I need to get this out of the way right up front: the War Stories video crew here at Ars loves Dead Space. The game turned 10 years old this past October, and it's a near-perfect execution of the survival horror genre—the world, the sound design, and the mechanics are all spot-on, even after a decade. It's also one of the games we've had on our War Stories to-do list since the very beginning, and we're excited to finally have this video to share with you all.

Executive producer/creator Glen Schofield was fortunately just as excited to talk about the game as we are, and he invited us into his home to tell us the tale of how Isaac Clarke and the USG Ishimura came to be. Creating Dead Space required Schofield and team to create not just an entire original IP (complete with lore and world-building) but new game mechanisms and new ways to tell a story. The focus of putting the player directly into protagonist Isaac Clarke's somewhat clunky shoes affected every decision, and the resulting game managed to be refreshingly original while also paying respectful homage to other horror movies and games (most notably Event Horizon and Resident Evil, respectively.























Tentacle design porn

But it wouldn't be a War Stories video without a singular challenge to overcome, and for Dead Space, that singular challenge turned out to be the infamous "drag tentacle." First encountered in Dead Space's third chapter, the drag tentacle interrupts the player's progress with an unskippable (and surprisingly difficult) arcade-esque sequence where you must shoot the tentacle's glow-y yellow bits before it hauls you away into its hidey hole and murders you into tiny pieces.

It's a memorable sequence, but creating it took an almost unbelievable amount of work. In spite of how smoothly it appears to happen, the sequence is not a fully scripted single animation—the tentacle actually locates and latches onto Isaac programmatically, and where and how it drags Isaac through the hallways is dependent on Isaac's positioning. The sequence required its own specific animations for Isaac's falling, struggling, and shooting; the animators also had to account for the fact that the tentacle could be destroyed by Isaac at any point along its route.

Tackling these problems turned into a multi-month slog and required the team to take a development approach that was at once both holistic and also layer-focused. Animators, programmers, and asset artists had to take stock of each other's work and become especially cognizant of what the other disciplines were doing; at the same time, the sequence itself had to be separated down into extremely granular details and tackled one tiny bit at a time. Pulling the sequence off required sacrificing some other potential content for the game, but it resulted in something truly great—or truly nasty. (Or both!)

They’re coming out of the walls

As usually happens with games like this, we ended up with considerably more footage than we were able to use. Glen spent a fair amount of additional time talking about Dead Space's influences beyond just Event Horizon; the 2008 French horror film Martyrs had a particularly outsized effect on Schofield, and some of that movie's outlines are indeed vaguely visible in Dead Space's structure.

We were also lucky enough to get our hands on some extraordinarily rare footage of a Dead Space early prototype build thanks to Glen. Eagle-eyed viewers will note the preproduction iteration of Isaac’s suit and some early game UI. Other footage includes test dismemberment footage that shows off physics and early necromorph models.

(Those same eagle-eyed viewers might notice that we snuck in a few little hidden easter eggs into the main video because we couldn't resist.)

For folks who want more, we've assembled some of the best cut bits about the origins of the Church of Unitology into a bonus video, which I'm embedding below:

Space ace

Schofield created the Dead Space franchise, working directly on Dead Space and proving creative input on Dead Space 2 before leaving EA to found Sledgehammer Games (he wants us to assure everyone that he had nothing to do with Dead Space 3). Sledgehammer was purchased by Activision and Schofield worked on several Call of Duty titles; just a few weeks ago he announced he was leaving Activision to take some time away from work.

And that suits us just fine, because if there's one thing Schofield loves, it's making games that terrify people. "I still write horror stuff," he told us as we were ending the interview. "I enjoyed making Dead Space so much that, you know, hopefully someday I'll make one of those games again."

Bring it on, Glen. Make us whole.