Clive Barker's Undying Preview
Geoff Keighley talks with Clive Barker himself about EA's upcoming horror-themed FPS game.
While some game designers are lucky enough to have worked on a successful game in their careers, many more developers still find that first hit elusive. Just off the 405 freeway on the west side of Los Angeles, game designer Dell Siefert and producer Brady Bell are two likeable guys who fall into the latter category. In fact, ask Brady about the last game he worked on, and his response comes with a built-in apology: "Trespasser, but don't blame me for it," he says with a wince. Dreamworks Interactive's Trespasser ended up proving that even fancy physics can't make up for deficient gameplay, so when Bell and Siefert were given the chance to move on to a new project in January 1999, they vowed to make gameplay the foundation of the design. Luckily for these two, Steven Spielberg came to them with an idea: Let's do a first-person horror game. No doubt aware that Dreamworks was coming out with Jan DeBont's The Haunting that summer, Spielberg wanted the team to build the Resident Evil of first-person shooters. For Bell and Siefert, this was exactly the clean slate they needed.
Before long, Siefert and Bell were sitting in the conference room at Dreamworks showing Spielberg a demo for a game called Undying. Over the process of a few weeks leading up to the meeting, five employees taught themselves the Unreal Editor and built levels that demonstrated things such as "spooky chairs that would fly at you inside of a manor," according to Siefert. Though the team didn't even have the license for the Unreal engine at that point, Spielberg liked what he saw and immediately gave the green light. While the team was still a skeleton crew, Bell and Siefert knew they were going to need to develop a story to tie together the horror elements. "To us a horror game is having action but also having a story around that action," says Bell.
The first stab at bringing the world of Undying to life came in the form of an imposing bald-headed hero, Count Magnus Wolfram, a master of the occult who travels to Ireland in the 1920s to rid a haunted manor of its supernatural inhabitants. The tale had all the makings of a gothic fable, complete with four dead siblings trying to come back and claim their only surviving brother.
"What we really wanted to do was build a game that was Resident Evil meets Half-Life," says Siefert. While mentioning two of the biggest action games of the '90s in one breath is always a surefire way to elicit excitement, the team thought it was on the right track to building a hit because this time it was using the stable Unreal engine and concentrating on the content instead of the technology.
Things seemed to be going along as scheduled, when one day lead artist Brian Horton gave the team an opportunity it couldn't pass up. Through a friend, Horton was able to schedule a one-hour meeting with acclaimed author Clive Barker at his sprawling Beverly Hills mansion. Never ones to shy away from an opportunity, the team members soon found themselves showing the game to Barker at his wooden kitchen table. While none of them expected much to come out of the meeting besides bragging rights, in the time between ringing Barker's doorbell and leaving his house a few hours later, Undying would become Clive Barker's Undying, and Count Magnus Wolfram would breathe his last breath.
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- GameSpot Score9.1Editors' Choice
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Clive Barker's Undying Review
Undying has superb graphics, truly impressive sound effects, and fast-paced, enjoyable action sequences. The entire game is very atmospheric, and a lot of fun to play.
- Feb 16, 2001
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- Release: Feb 21, 2001 »
- ESRB: Mature
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