- [eerie music]

- 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. But in the end we did end up having a character that was semi like him, that would cover up any of the dead people and turn them into a Necromorph.

[monster screeching]

Hi, I'm Glen Schofield, creator and director of Dead Space. I set out to make the scariest game of all time and along the way, I had to break some rules, make some new ones, and really redefine how I make video games.

[eerie music] [scary dramatic music]

I started thinking about Dead Space at about 2005. To do a prototype that everybody would approve, we actually took the dev kit of the Xbox, a lot more memory, a lot more of everything, and we filled it with just three rooms with spinning lights and, you know, fans and everything 'cause we wanted to just see what it 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. By accident we found a good way to develop and create newer engines 'cause then after they saw what we wanted and they were able to make it.

My number one goal was to scare the heck out of one person. I wanted to make the scariest game. You know, 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 exactly what I wanted to make. You know, I had made a lot of games that people wanted me to make and I was happy doing it because making video games. But this one I wanted to really make my creative side just really happy. And so I think you can see it in the end product. It was just really a handcrafted game.

Some of my influences to make Dead Space from the game industry, well, definitely the Resident Evil series. And Resident Evil 4 had just come out. One of things I would say to the team is we're gonna make Resident Evil in space. And you got it right away. Resident Evil 4 is one of my top five games of all time. And I just like the mood. The mood was oppressive sometimes. It was dreadful but it was, I don't know, I just got caught up in it.

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 there was a blind enemy.

[tense music] And that thing was so scary and so hard [bell rings] that when I finally got it, I was cheering, Ken. That's a different kinda scary. There's this tension in playing and then there's this like running away and all. But the moment that the dog jumped out in Resident Evil 1, it still goes down as probably top five scariest moments [glass shattering] in video game history. [scary music] [glass shattering] [dogs growling]

Video games is what pushed me to wanna make another video game and I think because I thought the 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 the nurses and oh my God, the feeling in that room that when it would go from nice to awful.

The things that would influence me in creating tension [tense music] or dread or oppression or whatever it is, I looked to movies and horror science fiction. At the top there is Event Horizon. The idea of a spaceship going to hell, man, that's something just crazy. And I wanted to create something like that. I found Event Horizon to be successful in creating the storytelling that was just done in the backgrounds. One of the characters is standing with their back to the cockpit, in the cockpit and a light goes on and the glass behind it is just covered in blood. It's not normal looking. It looks like just something awful's happened. And this character here has no idea. And I wanted to get that feeling somehow all throughout the game. We wanted you to have moments of relaxation but not too much.

[door clattering]

The sound design in horror movies is one of my favorite aspects [ominous music] of making the game. And 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.

[eerie music]

And in a lot of games, sound design was like sorta 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. One in particular that really got me was the bar train room. Don Veca was telling me one day, he's like, "Glen, I was going in the bar 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. Next day he's hanging out with the bar train, getting the sound when it's in the tunnel and everything. And he plays it for me and we have these really nice sound rooms. It's like screeching [train screeching] and it was like oh man, it's great, you know.

'Cause what we were looking for is how can we scare people just with sound, no monsters, no nothing. So you're zero G in the game. You enter an airlock and then [imitates air whooshing], turns down quiet again. Then you open the door and it's just like... [metal rattling] And people are running in the room. They are just trying to get out of that room. It's so awesome. There was such a thrill for us [tense music] 'cause that was a great way and now realize that we can use sound even more.

[train rumbling] [metal clattering] [tense music]

Our rules of developing Dead Space we're no HUD, character never talks, we were gonna do dismemberment, all big moments are gonna be interactive, and everything it's 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. Even just his look, here's something you've never seen before. The stomp, [character grunts] and that's just a simple melee. [dynamic ominous music

 With Resident Evil 4, [tense music] one thing that we wanted to do was, you know, you walk and then you wanna shoot, you gotta stop. And that's what made it really scary but I also thought it just, that sometimes took me out because I'm like no, no, I wanna be running and shooting. I wanna get away from the character. So that's what we did. [static crackling] Well, I didn't want him to stop and have to shoot. [guns firing] I wanted him to be able to turn, shoot, just like you would in real life. That just was a nice place to innovate.

One thing with the animation, 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. So we had this system of vents [gun firing] where it wasn't just a spawn point. We had a vent here and a vent here. Depending on where the character was 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 another vent. Just by innovating a little bit on the way spawn points are, you can really get something special.

[metal clanging] [tense music]

We wanted you to feel like you were Isaac. That's why you don't see a lot of HUD up. 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 lotta sense, I mean, deep water. That's where the idea came from was like, 'cause I kept saying how do we put it on the character, how do we put it on the character? 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. So the engineer went in and made sure that every time Isaac died that thing went red and that you would just see parts on his back. I love that! I love that when the engineers, when anybody comes up with just something to make the game better.

[metal clanging] 

The main character, Isaac, was not gonna talk. 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 just wanted to have sorta the Gordon Freeman-feeling game so character never talk.

[metal clanging]

The other rule was we were gonna do dismemberment, the thing that we built the game on. So change the way the that enemies were designed. We changed the way every single weapon was done because now they had to be something that could chop off arms and legs.

Isaac dying is purely two systems. Enemy system attacking a character that has dismemberment. The death animations weren't pretty big. Each one was different based on what the enemy was or how the enemy killed you or however it happened. He may cut off Isaac's arms, he may cut off his legs, that's all, it's all... So that's why they're all different. So the death scenes, they ended up being like a feature.

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. [enemy growling] So wanted 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.

Yeah, this here is all the notes from my animation director, Chris Stone. 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. Well, you can just see that the care that went into just dismemberment was something really special.

[metal clangs] [tense music]

Interactive moments. There are no cut scenes in the game so we're trying to tell the story through video logs, but also what Isaac does. You know, 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 'cause it was so hard that we almost just said well, let's just have him drag Isaac and we'll just shoot. And it was like, no, we're not gonna do that. We're not gonna break our rule just for one. One that led to a lot of work, a lot of changes in the way that we do things, and a lot of things, a lot of ways that we still do work was the Drag Tentacle.

[scary dramatic music] [enemy growling] [tense music]

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.

[eerie music] [Drag Tentacle rumbling] [character thudding]

The Drag Tentacle was meant to be a medium moment, well, 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 want to be on the ground and pulled and shoot. 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 kinda 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 [eerie music] because it flips you on your back. And you can't get away from it. You have to shoot it through.

That wasn't just about animation. That was about technology finding the target and being able to wrap around, grab the leg by the ankle, which is what we wanted. So we had to create this tentacle that kinda figured out where you were. We had to create falling on my back, and we get the sounds for it, all this stuff. Went through the list.

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 and everybody had their list of things to do. Well, I went away for a few days on business trip. When I came back, nothing was working but yet all the stuff was there, right? And it was done right and it was done good. But they were like, "Glen, we did everything you asked "but it's a mess." And I'm looking at it going, yeah it is, you know, it is.

After just kinda making a whole bunch of mistakes for a couple of weeks we realized there's gotta be a better way. And I realized that, you know, the problem wasn't the team, it was really on how I was giving them their assignment. Some things need to come first. I need to have 'em grab him by the leg before I can throw him on the ground. And if he needs to be on the ground before I can start animating. So all these things then started coming in as layers.

[dramatic scary music]

So I started thinking about how the heck do we get the tentacle to come in, 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 it could be the left or it could be the right. Realized I had to do one thing at a time. All right, guys, just animate the Drag Tentacle coming out of the hole and it grabs him by the leg. They're like, "Yeah but, the sound." It's 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 on the ground on his back. And they're like, "Yeah, but then he shoots him." Like no, just do, let's just do this part. Now everybody was starting to get it. 

When you do everything at once, you're not sure why it's not working. When you layer it and you break it down, you peel the onion peel. You keep, 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. I start calling it layering, layering management. You know there's probably a term for it but that for us, we still call it, you know, 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 then we realized that now he's dragging him and we're dragging him for a long way because we wanted to either 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 your 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 remake all of the shooting mechanics and some struggling mechanics. It was daunting. We had to put a team on animation.

Then we realized the tentacle would have to be blown up and broken and it could be anywhere along that long way. [character screaming] 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 [character thuds] and all of 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 or could be. We probably had anywhere between 15 and 22 people working on the Drag Tentacle at any time. And I remember, you know, people coming in and asking me, "Glen, are you sure? You really wanna do this?" We cut two other things just to get that in. I can't tell you what we cut 'cause I don't care, all right? That Drag Tentacle was really cool.

[scary dramatic music]

You know, 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. 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 there was like, hey, there's a challenge, just break this down into layers and see what we can do, you know? 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.

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, "No, I don't, nobody can take that." I'm like, good. Having an overarching desire to make something great and to have quality be your number one thing is the biggest lesson. I mean, may say, oh, 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, you don't have the right people, and you have to let down your guard a little bit.

We shipped the game two weeks early because we had gotten all our bugs. We had gotten all the way down to C bugs. The game came out and then we won, I'll never forget the biggest one was sitting at the D.I.C.E. Awards, which is the big one for us. 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. I founded Sledgehammer Games with my partner, Michael Condrey, July 21st of 2009 and we made three games: Modern Warfare 3, 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.

When I think back [tense music] about Dead Space and I think back on its origins which was just me in my car and talking to Paul Lee about making a game, I can't believe 10 years later it's become something I never, you just don't expect it. The real highlight of my career has been making Dead Space and then what it's brought since. 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. I still write horror stuff. [eerie music] 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.

[monster screaming] [scary music]