(Image credit: Electronic Arts)

Dead Space's Isaac Clarke has popped up in some unlikely places over the years: when he's not been cutting up monsters on mining ships you might've spotted him on the links in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, running the floor in NBA Jam: On Fire Edition or grinding rails in Skate 3. These crossovers, usually in the form of character outfits, have always felt bizarre, but in Tiger Woods' case it turns out Clarke had a good reason to feel right at home with a driver in hand.

EA Redwood Shores, which later became Visceral Games, built Dead Space using a modified version of the Tiger Woods game engine, level designer Ben Johnson said on Twitter yesterday. The costume crossover was therefore as simple as importing a single model.

Hey, Dead Space LD here. All these games used the same basic model rig, so adding Isaac was as simple as importing the model. Dead Space’s engine was a branch off of Tiger Woods, which was made in the same studio as Dead Space back then.October 12, 2019

Studios often re-use or modify engines between different series, but the fact two games in such different genres share the same lineage is interesting. It makes me wonder what other unlikely pairs of games were offshoots of each other: some googling reveals that Metal Gear Solid 5 was built using the same engine—Konami's Fox Engine—as many of the Pro Evolution Soccer games, for example.

EA Redwood Shores developed the Tiger Woods games from 2000 to 2007, two years before Dead Space came out, but the series has remained under the EA umbrella since then.