Back in May of 2010, my best friend, Andy, and I wanted to make a video game that we thought was going to change virtual reality gaming and the horror genre forever. We were both out of the university, me with a degree in computer programming and him with digital art design. Both of us were avid gamers. I think we played a bit of just about everything: racing, JRPG’s, MMO’s, sports, you name it. We wanted to make a game unlike anything you could get coming from overseas. You could call it an ambitious goal for a couple aspiring indie gamers, but both of us were ambitious guys.
Andy was a big fan of horror and was actually the first to come up with the idea. We had heard of the 4-Dimensional theaters that were being introduced in places like Korea and London, where you weren’t just watching a movie, but feeling it and smelling it. If the movie was set in a pine forest, there were triggers that would release the scent of pine to the audience. Likewise, if the characters were standing on the windy deck of a ship, fans, would start blowing to mimic the conditions of the movie in the theater. All of it was to create a more realistic, interactive experience for the viewer and we thought it would be awesome to try to implement that with a 4D game.
Obviously, we didn’t have the manpower to make an entire game by ourselves. We were in a lot of debt because of school and wouldn’t have been able to afford the virtual reality hardware in our wildest dreams. That, and we had no idea how to develop the technology needed to create the 4D gaming experience. Throughout the following summer, we networked like crazy, pitching our ideas to different developers, both indie and big-time. There was interest, but the 4D concept was still very much in development and no one was sure they wanted to invest time and resources in it without the assurance that it was going to hit off.
I won’t bore you with the details of how it happened, but we finally hit a breakthrough in September when an independent company called Systelien contacted us after our attempts to pitch the idea to them. They thought it had potential and were interested in on-boarding us us writers and programmers. The company itself would take the rights for the game, of course, and there would be a team that would make the final decisions during all stages of development. It was still more than we could have ever hoped for.
There was a team of 150 people, a third of which were hardware developers. The “controller” was built into a padded, inclined chair with a minimalist headset that fitted around the players eyes and ears. The joystick and buttons could be swapped on the arms to accommodate if the player was left-handed or right-handed. Really high-tech right? Where the money was really sunk was in the environmental simulators and the sensors and nodes that would be attached to the player’s body to monitor their physical status.
Like I said, the game was meant to be a horror game. We settled on the story of an unnamed character going into a haunted mansion to get rid of evil spirits and getting stalked by a demon. The most cliched plot and setting you could think of, but that was what we were going for. We wanted something that would easily be associated with fear. The idea was that the demon fed off fear and would find you more easily if you were afraid. First, it would scare and drive the character crazy and then it would kill him/her.
The monitors attached to the player analyzed the physical signs that the player was afraid (rapid heartbeat, dilated pupils, harsh breathing, clammy or sweaty skin, etc.) and use that information to determine how aggressively the demon would act. You could think of it as a social experiment; you could see how well a person would stay calm under pressure. Theoretically, a completely calm person could make it through the entire game without much danger, but the scares and the atmosphere wouldn’t let you go through the first level without making you anxious.
The real fun started once the demon came after you. We wanted to keep it subtle. No jump scares. That was cheating the player out of the experience. If you think about it, people with real paranormal experiences never report a demon breaking through a glass window and going for your throat. They report brushes against the skin, whispering in your ears, a loud sound in the distance, even tingling or electrical sensations.
