Original subtitles

I think horror movies in video games kind of goes back to, like, the beginning of video games.

In the old days, horror movies and horror video games were just a world apart.

"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. After you stop screaming, you'll start talking about it."

There was a Texas Chainsaw Massacre video game like for Atari, which

why would you even think that was a good idea, especially back then.

"The most bizarre and brutal series of crimes in America."

You have this seminal horror movie that's so gritty and grainy and dark.

Games by their nature at that time were bright blues and orange and all this kind of stuff,

and it just doesn't fit with Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Watching this, you know, like, "ungungung" looks like somebody was holding up a unicycle for fuck's sake.

You're like, what is that? That's a chainsaw? It looks like a weed whacker.

I think that's the first time I can think of in a game where you're controlling the villain

and flat out murdering people. Yeah, I mean, that was pretty rough for back then.

Leatherface literally gets his butt kicked by a girl. If he loses.

All he's really done is run out of fuel for his chainsaw.

So does that just make him easily surmountable then?

You can just kick him up the ass and that's it.

I never knew there existed a Halloween or

Texas Chainsaw Massacre game on Atari 2600 until much later.

They were released by Wizard Video. A lot of the Halloween games had a label that was handwritten

and sometimes even misspelled.

"Now, not every cartridge of Halloween was like this,"

"but as Wizard Video Games was liquidating their inventory,"

"they started doing this to minimize costs."

But at least they used orange ink.

Those licensed games were never scary like the movies.

It makes these games that are supposed to be terrifying so comical.

It's just so over-the-top. I don't know how people could be offended

by anything other than how terrible it was.

The game, but I was completely obsessed with was Friday the 13th.

But for Commodore 64, so it wasn't as good or as slick as the NES game.

But for the Commodore, those sprites used to scare me silly.

I think the NES version is not as bad as people make it out to be.

They tried to do something that captured the fear of, you know, being a teen trying to run away from Jason.

You're being stalked by the villain. You go into those cabins and then it switches to that 3D view,

which was really clumsy but back then it was kind of a big deal.

And then Jason pops out and you get that like that sting.

You just jump off the couch and like, holy shit, there he is!

There was a Nightmare on Elm Street game on Nintendo, and there was always that cool point

where it's like "Freddy's coming" would flash across the screen everyone would panic,

you know, and then just start mashing buttons because they didn't really know what to do.

You have to go around and collect Freddy's bones, which falls in line with some of the films.

"You must find the remains and bury him in hallowed ground."

There is a Evil Dead game on Commodore. There was all these Ghostbuster games and Gremlins,

and then they even had a Psycho game on Commodore 64.

Instead of playing as Norman, Marion Crane or anybody, you're like some detective,

and you're in the Bates Motel trying to find some jewels or something.

Back then, they just could not figure out how to make games based on movies like this.

But, you know, I feel like with licensed games,

they're usually rushed out because there's a new film coming out

and the film company, the studio want to rush out a game to try and promote their film.

"Dracula from Sony Imagesoft. Sure. It's just a game."

There are many versions of Bram Stoker's Dracula from the NES all the way to,

Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Sega CD. The Sega CD one was probably the most interesting

because, it had those, those full motion video scenes.

All I remember from that game was every time you die, you get this close up of Keanu Reeves screaming.

Yeah, there is nothing quite like playing as a digitized Keanu Reeves and punching bats in the face.

I mean, does any other game let you do that? I'd love to know.

It was kind of weird how they'd always make a kid's version of everything.

The movie Beetle juice was a lot more adult. Gremlins, Ghost busters.

I mean, those weren't the worst things, but, they were generally adult movies,

but they all had animated series and a toy line.

"I'll take care of you, Gizmo."

And if there's nobody that is passionate about something,

regardless of the revenue potential, there's not going to be a great game.

Some executive in their ivory tower will see some great licence, "let's go licence E.T. and do a game"

and they hand it down to the development team

and nobody particularly gives a rat's and out comes a bad game.

So I think it's time, money and you know developers need to be passionate about the franchise

and they need to have the time that they need to put their own ideas into it.

"Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live."

I was a big reader of science fiction

and fantasy and horror all throughout my childhood.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was my favorite short story.

It was just such a powerful story about the loss of identity and, loss of control

and of existential danger.

"But one day I woke and I began feeding all the killing data

until everyone was dead. Except for the five of you."

"As we promised last week, our fabulous commentator, Harlan Ellison. Harlan!"

I didn't have my first real conversation with Harlan

until it was time to show off some of our progress on I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

He'd actually dealt with a number of different other people throughout the project.

And there I was, standing before my idol, one of my favorite writers

writer of my favorite episode of Star Trek, the person I've always wanted to work with.

And he looks at me and says, "great, another one of those Cyber Dreams idiots."

"All right, get in here and show me what you have to show me."

I had heard him speak before, and I knew that he could be a very, very cantankerous person.

"I despise computer games. I think they are one of the great--"

"They are second only to golf as being the greatest time waste."

"So I've been putting it down. So now they come to me and they say, we want you to do a CD-Rom game."

"I said, you know, as long as I'm putting it down, let me see if I can do a better one."

"So using my little manual typewriter and a couple of game designers,"

"1 designed this game I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."

I thought it was really interesting as a game. I remember thinking,

how are they going to take on this complex idea and show it in a video game

and not just telling the story of the short story?

"When David Sears began working on it, and I said to him, I want a game that you can't possibly win."

"But he said, no, no, there probably should be a point to it."

And it was David Sears, the original designer for the game,

that cracked that nut by asking the question, why did AM select these five people to save?

After destroying the rest of humanity? And Harlan had never really thought about that before.

And that's what became the, the focus of the game.

Each of the five different characters, each were put in a scenario

in which they have to come face to face with and overcome a fatal flaw.

Nimdok had the farthest path to travel to redemption.

We learned that as we played Nimdok's psychodrama,

that Nimdok had been an assistant to Josef Mengele.

"He's a man who has allowed to happen or has personally performed"

"some of the most hideous acts that a human being can perform."

And is there salvation for him within the confines of this game?"

"Well, that's an interesting question too that the game will answer."

He had to realize the horrible things he did and seek atonement for it.

I think to be able to do that with a character is really special.

It shows a good grasp of writing. It shows a way of appealing

to people's humanity that maybe you didn't even know was there.

While we were developing the game, we got a letter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center

saying, by putting the Holocaust in a game, we are trivializing it,

and that they demanded that we take that story out.

"Nothing, nothing can trivialize the Holocaust.

"I don't care whether you mention it in a comic book on bubble gum wrappers in"

"computer games or write it in graffiti on the wall. Never forget, never forget."

"And putting it in this in this game is intended."

You know, some people seem to think that there's like a causality there,

that if you tell stories about what scares us, somehow those things will become real or somehow

they'll come to fruition, which I don't think is actually the case.

Horror games allow us to deal with parts of ourselves.

- "Please. Not again." - "Yes, again and again and again and again."

It provides a very cathartic experience.

"Don't count on it you mother-."

Because horror deals with our fears, it really latches onto our primal selves.

Probably the first emotions we developed.

"I finally received the hell I deserve."

"Outwardly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human."

The darkness in ourselves. I think that that's the scariest thing.

There's a big difference between being afraid by something that's external to you.

Perhaps you can fight it. You could run away.

But when the horror is in the inside, you know and there's no escaping from it.

When you don't want to look at yourself, you know, that's the deepest horror I can imagine.

"That is what I think is the nobility of this game. Understanding in however small measure,"

"that we are not alone, that we are all inside the same skin."

Another writer that I think is had a massive influence on games,

although she doesn't really get the credit for it, is probably Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

You know, she wrote essentially the first sci-fi horror.

Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Ann Radcliffe,

all of gothic fiction made a mark on horror video games.

You look at things like System Shock and System Shock 2, you look at Dead Space,

even things like Portal with GLaDOS. I'd say you could probably trace GLaD0S' DNA

right back to Frankenstein's monster.

"It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!"

Just the idea that humanity could create something through technology

that then assumes the God role.

"I think we can put our differences behind us, for science. You monster."

The monster creator ends up becoming hunted by its creation.

Gothic horror was all about approaching topics such as death or violence,

but doing so in a way where we were really taking on the emotions of the people dealing with these topics.

"To know that is wisdom, to use it is the art."

"The words are Clive Barker's, one man industry of the fantastique."

I learned a ton about horror, working with Clive Barker.

I worked with them from about 2004 to roughly 2009.

I grew up reading his novels when I was way too young to be reading his novels.

But I was, I was reading his stuff and consuming all of his movies and his comic books.

The Books of Blood and Hellraiser and Nightbreed and all this stuff.

"We have such sights to show you."

I love Clive Barker. I think he is really the epitome of

just like that kind of breaking into the mainstream, some strange person

talking about his strange inner world, especially, I think that's reflected

in the monsters that he makes, and that's like a huge inspiration for me

of making monsters where they feel like characters themselves.

"It's really important that we understand that these monsters are actually very attractive to us."

"They're, they're things, they're creatures who have powers that maybe we want."

"I would love to be able to fly. I'd love to be able"

"to turn into a wolf and live forever. Those are wonderful attributes."

I remember one of the things he told me about was like,

layers of violation or degrees of violation.

And he said, you know, when a monster eats you like a great white shark eats

you, that's a violation. They violated your personal space,

and they've kind of violated the natural order of like,

a human being at the top of the food chain and,

you know, everything else, we're the master of. But he said, like, there's other layers of violation.

It's like, then you get into some of the body horror stuff like that.

Alien and Giger did so well where, you know, now, not only has the thing decided to,

like, attack you, it's decided to move in.

So then there's like another degree of violation past that,

where something's moved in and it's maybe not going to come out and maybe it's in control.

I always wondered in Half-Life, when the poor scientists

are running around with the head crab on, are they, is some portion of them still in there?

Are they trapped? Are they in their brain screaming there "get this thing off of my head?"

These are all Lovecraft horrors where there's these things

that are beyond our understanding, are beyond our ability to deal with

Lovecraft seems to be a treasure trove for game developers.

We've gotten some really great games, not only based around that, you know, the Cthulhu

Mythos and, you know, eldritch horror, but the way it manifests itself

even in little ways in games, you know? There's nothing cooler than when you're playing a game

and you think it's pretty normal, and then suddenly there's some eldritch shit

going on and you're like, "uh-oh."

I was introduced to Lovecraft by Sandy Peterson while we were making Quake, and it was like,

oh my God, I couldn't believe how incredible all the lore in the stories from H.P. Lovecraft

were when they were created, The Mummy and The Wolf Man and Dracula and Frankenstein,

like all those characters, were tame compared to the stuff that he came up with.

Going back to Clive again, I remember Clive was not a super big fan of of H.P. Lovecraft

because he said, you know, he kind of wimped out. He said, you know, instead of like

giving your monster a personality and a voice and a point of view...

"You call us monsters. But when you dream, you dream of flying."

It's the cosmic, unseen horror that is so horrible,

I can't even describe it. I can't, I can't find the words on the page

to tell you how horrible this thing with tentacles and slime is.

I remember Clive would just go, "what a fucking cop out."

A lot of the criticism with Lovecraft's cosmic horror would be that it's often

devoid of personality, because we're So far removed from the unfathomable.

But what John Carpenter's The Thing did really well

was it brought that cosmic horror down to a human level,

and suddenly that monster was your friend right next to you.

When you're a movie director...

When you're me, there are two kinds of, offshoots of a project you do.

One is if I write it and I originate it, it's mine, and when I'm sitting on my couch,

a cheque arrives in my hand, and I don't have to do anything.

The Thing was owned by Universal.

They licensed it out and they did all sorts of things. They didn't have to ask me.

So The Thing game is really smart. It literally picks up right where The Thing movie left off.

We are showing up at the at the base in Antarctica.

They walk in, there's Blake, he's got his team.

-"What have you got?" "One body identification says 'Childs'. No survivors."

And this is why it's so smart, the film of The Thing is so built around the idea of trust.

"I know I'm human. If you were all these things

then you'd just attack me right now. So some of you were still human."

When they made the game, they thought, you know what?

That trust thing is a big part of this, this can't

just be you're running around and "there's The Thing!"

"There's the thing!", "There's the thing!" You shoot the thing.

We want this to have the same experience that the movie has, which is a group of characters

that are stuck in a situation that's very bad. And now maybe one of them is actually also evil.

"I'm locked, loaded and ready to make shit dead!"

At the time, Sony was talking about their, you know, the emotional nature of the engine

that they were working with on PlayStation.

We want to do things that nobody's ever seen before.

And I think that captured it right? Those those trust and fear mechanics

that allowed you to constantly try to walk a balance beam

to keep your squad in line,

"Keep your team together and get them to shelter as quickly as you can."

"Roger that. Blake out."

All the characters in the game not only have scenes where they're like,

- "You're the thing I don't trust you." - "Stay the hell away from me, I'm warning you."

But it has a mechanic where you have to do things to ingratiate them and get them back into your trust.

Whether you give them a gun or you point a gun at them and tell them to calm the fuck down.

"Time's up Blake!"

At the time, survival horror was more plodding, it was slower, the movements were almost frustratingly slow,

and that added to that tension that made it a better horror game.

We didn't have to make your movement slow and clunky in order to give you a scare,

because our scares came from those characters being in that world.

"Wait a minute. Don't you come any closer."

And you reacting to what they were going through and trying to balance them between trust and fear.

When it worked, it was great. It felt powerful. You could calm them down.

"Maybe you will get us out of this."

And when it didn't work, it was even better because they would run off.

They would go crazy. They would attack you. They would kill themselves.

"If you want a job done right, you got to do it yourself."

Really unbelievable stuff that we just chose to move the needle

on the action horror side in a different way than traditional survival horror.

I think what The Thing game did so well was you're not playing the exact same thing as the movie,

"The report said. The hypo contains a chemical that reacts with blood."

You're in the world that the movie created and the world that you enjoyed while watching that movie, but

- you're doing a different story. - "Now, I'm going to show you what I already know."

When we were working on The Thing, I think we went back and looked at the,

you know, the original film to try to take inspiration

from the stuff that had come before it. But, you know, I think we really wanted to concentrate

largely on the biggest inspiration for us is John Carpenter. Right?

Like bringing his horror adaptation to life. That was really the focus for us.

I thought that was, oh, that's good, that's nice. So they were very nice folks

and they took my picture. So I was a character.

I think I got killed.

And you know that that doesn't happen if he's not really invested and likes the product.

"Jesus, you've done it, haven't you?"

Whether you like The Thing or not, it's just an incredible game.

Even by today's standards it's still incredible.

I had a great time working on it with Chris Hadley and all the talented

engineers, designers, artists, but I liked it because it was a game that sort of was hard to define.

It wasn't a cookie cutter thing. We didn't take a license and slap it on.

It was all made with incredible care.

It just gets the paranoia of the movie across in such an amazing way, and it lets

you lead it and control it in a way that is so much scarier than if it was scripted.

Like, I still have never seen a game that's managed to do something like that, and it really drew me in.

As someone who grew up with the movie and loved the movie, it was the perfect follow up.

Sometimes you work on an IP and the director, the writer, whomever it is

that's in charge of the creative vision for the IP

may not necessarily be a gamer, so they don't understand,

what interactivity is about. They don't understand game mechanics either.

They think it's for kids, so it's a toy. So they're just not going to take it that seriously.

Or they want to be very dogmatic about like their linear story,

and they don't want to ever show moments from their story that like,

didn't happen on film or on page. Those are the difficult people to work with.

And then a lot of times, what games suffer from is the "wouldn't it be cool if" disease,

which is the notion that you can constantly make whatever you want all the time,

and in games that often time that leads to like longer development cycles

or a never ending development cycles.

I was game director on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was going to come out on the PlayStation 1.

We were working with the Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy

gave us really unprecedented access. We got to meet Sarah Michelle Gellar, and David Boreanaz

who plays Angel. Joss and one of his his lead writers on the series were giving us,

you know, notes back on our storyline and saying, yep, that game story sounds like a Buffy episode.

You were going to be running around as Buffy through her town,

through her high school, through the graveyard, you'd encounter vampires,

you'd do a few quick beat him ups, some flip kicks over their head.

But Metal Gear Solid came out at about the same time,

and our producer from Fox Interactive really loved Metal Gear Solid,

and the feature creep just began almost immediately. It was like, "oh,

we got to get some stealth elements into it. Let's make stealth part of it."

And "oh, can can, can Buffy hide in a box? Can she hide

like how snake or snake hides in the box? That's really funny."

So we pushed back, our studio head. Chris said, look,

you're going to have to give us more time or move the launch date out then if you want to accommodate this.

And the producer said, "well, I happen to have a team in California, and they said that they can deliver

exactly what I want at the same time."

So we said, "vaya con Dios."

And when the game did finally come out, it wasn't on PlayStation 1 anymore

because it took so long that it ended up being on Xbox. The first Xbox.

- "Cover him." - "I'm gonna have a good time with you!"

There was another game that came out called Jericho

and the horror, and it was really quite significant.

Clive Barker's Jericho was a squad based supernatural horror game

in which you were a a group of occult specialists and supernaturally gifted, war fighters

trying to avert the end of the world.

You had to jump from one character to another character. And there was a thing about that,

the mechanics of it being more, more disempowering than empowering.

It felt frustrating ultimately, because by the time you get towards

the end of it, you could see that looked like they'd run out of money and time.

It started to get a little bit fragmented towards the end.

"Jericho is way too ambitious, and it hurts on every side."

"While not broken it's poorly designed and dull."

The goal had been I wanted to create Red storm. So Red storm is Tom Clancy's brand

for like making Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six and such.

And I thought Clive needed to have that in the horror space.

I thought we needed to have like a go to horror brand with this master of horror at the helm.

We had tried to create these characters that were like very three dimensional humans, right? Like real people.

When Codemasters got a hold of it and the producer that was assigned to it got a hold of it,

he had like, kind of like an Asian fetish, if you will? The character, of Billy.

She, she had like a completely different design, and then he ended up turning her into this,

like geisha ninja, latex clad, sexy character. And Clive was like, "what the fuck is that?"

Like, that's that's not the Billy that we had originally designed.

Codemasters got a pictorial of the characters, the female characters, into Playboy

like pictorials of video game characters, "but now how you've always wanted to see them!"

And Clive was like, what the fuck? Like, this is, this isn't what we signed up to do.

"If we care about the craft, we're involved in we care about it"

"because it can communicate to large numbers of people."

"Because it has some power to change the world."

"I don't I'm not interested in art if it can't change the world."

I think Clive was just exhausted at that point. He was disillusioned with how games work

and was just like, "let's, let's just get it out."

The biggest challenge in creating a game out of something

that was not originally a game is finding the mechanics.

That's why you see a lot of licensed games based on superheroes, based on shooters,

based on things that have like, pretty obvious mechanics we can create.

"I'll swallow your soul!"

- "Make mine a double." - "Evil Dead: A Fistful of Boomstick."

That was awesome. It was, it was genuinely a fun game,

basically going around with a shotgun blowing off deadites heads.

Fistful of Boomstick is great because you're obviously

playing Ash, and Ash is one of the best horror protagonists

you could possibly get, but you can also,

put your soul into a deadite and then as a deadite go around

and kill other deadites.

"So you're probably asking yourself how a handsome devil like me

ended up in a place like this with you, right?"

The script that I got to write for it is some of my most favorite scenes. Just because, you know,

Bruce Campbell lent his voice to it. So to hear Bruce Campbell reading your lines

and hearing him like chuckle at lines going, "ah that sounds like Ash. Yeah, he's an asshole."

"That sounds good. That's, that's something he'd say."

That was just like, that was gold."

"Rated M for Mature."

When you're working in the realm of homage, you can basically adapt any license unofficially.

So we've got Alan Wake, which is essentially a Stephen King game.

We've got Thimbleweed Park, which is basically The X-Files,

and Deadly Premonition is essentially Twin Peaks, the video game,

but without any of the official licenses that come along with that.

It can't work if it's all relentless darkness.

I think to make effective horror, you have to have a good sense of humor as well.

Horror and humor are kind of warped

reflections of each other, but they're effectively the same thing, right?

They're art forms where you are playing with tension and expectations.

And then you subvert that tension, or you subvert those expectations, or you just break it.

Deadly Premonition is a funny one, because you could go either way with it,

like some of the best video games. Some people might think it's terrifying,

some people might think it's hokey.

I think it has an endearing quality to it in that there's kind of nothing else like it out there.

I love Deadly Premonition. It is a story about an FBI agent

who goes to a strange town and shit ain't right.

There is all kinds of strange things happening. There's zombies walking around all over the place,

and the residents are just bizarre.

"At heart this is a love letter to the cult TV series Twin Peaks."

"A young girl is murdered in a rural town. An FBI agent who talks to an unseen"

"companion is called in, and the offbeat townspeople make the investigation"

"anything but pedestrian."

"A policeman's dream!"

Deadly Premonition really focuses in on, like, the schedule of a town of people,

and I think that was the biggest stand out for it is not it's whodunnit story,

I'm a sucker for a whodunnit, but the fact that you could follow

each individual person in town on their set schedule

and kind of learn more about their lives.

The most exciting part of the game for me was him shaving

and changing his suit and, you know, going and getting an apple pie

and coffee or whatever it was.

"Deadly Premonition may be a technically shabby game,

but it's also a daring one that is, by turns hilarious and haunting."

There is a million things wrong with it, and it is a kind of broken game,

"If you don't mind me asking..."

But I think the the reverence for horror in it is so special.

There's this moment where you are driving around with your imaginary friend Zach.

And you start talking about this film, "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes".

"Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!"

"Attack of the Killer Tomatoes."

"Filmed in 1978. Produced, directed and written and edited by John De Bello."

And the fact that, like that of all films is being talked about in this game...

That game is such a like pastiche of different stuff.

That affection for like what horror is, is so palpable.

I think it's, it's one of the reasons that game is so special.

Like there is a real genuine earnestness to it.

I think Deadly Premonition was so underrated. People like laughed at it and derided it.

I never saw that at all. But it to me, it was without a doubt

one of the best games of that generation for me.

I think people love zombies because, they're you and me and then suddenly like, oh, there's your wife

and she wants to eat your brains, but also like there's a big wish fulfillment,

of what would you do in case the end of the world,

the zombies are the symbolism of the end of the world and then now you're stuck, like, fending for yourself.

So there's two real terrifying things that are going on.

Telltale's The Walking Dead was this narrative adventure game that came out

in a time where there was not a lot like this.

It came from that time where Telltale were at their height.

The story is just so well-written, like it fits into that universe

better than loads of other adaptations of it.

It was such a personal story in a way that I think echoes

the comics and the TV show, without ripping from it directly.

It is an original story. It's original characters, it's an original setting.

You're this guy and you meet just the coolest, nicest little kid, Clementine.

- "Hello." - "You need to be quiet."

- "I'm Clementine. This is my house." - "Hi, Clementine. I'm Lee."

And you have to keep her alive, during a zombie apocalypse

- "Did you kill it?" - "Yes."

Because I'm a father, I really tend to lean towards, like,

fatherly figures in video games now, which is really weird.

"Let's go. Stay close to me."

Lee, from the first season, he had a really touching and interesting story.

Starting nowhere, not really like caring about this child

All the way to the end where he's like really emotional.

"Clementine, honey. My arm is gone because I cut it off."

"Why would you do that? Because I was bit Clem."

He wants to leave her with the skill base that she would need to survive in the world.

- "I don't want to do this." - "You have to. It'll keep you safe."

So whenever you put a choice in a video game, a binary choice, you know, in this case,

how is Clementine going to resolve the situation with Lee?

It has to feel like this is a payoff to everything.

This is your final lesson to her, and at this point you can either say,

okay, everything I've taught you up until now,

this is the culmination of that.

This, this is what you need to do to survive, or, everything I've taught you before I was wrong.

And now that I'm at my extreme limit, here's what I actually want you take away.

This is what I want you to remember.

"There's only one thing you can do. You know that."

"I don't know if I can."

And I think either builds in a really beautiful arc

for their relationship, for Lee's character.

- "You have to shoot me honey." - "Lee, no."

And that's something that I just don't think another medium could do.

All of the inputs, all of the things that they've been experiencing, we have too.

"There you go, nice!"

We've experienced betrayal.

"You're not coming with us you son of a bitch!"

We've experienced the horror.

"I'm not letting somebody else get eaten today"

- "Name's Lee." - "I'm Kenny."

"Dad, we're gonna build a fence! There's a tractor and everything!"

We've experienced losing people that we've come to care about,

and so we've also grown as players in how we want to respond to the world.

And we can echo that with the characters.

"I'll miss you."

I think the players grew up with Clementine. I think that's what a lot of it is.

Based on reading fan mail and looking at fan art

and really loving it, it's they were young when the first season came out and,

and they experienced some of the same, you know, wide eyed wonder and terror of growing up.

You know, if you look even at the box art or the posters, she's hiding behind Lee

and she's this scared little girl, and then by the end, she's just,

you know, a complete badass who grew up in a world

where she had to defend people she loved, people

she just met, she had to defend herself against these horrifying creatures.

She wasn't just generic little girl, she felt like she was a character living in the world.

Somebody you want to make sure makes it, a symbol of the future, you could say, of just,

this is a kid who's growing up here, and that's terrible,

and we have to make sure that life is okay for her.

"Clem, don't-"

I became a writer on The Walking Dead: The Final season, after I had just completed

an internship at Telltale Games.

We played through all of the other seasons together.

We talked about themes that resonated with us, characters we were interested in, things

we wanted to explore more in the new season, and out of that came

what the season ended up being about, which was Clementine and AJ having a home,

trying to build a home for the first time. They've been on the run for years.

What does it mean to be part of a community?

"Made you some coffee. It was in the kitchen, Tenn said I can have some. I didn't steal it."

I thought that was a really full circle moment

with that relationship because, you know, you start out

the first season of that game as Lee taking care of Clementine,

and then Clementine ends up taking on that kind of position for AJ.

This is a child who really his only skill is staying alive,

and it's her teaching him you can be part of a community,

you can trust people, you can care about people.

You can love people and not immediately lose them. That is possible.

"If I'm a murderer, am I going to die too?"

- "What? No." - "Well, I think murderers are like monsters and,

I know what happens to monsters."

"Ad, you're not a monster."

And I think there's a really unique perspective there in

Clementine who can remember what the world was like before,

and AJ, who can't and will never be able to.

I think that is a very real experience for any parent or parental figure, and

I think it's just a really beautiful inversion on what players had already played through in season one,

and seeing Clementine come into her own from being,

the innocent little girl who needed to be taught to someone trying to teach and occasionally failing.

And I think, I think it's a really good and emotional story in that way.

"We're going to fix this, you and me."

-"I'm going to help you atone." "Atone?"

"It means make up for what you did wrong."

She's really just written so well in that final season. I think it's a send off this

that everyone who played the game and the characters themselves deserved.

So, like, I can't praise the end of that enough.

"I love you, Clem."

"I love you back."

If I had to pick a favorite licensed horror game, it would probably be Alien Isolation.

It gives you something to really be scared of.

You know you're not running around. You're not blasting enemies.

You're not overpowered. You're not in control,

in that video game and that is the most important thing when it comes to horror.

And I think the fandom of that movie, they really want something that can give them the feeling

of first watching alien in 1979.

They didn't pull any punches, making it the singular Xenomorph from the first film, which I really like.

"Aliens versus Predator."

Because I played Alien Versus Predator, where you're like against an army of xenomorphs

and they're kind of like cannon fodder, you know, gunning them down.

This thing you know, there's no Killing it. There's no stopping it.

It might as well be The Terminator, you know?

So we sat down in the very early days with the lead designer at the time,

and his first thought was that you have to be able to kill the alien.

We tried really hard to visualize how that would work.

We had to go back to him and say, if you look at the film Alien,

if you look at the film Aliens, the alien gets to you if it touches you, you're dead.

Okay, it doesn't matter whaether you're a marine or what you are, the alien gets to you,

you're either dead or you've got a facehugger implanted in you.

There's no surviving, and yet you play games and they will jump on you and you can wrestle them off.

So we sat down with him and we went, what happens if we say that that unbreakable rule

that you've told us that the player has to be able to kill the alien.

What if we break that rule? What happens if we do that?

And over time, it became very clear that this was going to be a creeping, terrifying experience.

And completely unsurvivable. If you met the alien that was going to be it.

You're in its domain, you know, everything is pipes and you know

it's made for that creature to hide, not for you to hide.

When you're playing it, you're like, he knows I'm here.

And even if it doesn't, you think it does.

So we said early on we wanted the alien to learn. Okay, so what would the alien learn from?

The alien would learn from encounters with the player.

We took a very simple approach to this in the end, and we went, okay,

let's brainstorm the things that an alien could possibly learn

under the very simple encounters it's going to have with you.

The big obvious one was the first time you get the flamethrower, it runs at you.

And after that, it's respectful of the flamethrower.

Until you run out of fuel.

It's the idea, it goes back to look at kind of horror tropes, right?

You go, okay, when two people go off somewhere, the antagonist of the film is going to be there.

All right? So we wanted to capture that feeling,

and the idea was that we would measure all the sort of intangible things

that might scare the player, okay? A sight of the alien on screen,

hearing the alien do something, just the alien coming

close to you, even if it's in the next room.

All of those things would build up on a menace meter.

And then if the player had not been menaced for a while,

we would attract the alien to the area the player was in.

Alien Isolation is interesting. The thing I thought about most is the difference

between a horror, simulator and that sort of horror facade,

or a veneer of horror, like a horror layer.

And in some sense, and I know people are going to disagree with me on this.

Resident Evil would have worked just as well without the horror theme, a lot like with the puzzles.

Whereas in Alien Isolation you're supposed to be hunted, you're supposed to be defenseless, and so on,

If you want someone to be a badass, you give them big, big weapons.

You give them health and armor and all the kit that they need.

But if you want to make the player feel the terror

that we felt when we first saw Alien, I was 18. It scared me to death.

How do you capture that sense of vulnerability? You do it by making the player vulnerable.

You do it by making the player realize that one false move

and they're back to those annoying restart points.

So save stations are crucial. Once you die, You repeat.

And the alien is, you know, relentless.

The fact that you're vulnerable while you're saving,

and it's not just like an instant save, you actually have to like, manipulate

a bit of Ul on the screen just to save your game,

and then you can be Killed at any point in this, like, really

long analog process of saving it, I thought "you bastards!"

But it's fantastic.

They beep, like "beep, beep" if you're near them,

You are trained to listen to sounds, which makes the game scarier.

We felt that you have to always know it's there. So how do you pull it off?

Well, the audio team did a spectacular job.

We realized the alien had to sound like it was wearing hobnailed boots.

Because you had to know where it was, you had to be able to hear it.

It's a, you know, it's a multimedia experience, it's sound, it's sight, it's everything.

I honestly have to take breaks while playing that game,

because it's so spooky and scary. And you're always looking around

and even after you finish playing the game, you're in the kitchen making a cup of tea.

You're just looking around for the for the smallest sound in case

an alien comes and drags you through an air vent.

Not that I have air vents in my house, but yeah, scary.

Some will say that to be horror, you absolutely need to be scared.

Yes, but I would still disagree. I think that horror can be a theme on top of anything.

And I think that Dead by Daylight kind of proves that point.

Because if you play the Killer, you're not the one that's scared.

But there's still horror that happens.

Dead by Daylight is a multiplayer game where you've got one player

acting as the killer and four others acting as survivors.

It's basically a playable slasher film. - At the very, very beginning of the project,

what we had was a very direct approach to the core of what we felt horror was about.

"The body count continues."

Like the old school slasher movies from the 70s and 80s, and the archetypes and the tropes.

We were doing work for hire. We were making games for anybody who needed one.

"From the smash hit movies comes High School Musical: Making the Cut for Nintendo DS.

Be it like the licensors, like, let's say a Disney or Warner

or sometimes developers needing help with their game,

whether it's THQ or Activision or anybody else.

"Scene it! Bright lights! Big screen!"

Essentially, it was one of those things where we wanted to do a fantasy of a horror game,

but at the time the publishers were saying, nobody does horror.

Like, unless you're like a Silent Hill or something.

So we decided to make it sort of like funny.

The very first Naughty Bear, at the last minute,

the publisher asked us to add a multiplayer mode,

and one of the modes was literally like the bears running around trying to do things

while Naughty was trying to kill them.

And that was the first sort of hint of that idea that took place.

And that idea at some point hit that fantasy of the horror movie thing.

And when we had those two together, we're like, oh,

yeah, okay, there's a sweet spot there. There's something special.

Okay, let's, let's push on this one.

It was really alluring to us to be able to be chased by a slasher

and to play the victim, but also to be able to create the other side of the metal.

I've been playing Dead by Daylight since it first launched.

I remember when it was just the first original three Killers,

but I remember when Michael Myers was announced.

And I think at the time, for me personally, Dead By Daylight was just

this cool game I'd pick up here and there. But when I saw Michael Myers

was being implemented into it, that was the moment I thought, okay, this is serious.

Very early on, it was always understood when we were building the game

that the format we were creating would allow us to expand on

more maps, more killers, more survivors, more content,

and immediately, because the inspiration was so direct, of course, we thought of potentially

involving existing licenses. And fortunately we had some contacts.

We already had some trust established also, and as we build up these sub-universes into DBD,

the more the license owners out there wanted to collaborate with us.

The players, the players love that for sure. It's the only place that you can have

Freddy Krueger chasing Ash Williams in the Myer's house.

Like how crazy is that for a fan of horror?

I think horror gaming was really lacking, like they like to call it like the Hall of Fame

of horror characters, and they really fill that need and they fill that void.

Ghostface is in there, they even have The Pig from Saw, like they do a really good job

of diversifying what they have, and I think it really adds to the experience

because, if you like Saw, and I like Evil Dead, we could both play and find a character

that like, hits home for us that we want to play as.

I think that later on, with the release of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, specifically,

Those were not our peers, right? They were the people that we looked up to.

They were the games that inspired us. They said, yes, we want to work with you

and to us, that was a huge, huge seal of approval.

Dead by Daylight, being more mature now, like almost ten years old,

allows us to be able to look at, different collaborations that, we didn't

thought were necessarily feasible or possible in the past,

that are more adjacent to horror. So Iron Maiden and Slipknot, for example,

they could be considered horror by people that don't necessarily know the band.

I didn't realize how cool and important that was until everybody and their mom

started telling me that it was cool and important, you know? And it's a really rad game.

But it's not something you think about when you're starting a band.

You know, it's like, you know, I hope someday I can go up against

Freddy or some shit, you know, it's just like the opportunity came up

and we were we were really, really into it.

And then you look eight years down the line, last year we released, you know, Nic Cage,

all those things that are horror adjacent and, and can heighten what it means to be horror.

It appears the party has started without you. How dare they exclude you from all that fun?

I think now it's officially half of my working life. Looking back at when we were a bunch of people

dreaming about this whole project and now seeing kind of the legacy,

It's amazing.

It's allowed us to integrate so many amazing IPs from movies

and TV shows and video games, and it's sort of an endless source

of excitement and pride. It's just never ends.

Licensed games have changed quite a bit. I mean, for a long time

just any license got slapped onto any game just to elevate it

and make it more visible and get some more, more buyers.

But I would say good license games have come out and they have proven that

if you're working with a partner on the IP that understands

what games can deliver and they're willing to be flexible,

that's how you get things like GoldenEye.

That's how you get like the really strong Star Wars games.

That's how you get, you know, the Jurassic games that I've worked on.

"We're trapped! Our plane went down. You got to send someone!"

Jurassic World Aftermath was a, VR game on the, quest VR headset

in which, you play a scientist exploring the, abandoned Isla Nublar

hunted by a trio of, very territorial raptors.

So we had to find a stylized art direction, and we tried a lot of different things.

And the Coatsink art team came up with this really nice, like,

graphic novel style, so it looked kind of like a hand-drawn comic,

and it looked really beautiful in stills, but we weren't sure how it was going to look

moving and the most important thing is, we didn't know if it would be scary.

So, they gave me the build and I'm exploring around. I'm going down the hallway and I'm throwing

some switches and stuff, and then you hear their chirp and you hear, it's like in the vents.

You're like, oh, shit.

So now I'm not even looking at the scene that they've built in the lab.

I'm looking at every air vent, wondering where the hell the thing's going to come from.

Of course, the bastard drops out of the vent, you know, when I'm not looking, so |

I heard it before I saw it. I just heard its feet go "pla-plom".

And then I see her tail, like, whip up behind a desk.

Instinctively, you're not playing with the controller so you don't hit like the crouch button.

I literally hit the floor like in my office. I like, hit the floor and I bash my head on my desk

because I hadn't cleared the space around. So I almost knocked myself out,

with this headset on because I was hiding from a cartoon velociraptor.

And the moment that the feet walked by

and she paused and she did her little tap, tap, tap, tap with her talon I was like,

yes, milestone approved cartoon velociraptors, scary as fuck, yes.

To really get yourself scared shitless, you got to go VR. That's the way it's going to go.

""Why does your God swim in such filth?"

You're sitting there all by yourself and you're just in the fucking game now. You're going to be terrified.

So, The Exorcist Legion, you're a hardened Boston cop

who's thrown into this world that, you know, maybe you didn't believe in in the first place,

and, you know, you soon start to believe.

I think when pacing The Exorcist, it was a case of, you know, giving the player

bits and pieces of information, letting them explore

and, you know, let them build up that imagery first.

We didn't want to reveal too much. We didn't want to see the demons,

really, until we're kind of at that final point of exorcising.

For any horror designer, there's a definite responsibility not to just rely on

big sounds and big, flashy jumps. I think there has to be,

you know, a little bit of time for a player to feel a little bit more than just fear.

There needs to be time to get a sense of, you know, reflection on a scene, a sense of what happened

here, a sense of what am I looking at? What am I exploring?

I do think that there needs to be a little bit more emotion than just fear in horror.

Horror wouldn't be horror without the physical sensation of fear.

So 10 take 2 IR headset and he put inside that virtual world

is something that's really important to the progression of horror I would say.

"I see you detective."

I think we're definitely going to see more licensed titles as we go ahead.

I've seen news of horror creators being given Hollywood IP,

and then we're also seeing that role reversal, where we're seeing games

made into films and done properly.

It's not great, is it? The game, to movie ratio.

"Some gateways should never be opened."

Horror video games have always had stories that are worth telling.

And what's really exciting is it seems like Hollywood

and the film industry have finally started to pick up on that.

There's a TV thing now, "Fallout".

And I will say the best one is The Last of Us.

Holy Toledo! Did they do a great job of that series. Wow!

If we look elsewhere and we look at Taiwan, we've got things like Detention that actually did quite well.

I think that those TV series have expanded beyond what some of the games

have done, and opened up more audiences to go,

"oh wow! that's from a video game?" Because some people might go,

"Video games, that's kid stuff. Yeah. How can it be smart?"

"How can it be compelling? How can it be intelligent or have any opinion on how we live our lives?"

And then they watch something like The Last of Us. They watch something like Fallout,

and they go, wow, those are actually really smart. Well guess what?

It wasn't written for the show, it was written from the game.

"Hey there."

So maybe go back and give it a little bit of love and some respect.

So, I'm hoping as we move forward, anything that comes from games

starts to really look at the art as more serious.