some mood pieces,
and there was also the fact
that they were very confined
and we wanted that same
feeling in Dead Space.
But really going back to Alien one,
the first Alien without the number,
that was a horror movie,
a horror movie in space.
The first time I remember watching it
and they land on the planet,
I had never seen a planet like that.
Up to now you have to remember that
a lot of science fiction was Star Wars
and Star Trek and I think...
There was a lot of good, good
science fiction coming out
but they didn't go to this
place that was really dark.
And I knew the second I sat
down and saw the first scene
when they're landing on the planet
that this is gonna be something special.
The Thing was the exact same
feeling I had with Alien.
Going into The Thing
and not really knowing
a heck of a lot about it.
You know, I knew there
was one before it in,
I guess in the 50s I wanna say,
and that was pretty scary at the time.
But I didn't know what
to expect with this.
When I saw the first, I forgot
if it was a dog or a human,
turn into The Thing and then
there was no rules after that,
it was whatever it looked like.
And the head that fell on the
ground started walking away
well we had one of those in Dead Space.
There was an article in Variety
where John Carpenter was talking about
what would be the one video game
he would like to make into a movie
and he said, without
hesitation, Dead Space.
So I got to meet John
Carpenter a couple weeks later,
we went down and I had lunch with him.
And I thanked him for his inspirations
and said, "I hope someday
we can work together."
While creating Dead Space I watched
all kinds of movies like I talked about.
But there was a tendency
in like the movies
made in America where a
lot of the Hollywood movies
ended where a person got away,
and they lived, they got the bad guy,
or it was Mike Myers and
you thought he was dead.
But some of the European
movies and the Korean
and the Japanese movies at that time
were just like if everyone
dies it doesn't matter.
So I started watching Miike, from Japan,
and I think I'm pronouncing it right,
and he does things with needles
and in the tongue or under the tongue
or he just does some crazy stuff.
So I watched a lot of his.
Oh by the way, he makes a cameo in Hostel.
I guess that Eli Roth was
also a huge fan of his,
but Miike has his own little
place in horror history.
I watched a lot of the old Italian stuff,
but what was happening at the time
was some of the French movies at that time
were sophisticated, really well done,
but done differently.
Like there's a move
called Martyrs that I put
as my number one top
horror movie of all time
just because it's so
different and sophisticated
and yet by the end of it I
was affected for a few days
where you just kinda go wow,
where was I for that last hour or so?
Then they came up with
another one called Frontiers,
and another one called Inside.
And Inside was relentless.
I'd never seen anything like this,
I'm not gonna give too much away,
but there's a nurse there who's insane
and she wouldn't give up no
matter what happened to her.
And you're just like no,
no, she's gotta be dead,
but she wasn't.
And you can see that in Dead Space
in which you can cut off their legs,
you can cut off their arms,
but they still have one arm,
these necromorphs are gonna keep coming
because that was something
that scared me in Inside
and also in Chainsaw
Massacre where he's just
running through the
woods and would not stop.
Well Martyrs is very
intelligent in its way.
They talk about history and the past
and what I mean is that there
is a group of wealthy people
who have seen pictures in the past,
and these pictures are of
concentration camp victims
or people that have almost,
they should be dead but they're not
and they have a smile on their face.
And they wanted to know why
they had a smile on their face,
because they thought
that maybe they had gone
somewhere else and they had come back,
they had been so close to death.
So what this group was
doing was torturing people
and doing it in a sophisticated way.
It sounds crazy right
but the way it was done.
And at some point it's just
really hard to like see it
because the star of
the show, of the movie,
she gets tortured and she actually
gets that smile on her face.
And so the ending is she
just whispers to the woman
who's running this group, something,
I never know what she said.
And the woman just turns around
and shoots herself in the head.
So did she say something good?
Did she say something...
I took it that she said something like
I went someplace great because this woman
wanted to go right away,
but then in the end I thought
she probably lied to her
because of everything
that she put her through.
So it's like one of those
in the end, you don't know.
I walked away going that was awful,
and then trying to figure out the ending.
And that's why if you look
at the end of Dead Space
there's a jump scare,
and people have asked me
was that real?
Was it a ghost?
And I'm not gonna answer that.
If you look at the names of the chapters,
the first letter in each one
it spells Nicole is dead,
and that was his girlfriend.
So that should give away the secret.
By the way Nicole is
named after my daughter.
Sound design in Dead Space is one of
my favorite places to work with.
I had such a good time
working with Don Veca,
who is my longtime
friend and collaborator,
and we won a ton of
awards on the sound design
because the sound is so
important in a video game to me,
and a lot of games, I'm
telling you, in the past
and even at that time
sound design was like
sort of the thing that came in last,
wasn't that important,
oh we ran out of memory,
we don't have a lot,
but right from the start
we said sound design and the
music and the audio are key.
Here's one of the things
I used to tell people
when they would first get on the project,
which you know, over
the course of the game
you're probably adding 100 people,
is I wanted to show them
how important the audio was
because I wanted to make
sure that everybody realized
that we're saving some of this memory
and everything for audio,
was I would have new
people come in and watch
about a 15-20 minutes
section of a horror movie.
I'd tell them to watch
it with the sound off,
then take the same section
and watch it with the sound on
but your eyes closed.
Which was scarier to you?
And in every time people will go,
"Wow that sound was really scary."
That was the way that we approached
the sound design in Dead Space.
It was extremely important.
I mean it is about getting
more precise in sound I think
than in anything in video games, in this,
because if you get the scare off
by like one 100th of a second,
you get that stinger off,
it's not gonna work.
And it was so many times
where I'd be sitting there
going, "It's off, it's off just by a bit."
And we'd get no it's not.
Yeah it is.
And that's just after watching,
you know, so many horror movies,
you kinda get where you need to put
the scare or the stinger.
It was the music, it was, you know,
everything in it was just
really, really important.
Don, actually, they worked on a language,
we created a language.
If you go into the bathrooms
and stuff in Dead Space
you'll see the language that was created,
and written on one of them
is like Glen something.
I forgot what that...
I know they put my name
in it all over the place.
But within the first day
I wanna say it was ours
and somebody had
deciphered the whole thing.
It took us so long too.
We have so many great examples
of sound design within the game,
but one in particular that really got me
was the BART room, the BART training room.
What that was was Don Veca
was telling me one day,
he's like, "Glen, I was
going in the BART train,
"we went under the bay,
and it's the worst sound
"in the history of man."
Or something like that, and I'm like,
"Record it!"
And so next day he's
hanging out the BART train
getting the sound when it's
in the tunnel and everything.
He brings it in, he plays it for me,
and we have these really nice sound rooms.
It was awful.
It was like screeching and
I'm like ah man, it's great.
'Cause what we were looking for
is how can we scare
people just with sound?
No monsters, no nothing.
So, you're in zero G in the game,
and zero G is like the absence of sound,
so it's like...
You get into an airlock
and it's down quiet again.
Then you open the door and it's just...
And people are running in the room.
There's not one enemy,
there may be a dead guy in the corner,
but there's nothing happening.
And they are running into it.
They're running into walls,
they're bumping into...
They are just trying to
get out of that room.
It's so awesome.
That was such a thrill for us
'cause that was a great way
to now realize that we
can use sound even more.
We used that same technique
in Advanced Warfare.
We have a room that's just
called the sound room.
We had a set of rules that sort of guided
some of the development of the game.
No HUD, character never talks,
all big moments are gonna be interactive,
and everything is gonna run through
the filter of innovation,
meaning everything that we do in the game
should be innovated on,
whether it's the HUD
or the things that we called out or not,
they need to run through
this filter and all innovate.
That's where you'll see even just his look
is something you've never seen before.
We wanted it to be completely different,
all those ribs and everything.
Even his video logs.
All that stuff.
Video logs is another one of
those issues that we ran into.
An example of that was
the main character, Isaac,
was not gonna talk.
And oh, I threw out development.
You can't imagine how many
times we wanted him to talk,
because it changed the way
that you create a dialogue.
You had to try and make a character
that didn't talk not look like
he was always just taking orders,
like he was a person on himself.
That came from Half Life 2.
We were all huge fans of that.
Myself, Brett Robins, who's
the creative director on it,
are giant fans of Half Life
2 and we just wanted to have
sort of the Gordon
Freeman feel in the game.
So character never talked.
Everything in the game we
were gonna innovate on,
even the HUD, and that's
why there's no HUD.
We were gonna innovate on
how much health he has,
that's why the health is on his back.
These are little things.
We were gonna innovate on the stomp,
and that's just a simple melee.
And the simple melee turned out to be
one of the greatest features in the game.
It's another lesson learned was like
if you can take some of these
simple things in the game,
like the HUD and the melee,
and try and go further with it,
you can turn it into a feature.
And one of the things that we studied
was the melee on Resident Evil 4
because it's a very simple melee
and it's actually not
a heck of a lot of fun
and when we did it by itself we did scores
and the scores came out to be like a D.
And so we were like well
they shipped a great game,
it was 90 rated, 90+ rated
and they had a bad melee.
I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no,
we're gonna come up with our own melee.
And that's when the stomp came.
And then that was put into dismemberment.
The other rule was we were
gonna do dismemberment.
I can't tell you how much
that just cost on itself.
Dismemberment was sort of the thing
that we built the game on.
So, for example, if your
enemies don't look like
they can be dismembered
then what's the sense?
So changed the way that
the enemies were designed,
they changed the way
the levels were designed
because we wanted body parts
to be all over the place.
It changed the way we actually made
the enemies appear on screen
because we wanted you to
be almost sort of scared
and turn around and
just like chop one off.
It changed the way every
single weapon was done
because now they had the something
that could chop off arms and legs.
Well what I like is like
this one that we tortured,
like the first eight enemies,
yeah you wanna chop them up,
and then the last one you
get to when you chop 'em up
he turns into six.
I don't know if you remember the one,
he's tall and if you chop him up
his head comes off and his arms come off
and his legs come off and
they all turn into monsters.
Dismemberment was probably the biggest
challenge that we had in the game
because with dismemberment came physics.
Every body part had to have physics
when it bounced and everything.
So the two major systems coming together,
if you had too many pieces falling off
frame rate would drop and we
had a lot of trouble with that.
We would get, it's funny 'cause sometimes
a piece would go flying through the air
and it would hit something,
and this is before the
game came out of course,
and it would sit there spinning.
So we had a arm spinning in the air
or it would, you'd see
a head get lopped off
and it'd get caught in the ceiling.
So we had a lot of problems
with it because it was...
I kept saying to the guys, "I
wanna cut off his fingers."
They're like, "We can't do that yet."
You know?
So I went to get as
many points as we could
in the arms and legs and everything
so that it felt really real.
Like I don't wanna chop here
and his wrist falls off,
you know, or I chop
here and the whole arm.
So we tried to get the fidelity
as granular as possible.
And I think for that generation
we really took the physics
really, really far.
Because dismemberment was
so important to the game,
like I said before, it informed what
just about everything looked like.
And so the weapons had to be
able to cut those things off
and then the frame rate with the weapon,
gosh I remember some
of the weapons spinning
and them coming on.
The frame rate issues that we had.
Number one issue was frame
rate with dismemberment.
And them getting caught in places.
Some of them were really funny.
But you know, last time I
saw a funny horror movie
I wasn't that scared.
You know we discussed some of the rules
that we had with making this game
but one of them that we discussed earlier
was interactive moments.
There are no cut scenes in the game,
so we're trying to tell the story
through his different logs that he has,
video logs, but also what Isaac does.
One of the main things with this game
was trying to come up with really cool,
big, interactive scenes,
because they're really
complicated to make.
One that we came upon almost
made us break our rule,
it was called the drag moment.
And it was so hard that
we almost just said,
"Well let's just have 'em drag
Isaac and we'll just shoot."
And it was like no,
we're not gonna do that.
We're not gonna break
a rule, just for one.
And again, just because it's hard
doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
And so that was one of the
things that we started doing
was okay we're gonna take
on this hard hard problem
but it needed us to come
up with a new solution
on how to attack it.
And that's when we came up
with this idea of layering,
after just kinda making
a whole bunch of mistakes
for a couple of weeks we realized
there's gotta be a better way.
We had a lot of rules that we've
talked about on Dead Space,
and one rule in particular
led to something even bigger,
which is sort of a way
the design and manage
and things like that,
and I'll get to that.
And that rule was that
all of our big moments,
even our medium moments as we called them,
were gonna be interactive.
The game also doesn't have cut scenes.
We tell the story all throughout the game.
We wanted you to just be
completely immersed in this world
and feel like I'm in here
for as long as I'm playing,
I'm in this place.
All big moments interactive
is pretty tough.
You see it with bosses where
you're playing something
and it's interactive
and I'm getting involved
with something really big,
but with scary you've added
something else on top of that.
Not only do you have to have
a moment that's interactive,
but you want it to be scary,
and not always just because
it's a monster coming at you.
One that led to a lot of work,
a lot of changes in the
way that we do things,
and a lot of ways that we still do work
was the drag tentacle.
The drag tentacle was meant
to be a medium moment,
was gonna be a small little...
Well a medium thing within the game,
we're gonna do it once, a
tentacle comes out, grabs you,
and then pulls you down on the ground
and then you die if you get caught by it.
But as we're getting
into it we're realizing
that no, no, Isaac would wanna shoot,
he would wanna be on the
ground and pulled and shoot.
So this was really a difficult thing.
Not only do we have to come through a door
and the tentacle would have to know
exactly where you are, right,
I could come to the left or
to the right or to the middle,
where could I be?
I could be jumping, I could
be doing all these things,
but how does the tentacle
know where you are?
So we had to create
this tentacle that kinda
figured out where you were,
we had to create the falling on my back
and we'd get the sounds for it.
All this stuff.
Went through the lists.
Okay animators, you're gonna be animating
the thing come and grab,
you guys are building the drag tentacle,
okay you know what it's gotta do,
it's gotta be animated and grab the foot.
Everybody had their
lists and things to do.
I went away for a few
days on a business trip
and when I came back I said,
"Okay, let's look at the drag tentacle."
And they're like, "Well you're
not gonna be happy about it."
And I'm like, "Well we got
a big team on it, why?"
So I look at it, it was a mess.
They knew it, you know,
it was like well we put
the animations in but it didn't fit
with the animations of the drag tentacle.
And then the sound was a little
bit off and then the VFX.
So I'm like oh what the heck, you know,
'cause we could usually, okay,
we're gonna have a car, so
somebody would make a car
and somebody else would
have the wheel spin
and somebody else would
have the character inside
and you know, they'd work together
and they'd talk about it,
and it usually always worked.
It didn't in this case.
When I first saw it when I came back,
I think the drag tentacle
grabbed them by the leg,
but I think it grabbed
them up around the knee
and that was because somebody said,
"Well he was kinda ducking
and so grab him by the knee,
"threw him up in the air
and when he came down
"the sound didn't work."
And when they were trying to drag him
it wasn't still attached to his foot.
Nothing was working.
But yet all the stuff was there,
and it was done right, it was done good.
Again, in retrospect, looking back,
and this is 12 years ago in development
that we were now getting
really complicated scenes,
really complicated moments in which
you're doing interactive gameplay
during what used to be a cut scene.
So, started thinking about
how the heck do we get
the tentacle to come, grab the leg,
picks him up, throws him on
the ground, the sound hits,
because all that could
be slightly different.
I could be there in the hallway
or I could be to the left
or I could be to the right.
Realized I had to do one thing at a time.
All right guys, just animate drag tentacle
coming out of the hole and
it grabs him by the leg.
And they're like, "Yeah but the sound."
I was like, "Just do that part."
Came back, that worked.
Then we came back and
said okay, the next thing,
animate him being picked up
and thrown onto the ground
on his back.
They're like, "Yeah but then he shoots."
I'm like, "No just do this part."
Now everybody was starting to get it.
Oh.
And I started calling it layering.
Layering management.
There's probably a term for it
but that, for us, we still call it...
We gotta add layers, we
gotta do this in layers guys.
And nowadays most of the guys on my team
will know that this is a layered problem.
And that started back on Dead Space.
And so we threw him on the ground
and we realized that now he's dragging him
and we're dragging him for a long way
because we wanted you to
have some way of shooting.
So this is kind of naive
I think at the time too,
we thought well if he
throws you on your back,
we'll just play like one of the moves
of you shooting the different
weapons while you're standing
but you're kind of on your back
and we'll have him pull it.
And we put that in there
and it looked terrible.
So we realized then
that we have to animate
all his moves on his back,
shooting all the different weapons,
just for this one scene
that someone told me
lasted about 40 seconds.
We had to put the team on the animation
then we realized the
tentacle would have to be
blown up and broken,
and it could be anywhere
along that long way.
So there was just so much
work that went into it.
So we started layering on all the issue,
then when it was all
done, completely done,
that's when we went back and we added
the special effects on top of it,
throwing him on the ground,
the sound of him hitting and all that,
and then we were able to put
the triggers in correctly
'cause now we knew all
the different places
that the character would be and could be.
It also created another thing
for us that we still use
and we call them strike teams.
This was a problem that was so big
and so hairy for us that it just,
it kind of stopped us in
our tracks for a month,
because we wanted to...
The thing is I could
picture it in my head.
I saw the thing and I always knew that
if I could see it in my
head and knew how to do it
that we should be able to do it.
And so we eventually did, it
was just much, much bigger.
That's why we used it
three times in the game,
where the plan was just to use it once.
But it turned out to be such a big deal.
Scary is you wanna have that
hole show up a couple of times
without something happening as well.
That was the whole idea behind it
was just I have the
tentacle come out once,
grabs the guy, throws you on your back
and you get pulled in and you die.
From them on when you
see the hole, you'd want,
and we'd have some sound behind there,
throw out some blood or whatever.
Or in one scene you see just the character
get dragged into the hole.
So we were trying to do all
sorts of things with that,
but it ended up being so big and so cool
that we wanted to show it
two more times in the game.
But that started strike teams
and that started layering for us,
both two huge things that
today just sound like
well yeah, that's what you would do,
but back then in games we didn't do
that sort of thing just yet.
The drag tentacle probably came
within the first third of making the game,
which was good because we
tackled a really hairy problem,
I think it was about eight to
10 months into development.
We had Isaac's, all of his
animations done, of course,
well most of them so that we thought
well we just naturally
throw him on his back
and he'll be able to shoot.
Well that section of the
game was quite a ways along.
We were looking for ways to try and make
the hallways even more scary,
and so the drag tentacle is one that we...
It's funny 'cause it was on
our list of things to do,
and it was off the list
'cause it was too hard.
It was on and back.
We have this sort of other rule,
which is, it's more like a saying,
which is just because it's hard
doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.
Matter of fact, I like
the ones that are hard
because I'll say to the guys,
"Do you think another
studio would do this?"
And they say, "Nah, nobody's
gonna take that on."
I'm like, "Good, come on."
So we looked for challenges
and we could have
easily cut the drag tentacle,
and the game probably wouldn't
have been much of a change,
but it was well worth it
to get something like that
and the lessons learned,
the learnings out of it,
my gosh, it was a great piece to have.
Around the time of the drag tentacle
we probably would have
been almost fully staffed.
I think we went up to about
125 people on the game.
So we probably were 100 people.
It was a good sized group, able to pull...
When you have a strike team,
what strike team means
is that for the next
two weeks, three weeks,
however long it takes,
you guys know, everyone
on the strike team,
your number one thing is to focus on
getting this project done.
Sometimes you're not up yet,
so you'll go work on your own things
but a strike team meant
this is number one,
and we go and do that.
And we use that all the time now.
Any game will have probably
three, four, five strike teams,
strike team issues.
And I assure you that we
don't know which ones they are
when we go into a game.
I wanna think that we
probably had anywhere between
15 and 22 people working on
the drag tentacle at any time.
I mean when you think about having to do
all the animations on his back,
all the permutations of what
this drag tentacle could do,
and where he would be,
it was just a giant.
And I think he left some
blood when he was killed
so there was a lot of tech
that went into making that,
so it was a big team.
The design of the drag tentacle,
I remember took on so many
different ways to do it.
At first it was like well we're just gonna
do it down a straight hallway,
now we're gonna do it around the corners,
and we just realized that in the shape
of the what we had it was the scariest,
because you're kind of just walking,
you don't think anything's
gonna happen to you
'cause I think just before
that we had a scare,
and so we wanted you to
kind of innocently go,
"Geez, that was pretty scary."
And then you walk through this door
and within a couple of seconds
this thing comes out and grabs you,
and that moment just when it grabs you,
I wanted it to be one of the
scariest moments in the game,
because it flips you on your back.
So I think just getting that right,
that wasn't just about animation,
that was about technology wrapping around,
finding the target, and
being able to wrap around,
grab the leg by the ankle,
which is what we wanted.
You can't it grab around
the knee on one guy
and ankle somewhere else
on a different person,
so we just made sure it
grabbed you in the ankle area.
That felt where you're
gonna take me out anyway.
And you can't get away from it,
you have to shoot it through.
And so what we wanted, what
I was looking for in this
was this thing comes out and scares me,
it grabs me by my feet,
throws me on my back
and I'm disarmed for a second,
I don't know what happened,
but we immediately are
saying no we're gonna
just throw you into this pressure cooker,
'cause now you gotta
shoot a weapon in a way
that you haven't shot before
and you got 20 seconds,
30 seconds to get away.
But we never anticipated that the controls
would be backwards.
We thought that we'd throw you on the back
and you'd be able to do it.
Well not only was that wrong,
but the whole shooting mechanic
was pretty much backwards.
And you had to, within those few seconds,
learn to reaim the gun a different way
and shoot it a different way.
I know it frustrated people at first.
I think on that one I
wanted you to die twice.
'Cause we'll do that, we'll go okay,
let him die three times on this one
but any more than that and
you gotta bring him back.
That could be a two or
that might have been
a three dead one, which would
be a long term commitment.
You gotta die at least three times.
Of course some people get through it first
but that's one where it was okay.
Sometimes it gets frustrating.
I know that when I play a game
and if I die three or four times,
if I blame it on the game
then you got trouble.
But we found in testing that
people blamed it on themselves.
For the drag tentacle we had to redo
all of Isaac's shooting animations.
He had a lot of different weapons,
so for any given character you have
thousands and thousands of animations,
and I don't remember how many
we had back then for Isaac
but there were tons of 'em.
The idea that when we
threw him on his back
we had to remake all of
his shooting mechanics,
and some struggling mechanics,
it was daunting.
I mean it was a big, big task,
and I remember people
coming in and asking me,
"Glen, are you sure you
really wanna do this?
"This is a big deal."
To this day I just remember that,
no I could picture it in my head
so I knew it could probably work.
And I said, "No we're
gonna make the commitment,
"we're gonna probably..."
We cut two other things
just to get that in.
It was worth every bit of...
I can't tell you what we
cut 'cause I don't care.
That drag tentacle was really cool.
And the amount of work
to redo the animation,
so even when we knew it was kind of done
and it was working,
there was still animators
still finishing up all
the animations for it.
That thing probably cost me
just a couple million bucks
just in itself.
When the strike team finally got
assigned to the drag tentacle,
I think we had been...
Already I'd spent about three
weeks struggling with it,
and we were finally getting somewhere
with the layered approach,
but then we put the strike team on it
and then they spent another
I think at least six weeks
finishing it up.
And then I know there was
an animator and an engineer
who probably stayed on it
another four weeks after that,
all for the clean up and
polish and just that.
So yeah, that was a giant undertaking.
I think it's one of the big challenges
in the game for players but I also heard
that it's one of the
highlights of the game
for people who've played it.
A lot of effort went into
it and it all paid off,
and it keeps paying off.
The overall feeling I wanted
you to have with Isaac
is that he was an everyday person.
This guy wasn't a warrior,
he wasn't a fighter,
he was an engineer.
And I wanted you to feel
like it was just a person,
like you are, like we are, you know.
It's like he's an everyday
worker put in a situation
that he didn't wanna be in.
And that's why all the
weapons are his tools
that he worked on, that's why his suit,
it's an engineer suit,
but he had to adapt it
into ways to take these on.
But the whole idea of
Isaac as an everyday guy,
and just someone who like
lives next door to you,
not like a superhero.
And that's why he wasn't
in charge of everything,
and he wasn't in the military
and he found his guns
and he found his weapons
and he used tools.
And that was the big deal with Isaac
is just trying to make
him an every day engineer.
I mean one of the ways that we made you
feel more like Isaac was we
never pulled away from Isaac.
We always showed him in the game,
even when they're cut scenes,
we allowed you to move his head,
to turn around, to look around.
We wanted you to feel like you were Isaac.
That's why you don't see a lot of HUD up,
I didn't want stuff all over it.
If we're gonna do it I didn't wanna always
have this screen up that made him look
like he had this big mask on.
That's why you see the HUD on his back.
And that was based on...
I don't know if this is true,
because at the time
we're talking about HUDs
and somebody said, "You
know, I once thought I saw
"a HUD on the back of
a scuba diver's back."
I'm like that makes a lot
of sense, I'm in deep water.
And so that's where the idea came from,
'cause I kept saying, "How do
we put it on the character?
"How do we put it on the character?"
I have gone back and I have looked since,
I have never found a scuba
diver gear with that on,
so I'm not sure, that
came from I don't know,
a fairytale, a lie, or whatever,
but what happens is if you
give an interesting idea
to a creative person or a creative group,
those things just bounce around
until they come out with an idea.
And what I love even
more is that eventually,
you know when you die in the game
you die pretty gruesomely and
they're a couple seconds long
so you see your character there.
One of the engineers
realized that there are times
that Isaac was getting killed
and you would see his back
and it would still have green on it.
I said, "No, Isaac's dead."
So the engineer went and made sure that
every time Isaac died
that the thing went red
and that you would just
see parts on his back.
I love that, I love
that when the engineer,
when anybody comes up with just something
to make the game better.
We call that happy surprises.
Isaac dying is purely two systems;
enemy system attacking a
character that has dismemberment.
So depending on whatever enemy,
whatever angle he came on,
he may cut off Isaac's arm,
he may cut off his legs,
so that's why they're all different.
We have some in there here and there
where you throw in some animated ones,
but the main thing is it
is all just two systems.
I kill a character and
he has dismemberment,
so if he comes in and
he takes off Isaac's arm
and there's enough hit points
damage, Isaac will die.
In many cases he probably won't,
but the enemy usually will come in
and just rip him apart.
They'll bite him, whatever.
So the death scenes, they
ended up being like a feature.
There are some that look
pretty much the same
because you know, the
enemy will come at you,
tear you apart the same
way, but there are times,
you know, you'd still see them
munching on you and all that.
The death animations weren't pre-baked,
because we had two great systems.
We had a system of enemies
that could kill you
and we had this dismemberment system
that said after enough
dismemberment I'm gonna die.
So the enemies would come and kill you,
each one was different based
on where the enemy was,
how the enemy killed
you, however it happened,
and then they would drag the body parts,
in many cases, a little bit later,
just by walking and kicking
or pulling him apart.
The thing that changed
a little bit over time
in developing the game was
actually the length of the death,
'cause we realized what
a fun thing we had,
so we just took two great
systems and had at it.
If the drag tentacle
wasn't part of Dead Space
I'm not sure we would have
gotten to the layering
as soon as we did.
I think that based on some of the problems
that we were getting to later in the game
we might have gotten to layering
because they needed layering.
Like the bosses, especially the end boss,
was just so big.
It was like do this then this then this,
and we just had a long list.
The layering has turned
out to be something
that everybody had taken on eventually,
especially the art directors.
They'd come in and I'd
say I need the sky bluer,
I need this darker, I
need the background looks
a little bit this and I need the door,
and they would come back and they'd go,
"Okay Glen, we're gonna layer it.
"Next week you'll see the sky darkened
"and then you can approve that."
So everybody's getting it now,
and then it gives also checks
and balances along the way.
Instead of everybody going make it blue,
make it bigger, do this,
do that, make it on fire,
and they all come in and I got a mess,
one person will come in
and they'll have that done.
So different groups know how
to layer and are layering,
and I think we all sort
of did it in a way anyway,
probably on our own little things,
but trying to do it as
a team was really new
and challenging, but now
it's part of our lexicon.
So layering, as simple,
again, as it sounds,
allows us to also know
where we're failing.
When you do everything at once
you're not sure why it's not working.
Everything's just like ah,
okay, well try this, try this.
So when you layer it
and you break it down,
you peel the onion peel, you know,
you add one, you add one, you add one,
and then you hit a spot
where it's not working,
now you can focus
everybody just on that spot
and get through it a lot quicker,
instead of going I've
got this massive problem
and I'm not sure where it's not working.
We now layer everything in.
Like I said, I like to
think that we would have
gotten to it anyway
because it's so natural now
that we would layer everything,
and that's the way our dev
directors will get a problem,
okay I need an enemy, like
okay I need this enemy done,
and they'll go in and they'll layer it,
they'll break it all down
into all its different groups.
And I think that was always part of it.
People broke things down correctly,
but they weren't layered correctly.
We still use layering today.
I mean it's just really
finally cutting a problem
into all these different sections,
and then it's just saying
this one needs to come first
and this one the second,
and this follows that.
Things don't always work out perfectly
but that just kind of breaks
down a big, big hairy problem.
In World War II, Call of Duty WWII,
we had a section where a RPG,
you're up on the top of
a bell tower in a church
and an RPG hits the top of the church,
and the bell starts to fall,
all the way down through the tower,
and what I wanted was you, the player,
just trying to get away from it,
just by split seconds, right.
And so that's another one
of those layered ones,
we just said, "Okay make it fall,
"and then Joe, you be
animating him going around."
It would never have lined up,
because it was really
a complicated problem,
so we broke it down and
the first thing was like
we've built this thing, we
know where it's gonna go,
just animate the bell coming down.
Then animate the character
at the first stop,
what happens when he sees the bell?
And then from there, what's
great about layering,
instead of just doing it all in one,
we had the bell come down,
but as we come down to a section here
where the bell is hitting
the inside of the tower,
we can now put special effects,
we can now put extra stuff because we've
broken the problem into many sections,
instead of just making one thing.
So layering has become
this big system for us,
in a weird way.
I'm sure there's a name for it
but we just still call it,
we just layer our problems,
and by layering and splitting the problems
we can add a lot more all along the way
and make those special
moments even better.
I remember when we were working on,
the very beginning working
on the drag tentacle,
we knew it was a very complicated
and very sophisticated issue that
we were trying to deal with.
We listed out all that we had to do.
Tons of animations, build and
animate the drag tentacle,
have the drag tentacle grab the guy.
The guy, Isaac, my pal.
We listed out the
issues, the dev managers,
they handed out their,
everybody got their tasks.
And then I remember having
to go on a business trip,
I think we were doing some
recording for a few days,
and when I came back
they had done the work,
but they're like, "Glen, we
did everything you asked,
"but it's a mess."
And I'm looking at it
going yeah it is, it is.
And I realize that the
problem wasn't the team
it was really on how I was
giving them their assignments.
Some things need to come first.
I need to have them
grab the drag tentacle,
I mean grab him by the leg,
before I can throw him on the ground.
and he needs to be on the ground
before I can start animating.
So all these things started
coming in as layers.
This also made us much much more efficient
'cause we had less problems.
If your layering part wasn't up yet
you can go work on something else.
So there was a lot of this shifting
and it really made us more
efficient, made us better,
and it also made it much
more predictable for me,
'cause now, if I could break
down a problem into layers,
I knew we could do it.
Doing the drag tentacle moment
and all the lessons
that we learned from it,
some of the stuff that came out of that
were just a sense of pride of the team.
Now they felt like they
could take on anything,
and the rest of the game after that was,
I don't wanna say easier,
but it was like hey there's a challenge,
let's break this down into layers
and see what we can do.
I wanna say that that was
a lesson for me as well
is like these big challenges
and once the team can pull them off,
what a shot of adrenaline
it is for the team.
Other lessons were by
doing stuff like this
we were more efficient, we
saved time, we saved money.
We can make more game because we knew that
we had a way that could
break down any problem.
And then from then on
our enemies, our bosses,
we would look into layering.
What needs to come first?
And this was a game that
really, really required you
to do one thing first
and then another thing.
Especially when you're
doing something scary.
First it's gotta be right,
and then you gotta add scary on top of it.
So this game was just all about layering,
you know, once we got to that point.
Focusing on quality is the key,
that is everything in making a game.
So where layering is
very very important to me
and it is a management
tool now that I use,
it's a development tool.
Having an over arching desire
to make something great
and to have quality be
your number one thing
is the biggest lesson.
You will hear people talk about it,
but it starts with your hiring.
If you really get back down
to like how you do quality?
Start at the very very beginning of it
and that is the people that you hire.
So the quality lesson
goes across everything,
hiring to what you feed
people to, you know,
how you talk in front of the team,
and to everything that you make,
quality quality quality.
I look back on some of
the things that I learned
when making Dead Space, and
any of my games of course,
and it's a couple of big lessons,
but one in particular was when
I had finished my last game
I was really proud of it but
yet I wanted to do better.
I wanted a higher score,
I wanted more and more,
and I just wanted to actually spend
a lot of time on this game.
Not think of the financials,
not think of anything like that,
I was gonna let other
people take care of it,
all I wanted to focus on was quality,
just quality quality.
Every single part of it.
And you may say well you
should always be that way,
and it's like yes but there are times
when you have budget
cuts or you have changes
and you don't have the right people,
and you have to let down
your guard a little bit.
That was in the old days.
So we're finishing the game,
we're working on the game,
and this came into every single deadline
that happened with Dead
Space was if you're not done
then we have to look at it and see
if we're gonna approve it to go longer,
because we wanted to make sure we had
enough time at the end
of the game to polish it,
which is key.
So even when we hit alpha we just put down
a hard line in the sand
and if you weren't done
with a level or something,
and we of course knew what was coming
and what we were rushing
to get stuff done,
but if it wasn't quality we weren't gonna
put it in the game.
We did that throughout the game.
Matter of fact we shipped
the game two weeks early,
'cause we had gotten all our bugs.
We had gotten all the way down to C bugs,
and I know some people are gonna say,
"Well I found some bugs in it."
But I'm telling you,
that was a clean game,
we even got a letter from Sony that said
one of the cleanest
games of this generation,
so we're quite proud of
that, and that's the bugs.
The game came out but I
happened to be in France
doing some marketing and PR
for the game when it came out,
and you know, they're
eight, nine hours ahead,
so I got up in the morning
and on the roof was a nice day
so I just went on the roof of the hotel,
and I just sort of opened my emails
and I'm looking at reviews coming in,
oh my god, 90, 95, 88, you know,
it just stunned.
Hadn't even thought about
the Metacritic score,
I swear it was just like
oh my god, you're right,
a Metacritic score.
And it started coming in
and it was really good.
Then all of a sudden we started
getting award nominations
and I haven't even thought about awards.
None of us did, but we're
like award nominations,
then we started winning.
Then we started getting the sales from it,
and then we won...
I'll never forget the biggest one
was sitting at the Dice Awards,
which is the big one for us,
seeing who we were up against
for best action game of the year,
and when they called our
name, I'll never forget,
just the feeling of validation
kinda just said it's okay
to go make another one now.
And that's all you kinda want,
'cause that's from your peers.
That thing of quality, because
after that the sales came,
the awards came, the satisfaction came,
and after that the great
developers wanted to work with us.
So, man you better believe
that's what I think about
and talk about now is just quality.
I don't need everybody to know
exactly what the highest quality is,
I just know that I just
need most of the people
to be capable of it.
And so hiring is the very first step.
Hire people that are really good.
So we looked always looked for
the top 5% in the industry.
Who do we think were the best?
And we would look at other games,
and then can they get along
with us and stuff like that.
So hiring is number one.
Then you have to realize,
I realize that not
everybody's an art director,
not everybody's a director,
they are who they are.
And so if an animator is good
then it's actually my job
to push them to what quality is,
and have people who can do that.
'Cause not everybody can see,
but I can tell you one thing,
when you do get 'em there,
all of a sudden they've
risen another layer,
and they've got more confidence again.
They're continent in like my ability to go
further than I was before.
And if you can get a
team feeling like that,
and you get them going,
by your third year into
making a game you've
got something special.
Growing up I really studied artists a lot.
But I really studied the great cartoonists
and one of 'em of course is Walt Disney.
But Walt Disney was all about quality,
and still is all about quality, right.
To me that's the name.
What I really liked is his story
of they're working on Fantasia
and they're building the
scene that's out in the ocean
and there's craziness going on,
it's just a giant scene,
took a few months.
When they were all done
they bring Walt Disney in,
and Walt just looks at it and he said,
this great sea and ocean
and everything is going on,
and he says, "Add a storm."
And walks out.
And they're like add a storm?
That means redo it.
And it took them, I don't know,
I heard another four months,
and back then it added about $400,000,
which is a lot of money today,
but he didn't blink an eye.
And that to me is quality,
that's the epitome of quality.
These days we'll say that
you gotta add a storm,
it's missed something, we've
gotta find something else,
we gotta find that storm.
So we're probably about
five months into the game
and I'm making my own
list of scary moments,
horror moments, and things like this.
I had broken down horror into
many different categories,
and it was my own categories, right,
so there was what I call torture porn
which is just kinda torturing people,
there is the maniac
killer, there's the ghost,
there's the little girl that comes back,
there's all different kinds of horror
and tension and stuff like that.
One that we didn't have in the game
and I knew we needed was I needed a way
to have sort of a ghost.
Now I didn't want to have a ghost,
but I wanted to be more like apparitions
and stuff like that, like something I saw,
not a ghost, but I saw
maybe a little girl,
and in this case he was
seeing his girlfriend.
But it felt like there was an awkwardness,
something that made me feel
kind of like wrong in the game.
You wanna add that, and that was...
We were missing the religion.
And then if I could get
a religion into the game,
now I've got the idea of how I could get
some really awkwardness in there, faith,
we could get all kinds of stuff.
Unitology is where the language came from.
But I needed a religion,
and this was tough
'cause you could start
one, I know L. Ron Hubbard,
I was reading how he created a religion
and he based it on some sort of faith
and whether you believe
it or not I don't know.
But with the faith I didn't have an idea,
so I'm studying something
else on the game,
for some reason I was looking into
South America and Central America
and I think I was looking
for some language stuff.
And I bump across the
story of the giant meteor
that landed in the Gulf of Mexico,
and I think part of it landed on the...
Is my cat in it?
- [Male] I don't think so.
- [Male] Yeah but it's
like only under, it's fine.
- Yeah I know.
- [Male] Leo.
- Leo.
I saw this story on Chicxulub,
which is the giant crater
that had the meteor
that landed that most scientists,
I guess everybody thinks
wiped out the dinosaurs.
So I started thinking about that
and I'm like wiped out the dinosaurs,
if it wiped out the dinosaurs then
that's how mammals started, you know,
the ice age came in and
then mammals started
then actually man came from that.
So man is here because of the meteor.
And I thought what if it wasn't a meteor?
What if it's something somebody planted?
Then man started because of somebody else
or something else.
And so what I have them
do in the game is they,
archeologists go down
there and they discover
that there's a marker.
There's something else, it's not a meteor.
And immediately some of the scientists
who maybe aren't even that religious,
they put two and two together.
Wow, this wiped out man, I
mean wiped out dinosaurs,
created man.
Then the question was did
they do it on purpose,
and that's where you have faith.
You have some people who believe that yes,
this thing was done on purpose,
and so they are actually
our supreme beings.
And then you have of course
people who don't believe it,
no that was sent by aliens,
it had nothing to do with
wiping out the dinosaurs,
you're absolutely wrong,
but now you have the basis for faith.
And so that's where Unitology came from,
and we wanted them to
completely believe in this.
And then of course you have your people
who are steadfast, that
everything that is said
or written down about
the Unitology is correct.
So you have your fanatics.
The only thing, what we did was to get
to the other part of it was that we had
that hallucinations came from the marker
and the hallucinations are what caused
sort of that ghost scare that we could get
when you saw your girlfriend
or you saw other things.
I don't like ghosts, I don't like demons
and things like that because
they don't have rules.
Like how do you kill a demon?
Well I don't really know.
Zombies I like, shoot them in the head,
necromorphs I like, you
know, dismember 'em.
We were just sitting in a room,
we're like what are we
gonna call these guys?
What are we gonna call 'em?
And they're like the humans.
We started with zombies,
we're like alien zombies,
like you know, we probably
said the walking dead.
We had all kinds of things.
We got the morph part from xenomorph,
which is from Alien.
Necro, we were just going down the line
of what were other words for the dead.
And we hit on necro and
then we put necro with morph
and I remember the first
guy said, "Necromorph."
And we're like that's it.
Now we thought it was
just gonna be sort of
an internal thing and we
would use it once in a while,
but it ended up being
something that not only
did we use it all the
time but then it became
just what they were called.
One thing with the enemies is that
we didn't wanna have a place where
the door opened and
there were the enemies,
they were just always there or something.
We wanted it to be real, we
wanted it to be semi-random,
because we wanted it to
be slightly different
every time you played.
So we have this system
of vents in the game.
Now we actually built the
vents at the very beginning,
we have them crawl and then later on
we were able to just say here's a vent
and think of it as a spawning point,
but it wasn't just a spawning point.
If we had a vent here and a vent here,
depending on where the character
is where the enemy came out.
So what we were trying
to do in many cases was
the enemy would come out a
vent and we'd go oh shoot,
back up, that starts another enemy
coming out of the other vent.
And so now you were in
these tight quarters,
but the vent system was
really sophisticated,
we thought it was gonna be an easy thing,
but it was a great, great
feature that we had.
Again, just by innovating a little bit
on the way spawn points are,
you can really get something special.
Before the BAFTAs I was on this long,
I wanna say 15 day European tour,
and I was in Prague and I
started bleeding out of my nose,
I guess from all the flying.
And I was on the plane taking us
from Prague to somewhere else,
and they were nice enough to just let me
kind of like stop it and
then took the plane up.
So we get to England, I go to the BAFTAs,
and I've been okay for two or three days
and I'm at the BAFTAs, all
dressed up in you know,
really nice.
And we're at dinner and they're starting
to do the announcements,
and I'm like oh my god,
I can feel my nose is starting to bleed.
And I don't know why, I
run back into the bathroom,
all I had was Chapstick.
So I take Chapstick and
I stick it in my nose,
I heard that's what you should do,
and I was like sticking it in my nose,
and as I'm walking back and I hear,
"And the winner is Dead Space."
I'm like oh no, oh no, do I
have blood on me or anything?
But I didn't and I went up there
and I talked like this.
Thank you, it's been a real pleasure,
just like really awful.
And then I'm backstage.
I wasn't supposed to do this.
I didn't know it at the time,
they give you the BAFTA and
then you take it backstage
and they have all the paparazzi
and you're doing all these
questions and everything
and you're holding the BAFTA.
And it is the heaviest
thing I've ever lifted.
I mean it's just like...
So I had it in my
backpack, I mean I had two,
we won two and I put it in my backpack
not knowing how important
they were at the time.
I was a lot younger.
And so I'm in Heathrow and
it really bothered my back,
so I sit down in Heathrow
kind of on the floor
and I just, it's crowded and all,
so I just take my BAFTAs out
and put 'em on the ground,
and all of a sudden I got a crowd,
crowd asking questions, you know,
why you got BAFTAs?
What are you doing with BAFTAs?
What are you doing here with BAFTAs?
And it was the time that I realized
that it was the Oscar, I
guess, of Europe and all.
And believe me I take
them a lot more serious.
And I'm really proud and
humbled by that experience.
Yeah this here is all the notes from
my animation director,
Chris Stone, and these are,
he took all the notes from
the meetings that we had
because this one here is
all about dismemberment.
And you can see the different points
that we were talking about,
this is how we started,
and then you can see, number two,
and then we got more and more complicated
as time went on and technology got better.
But we talked about the different enemies,
we have the pregnant character here
and what we were gonna do with them.
There's a couple ones
that we didn't put in.
I don't wanna get you
too excited about those.
Yeah and actually there's
a lot of different
names that we had but we
talked about the regeneration
of some of the characters that
would grow back their head
and stuff like that.
But you can just see that the care
that went into just dismemberment
was something really special.
It's kind of going back in time with this.
This here is a calendar
that we created with,
at the very beginning of the game,
with a lot of the concept
art that was in it,
and it was just for internal purposes.
It's got a lot of great dates.
We went and we researched all the dates
from all over history, from anything that
had to do with science fiction or horror.
And I'll just pick one.
September 4th, the Tuesday, 2007.
This will say September 4th 1966,
My Favorite Martian canceled
after 107th episode.
August 15th 1997, Event
Horizon theatrical release.
Big day.
This, wow.
A lot of very very early art,
but you can see how much
actually made it in the game.
This was again internal,
but it was used to get people
excited about the game,
as well as when new
people came onto the team,
we were able to just give them this book,
they took it home that
night, read about it,
and learned all about it.
This I'm really excited about,
this is the Ishimura.
We had to do a blueprint
because it was so,
getting so complicated, so you can see
we've broken it down into
different engineering rooms
and clean rooms and then down here,
different sections with
different colors as well.
So we'd have the engineering
was a little bit dirty,
then we would get up
to the first aid area,
and of course that was clean and white
but we tride to keep it stark and scary.
And then when you went down
into the bowels of the ship
it just got worse and worse.
It's a big time artist that did this too.
Did a lot of stuff for
Star Wars, Star Trek.
This was one of the original enemies.
We thought for sure that
flying enemies would work
and we found out they were really hard,
and they weren't that much fun.
Obviously we've had flying
enemies in other games
and we do have enemies
in there that will fly.
We had 'em in for a while and
it was just really hard work.
We shouldn't have tried to
bite off more than we can chew
as having him one of the first ones,
but in the end we did
end up having a character
that was somewhat like
him that would cover up
any of the dead people and then
turn them into a necromorph.
They could turn back the live ones.
But always liked that guy and, well,
we'll see someday.
I founded Sledgehammer Games with
my partner Michael
Condrey July 21st of 2009,
and we made three games.
Modern Warfare 3, we
made Advanced Warfare,
and then we made World War II.
The cool thing about Modern Warfare 3
was we also won action game of the year,
so we won Dead Space and
then Modern Warfare 3,
so we got 'em back to back.
At that point you think like
you're always gonna win,
so then after that it's been pretty,
I don't know what the word is,
but you don't win.
It's not about the awards,
the awards are really just
more about validation.
So even being nominated
is just a huge honor.
When I think back about Dead Space
and I think back on its origins,
which was just me in my
car talking to Paul Lee
about making a game, I
can't believe 10 years later
it's turned into something where people
that were only five at
the time it came out
have been playing it and
will talk about it with me.
It's become something I never,
you just don't expect it.
It's sort of been a real
highlight of my career,
has been making Dead Space and
then what it's brought since.
I enjoyed scaring people
so much on Dead Space
because a lot of people get
entertainment out of it,
that if you go back and look
at the World War II zombies,
you'll see a lot of Dead
Space in that zombie game.
It was so much fun to create zombies again
and get in there.
My experience from Dead
Space all came back.
People, it's 10 years
later, eight years later,
at least at the time,
and people wanted to make
some of the stakes that
we had made earlier.
This just made it so much more
efficient, so much faster.
I've been playing more
of the types of games
that I'm making right now.
That doesn't mean I haven't been writing.
No I've actually written a few stories.
I don't call myself a writer,
I'm more of a storyteller,
so I'll just put down
the stories that I have,
and I still write horror stuff
and I've got quite a few stories
and I enjoyed making
Dead Space so much that,
you know, hopefully some day I'll make
one of those games again.
