What Scares Horror Game Developers

The following is a brief introduction to the topic:

Sam Barlow was a child when he experienced an event that would forever change his life: being chased around by monkeys in a pool. In Tanzania, East Africa, he was about 5 years old. He says his parents didn’t do anything. The only thing they did was laugh.

Years later, he tried to recreate that experience with Silent Hill : Shattered Memories.

Barlow’s most notable works include Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality. He also founded the Half Mermaid studio. In 2009, Barlow was still working for Climax on Silent Hill. He became obsessed with hair and making characters run on their all-fours. Simultaneously, he had the teamʼs level designers build a segment where youʼd run through a swimming pool.

The Immortal Life

Testing the level was a problem. In Shattered Memories, you can look over the main characterʼs shoulder during chase sequences to see how close enemies are from grabbing you. However, if the creatures ran on all fours, the camera would have difficulty showing them as theyʼd be lower toward the ground. “I was very specific about, ‘If I ran around here, this is how the enemy should behave,ʼ” Barlow says. “I was like, ‘Why am I so obsessed with it?ʼ” Then it dawned on him: he was recreating his memory.

Stories like these are often the result of horror game development. They spend all day learning how to scare the audience. In the nine to five routine, developers spend their days deciding when to add a scare, analyzing real-life images to create alien creatures and using personal experience as an influence.

Game Informer spoke to some of the creators behind Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, Darkest Dungeon, and the Dead Space remake about the research and concepts behind horror games – from the influence of personal experiences to what scares the people who craft these frightening worlds.

Haunting Material

Haunting Material

Horror has many sources of inspiration. Developers are forced to confront horror by breaking down tropes and exposing novelties. This research leads to external material and discussions about themes you wouldnʼt expect to learn about in an office.

The Evil Within

For Shinji Mikami, Tango Gameworksʼ founder and one of the creative minds behind Resident Evil and The Evil Within, it all starts with a theme. “I think that the scariest thing for us as humans is actually other humans,” Mikami says. “But we donʼt want to put [regular]The human race as an enemy. Thatʼs where a lot of thought and creativity is needed.”

It was easy to use the zombie concept in Resident Evil because it had been used by other media. But during the development of The Evil Within, for example, the main keywords were “pain and torture.” The prevalence of barbed wire, chains, and spikes surrounding enemies and environments serve as callbacks to that foundation.

The real world can be a great source of inspiration. Mikami’s love of Spain dates back to Resident Evil 4, when he first fell in love with its architecture and design. And while, initially, he wanted to set the game in Germany, he thought that having enemies speak the language frequently “made us in Japan feel that all enemies would sound very angry,” so the team opted for Spain instead.

The team was able to do the majority of their research via the internet, but Mikami still sent a part of staff out on a 5-day trip in order to collect footage, take pictures, and understand the feeling of the location. “It was hard to get approvals for that trip because people thought [they] were going there to have fun, but it was actually work to gather materials,” he says, laughing.

Barlow spends a lot of his free time doing research. The usage of technology to consume media – and its limitations – is something heʼs always been fond of. He watched old movies on cassettes in his early years and stayed up late to check if anything strange was on television. Back then, youʼd have to purchase a special newspaper listing what was on the television, so there was a genuine unknown nature to tuning into those random channels using dial knobs, unaware of what could appear onscreen.

Barlow was aware that there were expectations for the way people consumed media in today’s world, particularly with YouTube and Netflix. Thatʼs why rewinding became a central piece in its horror elements. “Giving people the sense that the game itself was slightly aggressive and kind of haunted, it seemed like such a fun thing,” he says, recalling the impact that films like David Lynchʼs Inland EmpireHe had on him.

Fatal Frame: Project Zero

Makoto Shibata co-created the Fatal Frames series and is its director. His hauntings coexist with him. When he created the series, Shibata set out to create one of the scariest games on offer. Shibata claims to have a lifelong experience with ghosts. He has used them in his series at various levels.

Ever since he was a kid, overhearing what he describes as a ghost parade that seemingly travelled between two shrines close to his home, heʼs always seen the world through a supernatural lens. “Being able to provide players with an unusual experience, showing this world that only I can see, is something I find interesting,” Shibata says.

Shibata responds enthusiastically to questions I ask and retells many stories that I read in previous interviews. His hand was grabbed by a ghost who asked to “go swimming together,” mimicking the pose of an unknown guest he found in a hotel where only he and his relatives were staying, and a recurrent “Slender Man-like” appearance in his dreams called Mr. Miyamoto all come up in our chat.

Shibata tells me that he has had Mr. Miyamoto in his dreams. “Sometimes, sometimes,” he answers with a serious tone. “Once I put [him] in a game for a while, it doesnʼt show up, so itʼs kind of like heʼs satisfied after being put in the game. But he does appear sometimes still.”

Darkest Dungeon II

Chris Bourassa, co-founder and creative director at Red Hook Studios, has lived and breathed the gloominess and existential dread surrounding Darkest Dungeonʼs themes since 2013. As in the first sequel, characters are once again faced with impossible odds. But the story begins by implying a doomsday.

The few human beings who remain are seen from your caravan. You see them rummaging in infested areas and burning towns, and witness their horrific reactions to such despair. “Itʼs the response to the end of the world,” Bourassa says. The message was unexpectedly more personal when the COVID-19 epidemic began, a year following Red Hook’s announcement of Darkest Dungeon II.

The remote work never fails to disrupt the daily routine. “My wife was pregnant at the time,” animation director Yousuf Mapara says while explaining the process behind Darkest Dungeon’s The Harvest Child, a nightmarish cornucopia baby monster. More often than not, heʼd be too focused on adding physics onto dripping flesh to notice his 7-year-old daughter looking at the computer screen with shock before quickly covering the screen with his hands.

Barlow’s work on Silent Hill Origins was a fast paced process of character creation and enemy concept development. It was started in Los Angeles by Climax Group, a division. However, the team from the United Kingdom took it over after Climax Group’s Los Angeles office closed. They had other ideas for making the project feel more true to the Silent Hill series.

Barlow prepared designs at home in the evenings, but they couldn’t afford the time and money for artists to help. He would then bring the designs to the rest of the team the following day. As a result, the process was smoother as they were able to work faster.

Silent Hill Origins

Barlow used this in his artistic process – such as with the boss Momma in the gameʼs asylum, representing the memory of the protagonistʼs mother. “She was kind of suspendedThe following is a list of the most recent and relevant articles. the ceiling, almost as if wrapped in plastic, which I believe was about this idea of being institutionalized and the loss of humanity of using those clothes,” he tells me. “A lot of the reference images we had [were] from […]Strange contraptions with people bound in plastic. Bizarrely, my logic was, ‘Itʼs fine for me to download this stuff at home, but I shouldn’t bring any of this to the office.ʼ”

Fear Factor

Fear Factor

Nearly all the developers who I talked to for this story spoke of their passion for horror. Yet, every person in a studio canʼt share this feeling. A recurring question I asked is whether theyʼve worked with someone unaccustomed to the genre and if there were any specific considerations for them.

“They do it as work, professionally, so they would have to get used to it” Mikami says after a short laugh. “There really is no real special care that is applied for making people get used to it because itʼd be part of their work.”

Masato Kimura, a producer at Tango Gameworks, says he initially wasnʼt fond of horror when he started his career in game development at Capcom, working with Mikami on the Resident Evil series. As part of the research, Kimura watched many horror films. He eventually became used to them. “Itʼs the same as fishermen getting used to motion sickness on boats,” Mikami adds.

Unlike Kimura, the people on Barlowʼs team did not expect to jump from working on SpongeBob SquarePants: SuperSponge to two Silent Hill projects. He remembers one animator who was creeped out, in particular, by the death animation in Shattered Memories, which had enemies gently stroking the protagonistʼs face as they were manifestations of her daughter.

“It was like, ‘Iʼll chop his head off, but the creatures doing this is really creeping me out,ʼ” Barlow recalls. “This was still slightly in a time where everybody in video games worked really hard, and there was no real consideration for thinking about peopleʼs well-being […]We would want to talk about it if I was to create a large-scale horror video game. You just got going with it. Itʼs a weird job.”

Dead Space Remake

As development continues, teams can become numb to the horror. “When you see things like a jumpscare once or twice it might scare you,” says Joel MacMillan, Realization Director at Motive Studio, which recently worked on the Dead Space remake. “But as developers working on the game, you see it a hundred times. You start to lose the sense of how effective it is.” In the case of Motive, it worked closely with EA’s Community Council, an internal group of “veteran players, developers, and influencers” who provided feedback on the experience.

As much as they may create resistance over time, everyone has their fears. These films are a great way to explore the fear of others. Texas Chainsaw MassacreYou can also find out more about the following: Scarface left strong images in Mikamiʼs mind around chainsaws. “Even without actually seeing them on screen, the sound instils a lot of fear,” he says. This might resonate if youʼve ever played Resident Evil 4 or The Evil Within, as both games have prominent chainsaw-wielding foes.

Resident Evil 4

“A combination of losing my mind, rats, and then a little bit of fingernail torture porn; that would be my recipe for disaster,” Barlow says. “The things to my mind that were the most horrific across the games I worked on werenʼt the traditional monsters; it was the sad things. The really scary thing is that we all die someday and that our memory is valuable.”

“Imagination is probably one of the scariest things you can have,” Shibata says about his fear of moments where nothing happens, and you don’t know what comes next. As I planned to ask him if he had seen any ghosts, I could relate. Shibata, and myself, are not the only ones who believe in ghosts. Not everyone has experienced them. I wait for him to finish his interview before asking. I am nervous and embarrassed. “In terms of your room, I donʼt see or feel anything, so everything seems to be okay.”

The original version of this article appeared in issue 356 (July 2006) of Game Informer.