Glen Schofield on the space horror revival, and seeing his game remade.
Glen Schofield is feeling relaxed.
“It always feels that way, but somehow this one was more cooped up for longer.
Nine days later we got kicked out.”
“We never really picked the day,” he says.
“We just said 2022.
It’s hard to put a precise date on that.”
“Activision, nicely, was paying me but I took a year off.
It’s time to say thank you and relax from here.
So I took a month off!
“So I went down there and I decided that I was going to draw out in the desert.
I would go out in the desert - much to their chagrin - and just sit and draw.
And at the same time I’m coming up with ideas.
After a few weeks, I had seven, eight, nine, ideas.
And this was one - it wasn’t called The Callisto Protocol, I called it Meteor Down.
It had gotten pretty big, you know, with pages and pages of stories and stuff.”
“I knew that I wanted to come back to do this sort of thing.
What, I wonder, did Schofield set about to do differently this time?
“It was more like I really enjoyed it.
I’m kind of forgetting about that.
They’re EA and it’s like Bond or Lord of the Rings - so everything was already greenlit.
“It was really hard.
It was like, wow, edgy new EA, right?
They got a lot of good publicity at that time.
It was pretty smooth sailing after that.”
It must be a strange sensation, I suggest, seeing his baby in another company’s hands.
“Well, obviously, it’s interesting,” he says.
“They’re fellow devs so I want them to do okay.
I don’t want them to fail.
In a way it’s part of my legacy.
But it’s very strange.
It’s kind of weird to see them making your game.”
“You could say that right now, though it always looks that way.
With Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 came out a month before.
I swear, every game I ever worked on had something come out just like it around it.
After a while, you know, I’m like I’ve been there.
We’ll see what happens.
There’s nothing we can do about it.
So we just make the best game we can.”
“It’s weird how it happened like this.
Dead Space came out, was pretty popular and we won a lot of awards.
It didn’t sell a boatload at first, right?
I look at the sales and the sales are actually pretty high.
And everybody, it doesn’t matter how old they are, has heard of it.
So it’s a very bizarre thing.
I guess it’s like a cult classic in a way.
“It’s funny.
I never expected it.
I never thought about it, even back when we made it.
And [with Dead Space] I’m like, screw that, it’s about quality.
That’s all I’m thinking about.
Is that the best thing you’re able to do?
That’s normal thinking today.
It wasn’t back then in the 2000s.
The 2000s were about movie games.
Everybody made them, so it was about day and date.
Dead Space was this new kind of thinking.
It’s about quality.
Is it scarier than Dead Space?
“It’s got some pretty horrific moments, it really does.
We have a gore engine - we built Gore technology.
Then the rendering guys, they do their special thing to it which is make everything look wet.
It’s so advanced compared to Dead Space.”
“Nowadays the internet is loaded with those kinds of pictures,” says Schofield.
“I mean, these guys were looking at some horrible stuff.
It’s hard to tell now on the internet.
Is that real, or is that fake?
There’s some horrible stuff - like pictures of people who just shot their face off.
And we have reams of that data.
They really get into it.
It doesn’t bother them after a while.
Where does he see the series in ten years?
“I can only hope so - that would mean it’s been successful.
But yeah, I would like to see this to be a franchise.
I mean, I don’t have any more new ideas…
But no, I’d rather we went on for a while with this.”
