Grave Gamer News & Views — visceral games

“Is Dead Space dead? Not for me it’s not. I love it, the team at Visceral loves it. Having worked on it for seven years, this was a good break for us to try something different.

But there’s a lot of passion about that franchise, not just from me but from others in the company, so I think it’s an IP that’s important for the company. You never know where it’s going to go… I’d definitely be excited about what it would be like on this gen.”

– Steve Papoutsis, Vice President and General Manager, Visceral Games, speaking to Kotaku.

Next-gen technology can set the stage for a stunningly gorgeous and gruesomely stunning Dead Space. Surely this universe has more stories to tell and more Clive Barker-esque nightmares to scrape off your boot.

John Carpenter Interested in a Dead Space Film?

With a sixty-five year resume spanning the likes of The Thing, Escape From New York, Christine, and the original Halloween, I don’t have to explain to you why director John Carpenter is a silver screen legend. 

Carpenter has some crazy range when reviewing his career – films like They Live and Big Trouble in Little China prove just how far out there the filmmaker’s mind goes – but his cinema doctorate is undoubtedly in horror.  So as a former twelve-year-old entranced, excited, and terrified by this man’s many instant classics (Prince of Darkness will alter your moral fiber), an internal geek-bomb goes off when I hear John Carpenter is interested in making a Dead Space movie.

A longtime supporter of video games and their unbound potential for storytelling, Carpenter likens the appeal of Visceral Games’ survival horror title to 1979’s Alien (a hit-you-in-the-eye-it’s-so-apparent influence on the games).  “The first game was more - I guess it was like Alien - but not quite.  It was a little different than that,” says Carpenter.

“I maintain that Dead Space would just make a great movie because you have these people coming onto an abandoned, shut-down space ship and they have to start it up and something’s on board.  It’s just great stuff.”

Way back when the first Dead Space game was making waves, a feature film was being optioned with director D.J. Caruso attached.  Formerly, Caruso worked on the Shia LaBeouf vehicles, Disturbia and Eagle Eye.  That deal eventually lapsed and fans’ dreams of seeing Shia step into Isaac Clarke’s rig – I can’t even finish that sentence; nobody fucking wanted that.

Dead Space has found its gore laden way into just about every avenue of media – comics, novels, animated films, toys – but hasn’t carved a path through Hollywood yet, and Dead Space 3’s less than stellar sales do little to endorse an adaptation.  That hasn’t deterred Carpenter, though.  “I would love to make Dead Space, I’ll tell you that right now,” he says.  “That one is ready-made.”

Dead Space Ain’t Dead

We’re prone to our fair share of rumor mongering here on the Herb – ahem, I mean journalism – but today I’m doing my part to squash one like a writhing necromorph gnawing on your rig…for now, anyway.

The rumor in contention being one nasty bit of bad business involving the premature cancellation of Dead Space 4.  An anonymous source claiming to be close to the project tugged on VideoGamer.com’s ear a few days back, purporting the horror sequel was already in pre-production at Visceral with their Montreal branch assigned to prototyping the game as well as bouncing narrative ideas HQ’s way.

However, the source alleges the corporate axe came down after the recently released Dead Space 3 failed to meet sales expectations [As of this writing, exact figures have not been released by EA].  Dead Space 4 was cancelled and EA’s company-wide restructuring forced Visceral Montreal’s doors closed.  Indirectly, the cancellation would mean the entire franchise is put on hold.

That’s all pretty goddamn plausible.  A while back, EA honcho Frank Gibeau did spout some business jargon about Dead Space needing to push around five million units to stay afloat as a franchise.  Plus, the closure of Visceral’s Montreal studio left quite a few unhappy campers jobless, so it’s not unlikely we’d hear a few jilted tipsters tossing company secrets around to any news junket that likes its shit stirred.

Something suspect is happening behind the scenes, for sure, but I’ll leave you with the official, more hopeful, byline sent Kotaku’s way: According to a spokesperson, the company is proud of Dead Space 3 and the series “remains an important IP for EA,” going the extra mile to call the rumor “patently false.”

Though EA’s corporate meddling has defaced Dead Space into a more widely palatable, money-making machine (microtransactions are evil; but this is fucking vile), Visceral’s trilogy still owns the distinction of being the most prevalent and critically successful survival horror series this generation.  It’d be a gaming crime if Visceral couldn’t compete for that mantel in the next-gen.

“Gruesome” Dead Space 3 DLC Slated for March

Dead Space 3, Visceral Games’ latest big budget horror blockbuster, has crept its way into stores today and the buzz is good – though the insidious mixture of microtransactions and dull writing is scaring fans in their own way, but I’m not here to condemn games I haven’t played yet (I’ll save that for the YouTube comments section).

We’re here because EA has announced new downloadable content for the game that’s promised to be especially “disturbing,” even for the Dead Space franchise – and this is coming from the same series that introduced exploding slug-babies as an enemy.

Dubbed Awakened, the story add-on takes hapless engineer Isaac Clarke through “the franchise’s darkest chapters as the Necromorph battles become even more gruesome and terrifying than ever before.”  I’m guessing massive exploding slug-babies.

Awakened releases sometime in March for all systems Dead Space 3 graces, priced at $9.99 (800 MS).

Dead Space 3 Gets a Very Limited, Limited Edition

EA and Visceral are just about set to release their AAA horror sequel, Dead Space 3, with a little less than a month to wait out on the clock.  That’s why there’s no better time than now to make fans scramble like crazy for a limited edition as pricey as it is scare.

Behold the Dev Team Edition, priced at $160 U.S. if you bundle the exclusive goods with a copy of Dead Space 3, or only $100 if you’re getting the game elsewhere (or if you’re a reseller…or if you, bewilderingly, see no need to own the game but all the need to own one-hundred dollars worth of swag).

The Dev Team’s contents are as such:

• A custom molded, 8" polyresin Black Marker statue
• An Aluminum Sovereign Colony era Data Pad
• 14-oz water bottle replica of the in-game Med Pack (Hydrate and heal, friends)
• An SCAF Bound Jotter filled with 20-pages of Dead Space lore
  
• 3 SCAF Posters and 6 PENG postcards featuring pin-up girls from the future
• Dev Team exclusive 96-Page Mini-Art Book

How limited are we talking?  5,000 were produced, and according to Visceral, those’re the only that are ever being made.  “Get a copy now before they’re gone forever,” says the dev.  Dead Space 3 and its limited edition terrorize the PS3, 360, and PC come February 5th.

Pre-order your Dev Team Edition right here.