Developer Interview

Human Head's Timothy Gerritsen and Chris Rhinehart explain the innovative features of Prey.
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Sometimes, you don't want to be a hero. Sometimes, all you want to do is get off the reservation with your girlfriend and get a lucrative job as a mechanic. That's how it is in Prey, the upcoming shooter from Human Head Studios and 3D Realms. While other first-person shooters generally focus on you running through corridors from a first-person view and blasting everything that isn't you, Prey will instead attempt to turn the typical shooter upside down, literally. Over the course of the game, you'll be captured by aliens and travel to outer space, where you'll find yourself in low- and zero-gravity areas. You'll also encounter alien technology that creates gravity fields on walls and ceilings, so you can expect to be running sideways and upside down while fighting off hostile alien life-forms so that you can rescue the girl and get back home (or whatever is left of home).

While Prey will have some kind of multiplayer, Human Head is focusing primarily on the single-player game, which will in turn focus on characters and story. You'll play as Tommy, a disillusioned Native American Army mechanic who was recently discharged from service and has returned home to the reservation in Taliquaa, Oklahoma, where his girlfriend, Jenny, lives and works. Tommy won't exactly be a knight in shining armor. The guy really doesn't care a whole lot about his heritage or his few remaining family members, and he just wants to get off the reservation with his girlfriend and make a better life for himself. For a number of reasons, including his lady friend's stronger sense of duty toward their shared heritage, Tommy is basically stuck on the reservation, spinning his wheels. That is, until the aliens come.

According to the game's story, the aliens aren't even the bad guys. Not all of them, anyway. A bizarre entity, part gigantic spaceship, part living being, has apparently been scouring the galaxy in search of new life-forms and cultures to capture by sucking them up into its hull with a powerful tractor beam. The ship seems to be looking for slave labor--it needs someone to maintain the ship, and others to be enforcers among the slaves it has captured. So, some of the aliens on board will be hostile to Tommy, while others may be neutral or may even try to help him, because they'll be helpless captives, just like him. Tommy only finds this out after he, his grandfather, and his girlfriend are all abducted in a dramatic scene that appeared in the E3 2005 demonstration video, in which his local bar, the slot machines, his grandfather, Jenny, and eventually Tommy himself get forcibly yanked skyward in a beam of blazing green light from the mysterious alien craft.

At first, Tommy doesn't really care about his grandfather's spiritual teachings. You can guess how that makes him feel.

Before you even begin your journey, you'll notice the emphasis on interactivity. Considering that the game is being developed with production assistance from Duke Nukem creator 3D Realms, you may not be surprised to hear that it will have fully interactive environments. So, on the reservation you can expect to see the usual, usable restroom facilities, playable slot machines and arcade games, a TV with ongoing reports of strange sightings in the area, and a jukebox that will spit out a series of licensed songs for Prey's soundtrack. Once you're on the ship, you can expect to interact with plenty of bizarre alien technology, including switches that alter the orientation of a room or the flow of gravity.

Gravity will be a big part of your adventures in Prey. Even though the ship is alive (and so, many of its areas will be lined with pulsating, fleshy walls with machinery and computers buried inside), it's also equipped with gravity-based technology that can turn gravity on and off at the flip of a switch. In several areas, you'll find lighted paths, along floors, walls, and ceilings, which generate localized gravity. You'll find yourself in situations that recall artist M.C. Escher's infamous painting Relativity (a study in geometry that depicts people walking up and down stairways on the walls and ceilings of a house), just with more upside-down aliens shooting at you.