00:00www.mesmerism.info
00:09www.mesmerism.info
00:09You know, at the beginning of the movie, it's going to be an hour and a half.
00:12At the end of an hour and a half, I'm done.
00:14But with a game, you don't necessarily know
00:15how long it's going to go on, so
00:18we can continue to scare them for a long time.
00:21Dead Space
00:22is a new, all new
00:23third-person horror game
00:25that we're working on here at Electronic Arts.
00:28It takes place
00:29in the future
00:31and primarily takes place
00:33on a huge mining
00:35spaceship. Gameplay-wise, we are
00:37definitely, I would say, survival
00:39horror, and those have always got
00:41a bunch of shooter inside of them.
00:43I think we will differ a lot from
00:45the survival horror games
00:47because we are in sci-fi.
00:49And it gives us the chance to
00:50have different types of weapons, different types of aliens.
00:53Obviously, we're on a
00:55spaceship and we're out in the future.
00:57Whereas a lot of the horror games that are out now
01:00seem to take place
01:01in the present day.
01:02It started with Glenn Schofield, the EP.
01:04He had a vision for a game
01:06that he was all excited about
01:09and he wanted to do
01:10a prison game
01:12in space.
01:13and I think you wanted to even call it
01:15I think you wanted to call it Moon Wars
01:17or something.
01:18No, it wasn't called Moon Wars.
01:21It was Rancid Moon.
01:23That's right, yes.
01:24It was sort of like Escape from New York
01:27on another planet.
01:29and we were like,
01:31okay, we got the space part, we're down with that.
01:33I'm not so sure about the prisoner part.
01:35We've been on teams with each other for a long time.
01:37And we would sort of go to movies or go to
01:39other sorts, see other horror games
01:40and be like, ah, do you see that thing?
01:43That was crazy.
01:45And then we'd go back to work on like our rated T for teen
01:47game and sort of like, yeah,
01:49we'd love to make that someday.
01:50And we'd sort of toss it around at lunch and stuff like that,
01:52but never really thought we'd get a chance.
01:54It started a little over two years ago.
01:57It just felt like it was the right time to go and,
02:00you know, talk to the general manager
02:04and president of the company about making our own IP.
02:07Glenn decided that it was now or never.
02:09So he went to the bosses.
02:10He was like, look, I got my guys.
02:12We're all together.
02:13We really want to do this.
02:14Give us a little time.
02:15Let me show you what it got.
02:16And this is just basically the type of project
02:18we wanted to work on for years and years.
02:21So we all got together and thought a lot about it.
02:24And the basic tenements were there.
02:26It was going to be a scary horror survival game in space.
02:29You play Isaac Clarke, who is a engineer
02:32who gets thrown into a pretty crazy and intense situation.
02:37We wanted the protagonist to be very relatable
02:41and very much like an everyman and very not like a space marine.
02:44He's not all loaded out.
02:45To be scared, you really have to believe the world.
02:49because if it's all like force fields and lasers, you're like, whatever.
02:53I don't I can't even get this.
02:54It's all just sort of fantasy.
02:56The first thing that we did was I remember the president saying to me,
02:59OK, you can you can take your 18 people, you know, pick your pick your people.
03:03Give me the list.
03:04And, you know, we'll give you six months.
03:08And I think it was important to us not to come out with a doc at the end of the
03:13six months.
03:14It was what we really wanted to do was sort of put something in their hands to play.
03:18That just buys you a huge, huge amount of confidence.
03:20And I'd say that's almost single-handedly the reason that we got to be greenlit
03:23is we did a very thick and detailed vertical slice.
03:25If you look at the stacks of like a cake, right, you take the slice and you get all the
03:29little stacks.
03:30So you get the cake bar, you get the frosting part, you get all the other little parts,
03:32and you get an idea what the whole cake's going to be like.
03:34So that's why they call it the vertical slice.
03:35We wanted to create about 10 minutes of gameplay, but we wanted it to be complete gameplay.
03:42Not just like a smoke and mirrors demo where it's sort of faked and you're not really seeing a true
03:48representation of the software.
03:49That was the biggest thing is to come out with something we say, here, here, instead of pictures, here, just
03:56play it.
03:57By the end of that, it was only 15 minutes, but it was really good and really scary and fun.
04:01And we still had a year and a half before we had to finish it.
04:08When we figured out that we could scare people, like scaring people is really hard,
04:15but to see someone for the first time pick it up and then jump or scream or yell, I mean,
04:21those are great moments.
04:22The first time that really sort of came together for me was the first time we turned off the gravity.
04:29You know, there's been plenty of games before that have done horror or done other sorts of things,
04:34but the first time we turned off the gravity in the game and it really worked.
04:39And like you could walk over stuff and come around the other sort of side and there was bad guys
04:43that were upside down
04:45and there was blood that sort of came out of a thing and it just sort of floated away in
04:50globs.
04:51I was just like, okay guys, we're on to something, like this is pretty good.
04:54I'd like people to walk away and think that that was the scariest video game they've ever played.
05:00That it was new, it was fresh, but that it scared the crap out of them.
05:05That would be a great goal.
05:06be like, hey hey, flick it up to me right?
05:20You guys were the same.
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