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.

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.

This game's Isaac equivalent looks like he needs to be defrosted in a microwave but the demo, while hopelessly derivative, does make me want a new Dead Space game quite badly. 

Negative Atmosphere is the result of just five months of work, and the demo was shown at EGX Rezzed last week. It has all the trappings you'd want: blood smears, cool floating HUD elements, strobing sci-fi emergency lighting, and angry stamping.

Negative Atmosphere is being funded on Patreon where you can find more information, including background info: "It is set in a universe in the midst of a cold war, in which A.I has been achieved via the use of organic processing cores, you play as a 49-year-old ex-combat medic called Samuel Edwards, aboard the long-range cargo and haulage ship the TRH Rusanov."

There's no release date at the moment, but the team is planning to release a playable demo and a Kickstarter campaign sometime this year. Expect that to be announced on Twitter and the game's Subreddit.

For all the terrifying scares in Dead Space—necromorph babies, giant tentacles, and ghostly whispers—one of my favorite moments is one that has no monsters at all. A few hours into the game, you navigate a zero-gravity section of the Ishimura on your way to the engine room. During this entire sequence, there's barely any sound—everything is muted by the vacuum of space to the point where even your shotgun sounds like a distant thud. Then, after re-compressing at an airlock, you open the door to one of the most horrifying sounds known to humankind: the ungodly wail of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system.

Though it's been a fun fact that's been circling the internet for a while now, I only just learned that the source of this awful noise is none other than the train millions of California Bay Area residents commute on—as if I needed another reason to think of San Francisco as a nightmarish hellscape.

You can watch the video above to see the exact scene that I'm talking about. The sudden shift from dead silence to metallic screeching and flashing lights is so jarring, I vividly remember having to pause the game and muster the courage to enter that room. I was convinced something was going to maul me the moment I stepped inside, but Dead Space plays an even nastier trick. There's nothing in the room. It's a brilliant subversion of expectations.

This story comes from the most recent episode of Ars Technica's excellent video series War Stories, which explores the untold development stories of beloved games. This particular episode focuses on Dead Space and how creator Glen Schofield and his team turned it into a horror masterpiece. The whole episode is worth watching, but the BART story comes as Schofield talks about how important sound design was in achieving that palpable sense of dread in Dead Space.

"Sound is so important in a videogame, to me," Schofield says. "A lot of games, sound design was sort of the thing that came in last... But right from the start, we said sound design and the music and the audio are key."

When audio director Don Veca rode BART, he was stunned by the unbelievably awful noises it makes. Bay Area residents are all too familiar, but for someone who has never used the train before, it's almost hard to overstate what a nightmarish experience it is. If you want a taste, watch this video with the volume cranked.

After telling Schofield about it, they sent an audio team with studio microphones to record samples of BART that they then turned into the nightmarish squeal used in that room. "What we were looking for was, how can we scare people with just sound? No monsters," Schofield says.

It's one brilliant little moment in a game full of them, but watching this War Stories on Dead Space helps crystallize some of the things that made it so good. As Schofield explains, the team at EA Redwood Shores would go to extreme lengths to perfectly execute scares in even the smallest scenes, sometimes spending weeks of development time building new systems in the process. And it pays off. Dead Space is great and I now have a newfound appreciation for one of its more memorable scares.

New information has emerged detailing Visceral Games’ aborted plans for what would have been Dead Space 4.

Speaking to Eurogamer, former Dead Space creative director Ben Wanat revealed Dead Space 4 would have placed greater emphasis on exploration and scavenging resources for survival, blending the previous games’ tightly scripted action with larger, more open areas that the player could explore freely.

"The notion was you were trying to survive day to day against infested ships, searching for a glimmer of life, scavenging supplies to keep your own little ship going, trying to find survivors," said Wanat, who is now creative director at Crystal Dynamics.

Dead Space 4 would have expanded upon the “Lost Flotilla” chapter of Dead Space 3, in which Isaac drifted through a graveyard of destroyed spaceships on the trail of an SOS signal. “The flotilla section in Dead Space 3 hinted at what non-linear gameplay could be, and I would have loved to go a lot deeper into that," Wanat said.

The concept was that the player would hop from ship to ship, seeking out equipment and battling the horde of Necromorphs that undoubtedly would have lurked inside. Wanat planned for these ships to be highly distinct from one another. “Imagine an entire roster of ship types, each with unique purposes, floor plans, and gameplay. Our original prototypes for the Dead Space 3 flotilla had some pretty wild setups that I wish we had been able to use.”

The article reveals a couple of other interesting details. Dead Space 4 likely wouldn’t have featured Isaac Clarke as the main character. There were no solid plans for who the player would have controlled, but Wanat’s preferred choice of protagonist was Ellie, a side-character featured in Dead Space 3.

In addition, Dead Space 4 would have introduced a new range of Necromorphs that were more dangerous in Zero-G environments, and reworked the controversial crafting element of the previous game, “I love that it gave players creativity in putting together their weapons, but it became very difficult to tune when you allowed players to break the primary and alt-fire pairings,” Wanat said.

Visceral of course never got the chance to put these ideas into action, having been added to EA’s own studio graveyard late last year. Nonetheless, the revelations form yet another chapter in the series’ fascinating history. Last year, Eurogamer also revealed that Visceral’s original vision for Dead Space 3 was very different from the final product, while PC Gamer contributor Mat Paget learned that the original Dead Space began life as System Shock 3.

What happens when PR goes awry? Not slightly sideways, as we saw recently with the leak of Rage 2 (which is probably the best thing that could have happened to it anyway) but completely, irretrievably wrong, in a way that inspires conversation and funny stories for years to come? Game publishers do their level best to keep the hype machine running along smoothly and inoffensively—that may be the most important part of all—but sometimes, out of malice or greed or plain old good intentions, the bus goes off the cliff and there’s nothing to do but hold on and ride it to the bottom. 

That’s when legends are born.

Daikatana: John Romero's famous bitch-botch

Back before the turn of the millennium, John Romero proclaimed that he was going to make you his bitch. "Suck it down," he added, presumably to ensure that we were all on the same edgy page. Three years later, Daikatana finally came out, and... well, there was some bitching, alright, but it wasn't quite what the ad had promised. The infamous FPS wasn't as bad as people sometimes like to pretend, but the pre-release hype (which was also wildly premature—the ad was followed by multiple delays) set the bar so high that anything short of perfection would have seemed a letdown. And the final product, while far from a disaster, was also far from perfection: Reviews weren't great, but the reaction from gamers was absolutely savage.

Romero ultimately apologized for the ad, acknowledging that it soured his relationship with the gaming community. Ion Storm Dallas closed less than a year after Daikatana's release.

Aliens: Colonial Marines - The actual gameplay demo that was not, actually 

Pre-release press demos for Aliens: Colonial Marines promised a game of impressive—some might say cinematic—visual fidelity, but the final release left players squinting and scratching their heads. Opinions varied on the degree, but the general consensus was that the visual quality of the released game fell well short of what was promised in those "actual gameplay" demos. The difference was enough that the UK's Advertising Standards Agency forced Sega to add an after-the-fact disclaimer to Colonial Marines promotional videos, shortly after which a lawsuit was filed over claims of false advertising. 

It eventually fizzled out but not before Sega and Gearbox pointed accusing fingers at one another ("It's Randy doing whatever the fuck he likes" remains one of my favorite lines from a leaked internal email) and while Gearbox was ultimately absolved of legal responsibility, the stench of that swim through a swamp of ugly recriminations lingers.

Dead Space 2 - EA pulls a “How do you do, fellow kids?”

For some reason, Electronic Arts decided that what Dead Space 2 marketing really needed was a literal "your mom" joke. The company released a series of videos in which middle-aged women were given an eyeful of interstellar trauma victim Isaac Clarke hacking and blasting at hordes of sticky space zombies. Clips of gameplay were mixed with shots of their horrified reactions: One participant described the game as "purely crap" at the end of her session and predicted that such games would leave us at the mercy of "a society of criminals."

The campaign was built on a framework of all the worst gamer stereotypes—Women! Old people! Games cause violence!—and didn't even attempt to make a save with an ironic twist at the end. It was embarrassing, and frustrating: Dead Space was a splattery mess, but it was also a top-notch survival-horror game with a dark psychological edge, and the juvenile focus on the worst excesses of guts and gore did the sequel a real disservice. (Also, your mom told me she actually loved Dead Space 2.)

Homefront - 9999 red balloons go into the bay

I liked Homefront, the Red-Dawn-but-North-Korea shooter that THQ pushed out in 2011. It was monumentally stupid and overwrought but so was Red Dawn, and the shooting bits were good enough to make it a “forgettable fun” kind of 6.5/10 shooter. (Interestingly, our reviewer, the redoubtable Norman Chan, saw it the opposite way: Intense story, “ho-hum” combat.)

Speaking of monumentally stupid, THQ released 10,000 red balloons as a Homefront publicity stunt during GDC 2011. The balloons rose majestically into the sky over San Francisco, but instead of rising high enough to break apart (or at least go away), crappy weather conditions brought them down prematurely in the San Francisco Bay. It was a hell of a mess. THQ claimed the balloons were biodegradable but city officials didn't care: The publisher had to pay to clean the mess up and ate a $7000 fine on top. Homefront tanked, too.

There's more...

Horse armor - The world's most infamous cosmetic (which you can still buy)

Before nickel-and-dime DLC was a routine part of the gaming life, there was Horse Armor, a $2.50 outfit for your mighty steed in Bethesda’s open-world RPG The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. The steep price for a simple cosmetic did not go over well, particularly since you couldn't even use it to flaunt your affluence and/or financial irresponsibility in front of your friends, enemies, and indifferent strangers: Oblivion is strictly single-player, so the only person who would ever see your horse in her fancy new outfit was you.

To its credit, Bethesda did a good job of owning the error—eventually. Its 2009 April Fool's gag (Oblivion was released in 2006) included a half-price sale on all Oblivion DLC except Horse Armor, which was actually doubled in cost. More recently, it added Horse Power Armor to Fallout 4 via the Bethesda Creation Club. But it also never stopped selling horse armor, and it still goes for $2.50. There’s probably a lesson in that.

Mass Effect Andromeda - My face is tired

The point of demos and early access availability is to get people interested in your game: They try it, they like it, they tell their friends, everybody preorders, and it's happy faces all around. Mass Effect: Andromeda is a case study in doing it wrong, wrong, oh-so-awfully wrong. Origin Access subscribers got a one-week head start on the journey to another galaxy, and almost immediately began dunking on it: It wasn't exactly broken but it sure as hell wasn't right (well, okay, some of it was broken), and the legion of memes it spawned—including one courtesy of our very own Tyler Wilde—was the last thing BioWare and EA needed, especially since fans were already uneasy about the state of the game and its ugly, tired faces. Glitchy visuals weren’t Andromeda’s only problem, but they set a pre-release tone that the game was never able to overcome.

Battlefront 2 loot boxes - The microtransactions heard ‘round the world

An exclusive licensing deal to make Star Wars videogames in a post-Lucas world should have been a golden goose for EA. Instead, after setting a promising pace with a rejuvenated Star Wars: Battlefront, it set the game industry on fire with Star Wars: Battlefront 2—and not in a good way. The planned implementation of loot boxes and premium currency outraged fans and forced a days-before-release walkback, which was bad enough on its own. But it also attracted the attention of politicians around the world, leading to multiple inquiries and threats of legal action reminiscent of the videogame violence moral panic of the early '90s. Many gamers also very vocally took up the cause, seeing the legislative pushback as an opportunity to force real change on the industry.

The reaction from publishers has been somewhat less than graceful so far. Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson reiterated the company’s (and industry’s) position in a recent earnings call that loot boxes are not gambling and said that it will "push forward" with them in future games no matter what people think. Executives from other companies have said much the same. But some sort of compromise in the way loot boxes work seems likely: Belgium's Gaming Commission recently declared that three out of four popular games from EA, Activision, and Valve (FIFA 18, Overwatch, and CS:GO) contain loot boxes that contravene the country's gambling laws and warned that hefty fines or even prison sentences could be applied if they’re not changed or removed. Ironically, the one game that was found to fall within the boundaries of the law is the one that started this whole damn mess in the first place: Star Wars: Battlefront 2.

And because our console cousins deserve some love too, we've got a pair of honorable mentions ahead...

Sony PSP Black/White Campaign - Yeah, that's racist

To herald the launch of a white PSP in 2006, Sony rolled out an advertising campaign in the Netherlands that included an image of a very aggressive-looking white woman holding the face of a visibly frightened black woman. It was not good. Sony denied any racist intent but the subtext, intentional or not, was about as subtle as a kick in the junk with a steel toe boot. The backlash was immediate, and Sony quickly killed the campaign.

I mean, holy cow.

Xbox One is always online - Get with the times, chumps

“We have a product for people who aren't able to get some form of connectivity, it's called Xbox 360,” Microsoft’s Don Mattrick said during an E3 2013 interview with Geoff Keighley, addressing concerns about the Xbox One’s always-on requirement. (Start around 1:30 for the relevant bit.) “If you have zero access to the internet, that is an offline device.” It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable point but it came off as cavalier and dismissive, especially after he followed up the remark by basically implying that only chumps don’t have access to the internet. Xbox fans weren’t buying what Microsoft was selling, and possibly even worse, Sony used Microsoft’s struggles at the show to put on a master class in ownage.

Dead Space, EA's 2008 game of weed-whacking in space, is really good, but the PC version is a little wonky, specifically with regard to the mouse control. Disabling vsync and futzing around with the sensitivity can dramatically improve things, but out of the box it often suffers mouse lag, weird sensitivity, and other issues that can make it feel anywhere from "off" to nigh-unplayable. Keep that in mind when you snag it from Origin, where it is currently yours for the taking, for free.

Developed by the sadly now defunct Visceral Games, Dead Space tells the tale of Isaac Clarke, a heavy-handed sci-fi reference and engineer aboard the USG Ishimura, a massive "Planet Cracker" spaceship that falls foul of the Marker, a mysterious relic of Unitology—basically the Scientology of the future. 

Trouble is that the Marker actually has power: It turns people into ravenous, hideously-deformed zombie-type creatures called Necromorphs, which of course doesn't keep the brainiacs in charge from bringing the thing aboard the sealed environment of the ship.   

Things go predictably sideways, and it falls to ol' IC—who by the way is also suffering from hallucinations and appears to be in the midst of a total psychological breakdown—to clean things up, with nothing more at his disposal than a futuristic Black and Decker set. 

It sounds silly, but it really is good stuff —and you can't beat the price right now. As with all of Origin's 'On the House' offerings, it will be free until it's not (it will eventually go back to $20 but EA doesn't say when On the House freebies expire) and if you grab it during the giveaway, it's your to keep forever.   

Dead Space 2 is available now on Steam for just $5.00/£2.49—but be quick; it won't stay that price for long.

Dead Space 2 sees you reprise your role as Systems Engineer Isaac Clarke three years after the horrific events on the USG Ishimura. Expect more of same atmospheric horror and monster-stomping action, only this time around, Clarke's a little less taciturn when he encounters more of those murderous Necromorphs.

If you've never explored the original game, you can add that to your library for cheap, too. The Dead Space bundle—which boasts the tense prequel, too—is available for just £3.74, a whopping 81 percent off its usual retail price.

Last month EA closed Visceral Games, the studio behind Dead Space and Battlefield Hardline. Electronic Arts' vice president Patrick Soderlund confirmed the closure and confirmed that the design direction of Visceral's Star Wars project will undergo a "significant change."

In the words of one plucky commenter on the Dead Space 2 customer reviews page, "Don't be sad that it's over, be happy that it happened."

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

Electronic Arts closed the doors on Visceral Games yesterday, bringing to a close the studio whose (relatively) recent work includes Dante's Inferno, Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel, Battlefield Hardline, and the Dead Space series. Following the announcement, Zach Wilson, who worked briefly at the studio as a designer on Hardline, took to Twitter to offer some thoughts about where it all went wrong. 

Wilson's opening tweets say it all: 

In follow-ups, Wilson said that he's "back of the napkinning" the numbers, but added that they're close to the real thing. "I don't know the exact marketing budget but they're frequently close to the dev cost (I have heard this anecdotally)," he wrote. 

Sky-high budgets are also why developers are launching their own digital storefronts, rather than simply relying on the simpler and far more ubiquitous Steam.

"Do you hate uplay? Well, the pub gets 90% of the $$$," he tweeted. "EA makes $30 per copy after retailers and console makers take their cut. Then consider that a chunk of the game was sold on sale ... Through Origin they get 90%"

Wilson's tweets don't directly address the reasons for Visceral's closure, but they do paint a very grim portrait of the state of the business, and the extent to which major publisher releases are either big hits, or big busts. If a mid-tier game like Dead Space 2 can knock out four million copies and still be considered underperforming (and keep in mind that EA reported two years after its release that the original Dead Space had sold roughly half that number), then the bar is incredibly high. Any new project that looks like it won't be a huge hit, or won't have a long tail via microtransactions and DLC, suddenly starts to look like a risk from that perspective.

And if, on top of that, the game in question appears to be in trouble, as Kotaku suggested in its report of Visceral's closure yesterday, then risk-averse publishers (which is to say, all of them) aren't likely to wait too long before they take action.

Resident Evil 4’s influence has become immeasurable since its release in 2005. Games like Gears of War and Uncharted owe much to the game that revolutionized third-person action controls. However, one popular sci-fi horror game would look a lot like an entirely different sci-fi horror game if not for Capcom’s reinvention of its seminal series. I got the opportunity to sit down with Dead Space designers Ben Wanat and Wright Bagwell to talk about the early days of development and how Resident Evil 4 helped them shape their own horror series out of another.

"When Resident Evil 4 came out, we were just awestruck by it," Wanat told me. "We were all playing it and we were like, 'Holy shit, this is a really awesome game. They're actually trying to tell a story; they've got some cool cinematics; the gameplay systems are fixing a lot of problems, bringing it into this action realm but keeping this intense horror feel to it. It was this amazing combination and—oh, the enemies were so freakin' cool."

Wanat didn't shy away from admitting that Resident Evil 4 is one of his favourite games of all time. And it's clear looking at Dead Space that he wasn't alone at EA Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games).

"It's pretty obvious when you play Dead Space, to look at it and go, 'Yeah, it's almost like they decided to make Resident Evil 4 in space,' which is exactly what we were doing."

A shock to the system

But it wasn't always that way. Early on in its development, before Resident Evil 4 had even been released, Dead Space was a completely different game. Rumours have circled around the sci-fi horror game's early days, reinforced by similarities found within Dead Space. During our discussions, Wanat confirmed them to me. 

"Originally, we were pushing around this idea of maybe we could make System Shock 3. And you can look at the Dead Space blueprint and be like, 'Oh, this is kind of like System Shock,'" Wanat said, smiling. 

"To do a System Shock 3, you're really tackling a monumental task, to make people happy with a sequel that wasn't made by the same team as the original," he explained. And while the game didn't make it out the door and live on as the third System Shock, Wanat said that a new entry in that series was the goal they shot for early on.

"It was like, 'Everybody, get your System Shock 2 copy, play it start to finish, and let's figure out what we're going to do,'" Wanat said, recalling the early days of development. "Then Resident Evil 4 came out and we were like, 'Oh. No, this is the shit.'"

However, Redwood Shores couldn’t just change the name of its project and work on something completely new. 

"It was at a time at EA when there was no appetite for original IP. It seemed like everybody else was doing it except for us," Wanat lamented. While Redwood Shores created games based on James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and The Godfather, Wanat said the desire to make something original was fervent within the studio. And Resident Evil 4 was the catapult they needed.

"We were so hyped about Resident Evil 4 and we got obsessed with improving the mechanics," Wanat said. The team truly wanted to develop a first-rate survival-horror game. However, convincing EA to bet on an original idea wasn't going to be easy, and it was something that co-director Glen Schofield, now the GM of Sledgehammer Games, would work on for a long time. Schofield would break the ice on the idea, show some promising progress, and over time, slowly build the confidence EA needed to give the project a thumbs up.

"Eventually everybody accepted it, they saw how cool the things coming out of it were. That confidence continued to grow," Wanat told me. "Having that group there from the get-go and building this stuff without a greenlight was a little weird, but it's probably what got that whole thing working because we could all put our expertise into a pool and make something tangible. 

"And once people saw that it was a real thing, they got it much easier than if you were trying to say, 'I want to make this totally scary-ass thing,' to which they'd look at their portfolio and say 'Nope, scary-ass thing is not in our language.'"

The executives weren't the only people impressed by the Dead Space demos. Wright Bagwell, who was working on another game at the time, played through one of these demo levels and was so enamoured with the experience that he absolutely had to work on the game.

"One of the level designers came over and said 'Hey Wright, we're testing this out. I want you to come into this dark room, I'm going to turn the lights off and turn the sound up really loud.' And we played through this demo level, and I remember feeling like I was going to shit my pants," Bagwell said, laughing."I was working on another game that got cancelled, and EA was trying to get me to work on something I didn't want to work on, and I was like, 'No, I want to work on Dead Space or I'm going to quit.'"

So Bagwell joined the Dead Space team, and at this point, it was starting to come together. Controlling Isaac was becoming a smooth experience, thanks to some of the big improvements to Resident Evil’s formula that the team was working on. Wanat specifically pointed out the ability to move while shooting. Despite the relatively simple-sounding nature of this change, it wasn't as straightforward as flipping a switch and letting someone walk around.

"I love in Resident Evil 4, the tension of not being able to move. But it caused a lot of problems for us to put movement in because we were making a new game," Wanat explained. "The enemies couldn't follow the same formula. It breaks a lot of the mechanics. We didn't know it was going to happen until we did it and were like, 'Oh, I think we broke something fundamental about the tension,' so we had to get it in other ways.

"It was like, 'It's a game changer. Let's embrace it and make this the best, polished survival shooter. Let's try to be the gold standard.'"

Space to grow

The move from System Shock 3's first-person view to the over-the-shoulder perspective that we know from Dead Space was something else that Wanat was increasingly happy about, as it allowed players to more easily care about Isaac.

"Even though Isaac didn't have a voice in the first game, seeing him and seeing him get grappled and eviscerated, I felt like there was a better chance to make a connection with the character. And that kinda gives the player a sense of who he is and the place he's in that we could have missed out on if we went the first-person shooter route and—man, we ripped off so much stuff from Resident Evil 4," Wanat stopped himself mid-sentence, laughing.

"But in a way, the modifications we made to the formula gave it its own style. Things like the outer space setting gave us a way to include new mechanics that weren't really available for the time and setting that Resident Evil took place in."

Dismemberment by way of plasma cutter, perhaps Dead Space's defining feature, was one such mechanic that joined the movement system to set itself apart from its Earth-based counterpart.

"It was very interesting to get those two things together and see that something special was taking shape," Wanat said. "But we do owe tremendously to Resident Evil 4. We were really big fans. We had so many of those water-cooler moments after that game came out."

Dead Space released in October of 2008 and was met with an overwhelmingly positive critical reception, in addition to sales of over two million copies. When Dead Space 2 was announced less than two years later, it was no surprise that EA wanted to push the series into a more action-focused direction to appeal to a wider audience. Bagwell moved into the creative director's chair, charged with a delicate balancing act of making sure there were moments of adrenaline-surging panic, but also time for the player to relax among the nameless horrors and dismembered limbs.

Despite its obvious inspirations, Dead Space had become its own thing. The studio was no longer praying at the altar of Resident Evil 4, but Wanat says there were some leftover influences that didn't make it into the first game.

"We didn't really have the ability to do any elaborate cutscenes," he explained. "I mean, we looked at Resident Evil 4, and we thought those were elaborate at the time. I love the intro. They're in the jeep, a guy goes to pee in the bushes, it's this really cool moment. And we couldn't really do those things, but we all wished we could. So in Dead Space 2, you get a lot more character moments and those over-the-top moments."

Like its predecessor, Dead Space 2 garnered high praise from critics and, according to EA, sold nearly two million copies in its first week of release. However, that success wouldn't carry over to the third game. With less positive reviews and significantly less sales, Wanat, the creative director of Dead Space 3, expressed disappointment with how it closed out the series.

"I think in Dead Space 3 we kinda destroyed what we had because we pushed too far on it, but it was a deliberate decision in each of those instalments to make it faster, more relevant to a broader audience," he said. "It's a hard thing to do, to make a horror game have mass appeal. They're two diametrically opposed things."

Wanat and Bagwell went on to co-found Outpost Games, a developer that's currently working on a multiplayer survival game. Not much is known about their upcoming game, but the two designers wouldn't be surprised if Dead Space fans found some pieces of the sci-fi horror series woven throughout it. However, speaking to Wanat, it sounds like he's not quite done with survival-horror.

"Personally, I've got so much of that stuff in my system, that one way or another I will make another survival-horror game because I can't stay away from that kind of creative expression. That's just part of my DNA now." 

Dead Space is a game so unsettling it took me years to finish it. Soon after its original 2008 release, I abandoned my first attempt. I d played and enjoyed horror games before, but something felt different about what Dead Space had to offer. I couldn t take it. Years later I would end up completing the game, but I ve never forgotten the initial anxiety that it stirred up in me. Setting aside the missteps the series would end up taking in its second and third entries, what the original Dead Space accomplishes is simple in its frightening elegance: You re trapped on a ghost ship in the midst of its own industrial/organic nightmare and you have to escape.

Much of the anxiety that I find simultaneously attractive and repulsive in Dead Space is tied to the worn-down, blue-collar approach of its story and setting aboard the massive Ishimura mining vessel. As a kid growing up around the deep, dark waters of Puget Sound, WA, I would watch big tankers roll into Commencement Bay and anchor in the shadow of the giant copper smelting tower that used to overlook the area there. It was a filthy place and I d wonder what part those mysterious rusty ships had to play in that toxic wasteland. Where in all the world had they been and what had they brought back with them?

This was the image Dead Space had drawn from my memory and that had bothered me so much. And it s one that still fascinates me, even as the game s jumps scares and lighting tricks lose their intended effect on repeated playthroughs.

This edition of If you like deals with big ships and the mysterious, sometimes evil cargo they carry. I ve picked out some novels, comics, and films that deal with what I think is Dead Space s central theme—machines that bring us into contact with new fears as well as show us the ones that travel with us all the time.

Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke s 1973 novel anticipates and works with many themes that have become a staple of late-20th century science fiction. The development of planet earth in response to catastrophe, the limits of technology, and the difficulties of inter-species communication. But just like Dead Space, Rama also functions as a hard-sci-fi adventure story that puts a host of problems at the feet of some pilots and engineers and asks them to find a solution.

In the novel, a massive celestial object appears in earth s solar system. First thought to be an asteroid, it s actually an interstellar spacecraft. But the destination of the ship is unknown. The drama of the story plays out as the crew of the only ship that s near enough to make contact—a solar survey vessel—begins to explore the alien craft. The novel is a great example of Clarke s tightly controlled characterization and attention to scientific detail and plausibility. While Rama isn t a novel of space horror per se, its sense of urgency, claustrophobia and mystery should appeal to fans of Dead Space.

The Thing, directed by John Carpenter

Beyond the obvious references to the 1982 John Carpenter classic in terms of Dead Space s body horror and gore, the psychological dimension of this film also has a lot to offer. We re confronted fairly early in the film with the horrific implications of an alien being bent on murderous replication. But it s the response of the men to the psychological challenges brought on by their isolation in Antarctica that lends the film its true narrative pulse: Who can they trust? How do they escape this scenario?

Carpenter gathers a superb group of character actors to play out this test of wills, led by Kurt Russell who turns in a sardonic performance as a chess-playing helicopter pilot bent on survival. It s also worth checking out the original novella upon which the film is based—John W. Campbell s Who Goes There?

For a slightly less-serious take from Carpenter on isolation and the horrors of space, you might also be interested in his 1974 movie Dark Star. The movie follows a stressed-out group of men who work as a kind of wrecking crew in deep space, launching bombs to destroy dangerous or problematic planets and moons. Sometimes billed as a comedy, the low-budget Dark Star helped kickstart the career of Alien writer Dan O Bannon who acts in the picture.

Southern Cross, story by Becky Cloonan, art by Andy Belanger

A new comic from Image that s only on its third issue, Southern Cross hits all the right notes for dark and ambitious ship-based sci-fi. The narrative so far follows the journey of Alex Braith, a woman traveling from earth to the Titan moon in order to collect the body of her dead sister. A solitary and—perhaps—troubled woman, Braith has to find a way to make it through the voyage to Titan on the giant Southern Cross spaceship, an industrial tanker and personnel carrier that appears to have a few horrors of its own to reveal.

Along the way Braith encounters a variety of strange types all looking to dig some kind of meaning out of a solar system structured around the faceless corporations that keep the fuel flowing. The writing is pithy and authentic, an approach that gels nicely with Belanger s Moebius-influenced art style. Belanger s art not only captures the sharp edges of Braith s emotional landscape, but also works brilliantly at depicting the technological complexity and scale of the comic s grimy industrial universe.

Event Horizon, directed by Paul Anderson

The movie follows a rescue crew on a mission to investigate the sudden reappearance of a ship that had been missing for seven years. That ship, the Event Horizon, was tasked with attempting to make mankind s first interstellar voyage through the use of a new propulsion system that exploits gravity. Now that the Event Horizon s returned, and in a decaying orbit around Neptune, the rescue crew and the ship s designer head out to try and find out what s become of its mission.

It s no secret that horror films like Event Horizon lose a bit of their punch on repeated viewings. But I ll never forget the sheer bizarreness of my first encounter with this movie in the late-1990s. Although it was a critical and box office flop, it was the kind of film you d pick out and watch with friends just to see how they would respond—kind of like The Shining in this way.

The film s look and story owe a lot to earlier movies such as Solaris and Alien, and were an obvious influence on the aesthetics of Dead Space. And from its costuming to its acting and practical special effects, the nearly-20-year-old film holds up remarkably well. If you like Dead Space and haven t seen Event Horizon yet, it s a must-see. 

For more installments of If you like... , check out Patrick s recommendations for The Witcher, Dishonored, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Deus Ex fans.