Feature: The Thing
It’s been on ice for nearly 20 years: we unthaw the game of the movie.
The Thing needs little introduction. To this day, John Carpenter’s masterpiece of claustrophobic paranoia is still routinely held up as one of the greatest horror films of all time. It excels in every area, from its knife-edge tension to its innovative practical effects to composer Ennio Morricone’s haunting main theme.
In 2002 a scrappy band of British developers returned to this Antarctic nightmare, bringing players a videogame adaptation and official sequel to the movie a full 20 years after MacReady and Childs were left freezing in the ruins of the research station.
THEY’RE NOT SWEDISH
The Thing is a squad-based third-person shooter developed by Computer Artworks, a London-based studio founded by William Latham. Artworks started life in the early ’90s as a digital graphics company funded by IBM. Its first product was Organic Art, a program that produced morphing, multi-hued forms for screensavers. It later expanded into games, producing Evolva in 2000. That game was a squad-based title (both single- and multiplayer) that took
inspiration from Organic Art’s visual style. Fittingly for a studio that would go on to develop The Thing, the game’s core USP was its mutating alien creatures. Players controlled a team of ‘Genohunters’ on a distant planet, each member of which was able to acquire new abilities from the DNA of killed enemies.
The game was a success for Artworks, and established its reputation as a maker of squad-based games. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Universal Interactive Studios was searching its IP library for properties to adapt into a game. The link between Universal and Artworks was made by Ricci Rukavina, a producer at the former company. Rukavina wanted to adapt The Thing because of its cult status, and contacted Artworks after seeing the fleshy, morphing effects of Organic Art. Artworks leapt at the chance, simply reskinning a level from Evolva to produce a one-minute proof-of-concept demo. Universal loved it, and the project was quickly greenlit.
In the game you take control of Captain Blake, a special forces operative sent with his team to discover what happened at the research station from the original film. Things quickly go FUBAR, and Blake’s team is sucked into a survival situation while uncovering a sinister conspiracy. At its core, the game is a third-person shooter, using a control scheme largely inspired by Bend Studio’s Syphon Filter, plus an FPS zoom perspective modelled on that of Rare’s GoldenEye.
At the time, the game’s standout feature was its trust-and-fear system. Artworks built on its experience of designing a squad in Evolva, basing much of the game around Blake’s interactions with other members of the special forces team. Not only did this play to the studio’s graphical strengths, it also worked thematically.
“There was a lot of discussion, a lot of watching the film, and really breaking down the dynamics of the movie,” says lead designer Andrew Curtis. “One conclusion we came to quite early on was that a lot of it is about the tension between a very anxious cast: ‘Do I trust this person? How do I cope with this horrible scenario?’”
This feature was surprisingly robust. Most of Blake’s team is separated and isolated, and with shapeshifting monstrosities on the prowl, comradeship and morale are in short supply. NPCs will crack if they see too many horrific scenes, and trust has to be earned through actions like conducting blood tests in front of allies to prove your humanity or swapping supplies like health and ammo. In true Thing style, there’s always the possibility
“With shapeshifting monstrosities on the prowl, comradeship and morale are in short supply.”
that a squad member isn’t who (or what) they say they are; in addition to roving Thing monsters, NPCs will sometimes reveal themselves to be impostors.
CHEATING [BLORP!]
The Thing isn’t perfect. The UI is a bit cumbersome, and the infection mechanic often butts up against the constraints of a linear narrative. For example, there are occasional immersion-breaking moments when you waste a test kit confirming a squadmate’s humanity, only for them to transform mere moments later. However, most of it works well enough, and it’s
impressive how Artworks managed to implement so many complex systems, despite its relatively junior team.
“Most of the team – certainly I – was incredibly inexperienced, and we were all very young,” recalls Diarmid Campbell,
The Thing’s lead programmer. “But I think if we had had a process in place, we would have made a worse game. Part of the charm of and success of The Thing was that it’s got so many innovative things all thrown in together. I think now if someone came to me with half as much new stuff that no-one on a team had any experience of designing, I’d cut it down to one or two things, but somehow we managed to get everything working together.”
Part of this was achieved simply by using anything and everything available, combined with a somewhat seat-of-yourpants attitude to game design.
“It was all on a shoestring,” laughs Ron Ashtiani, the game’s senior artist. “At one point we needed faces for the NPCs; we just took photographs of everyone in the dev team and turned them into textures, so everyone’s a character in the game; I’m a medic called Williams, I think.”
At times, development went full gonzo. For example, Ashtiani recalls how the art team created the gore effects: “We got a big piece of white card in the backyard of the studio, and bought a bag of offal from the butchers. We would just throw these chunks of meat at the card to create blood splats and gibs and photograph it!”
GOTTA BE KIDDIN’ ME
The Thing was a commercial and critical success, generating positive attention for the studio. Ironically, this led to the downfall of Artworks. The studio received multiple development offers, and was soon working on several projects at once, including a new Alone In The Dark. The result was a headcount explosion, with the team shooting up from about 20 to over 100 staff. It proved unsustainable, and Artworks went into receivership in 2003.
With the company gone, so too was The Thing 2, which Artworks had begun work on. This would have continued the story of the previous entry, following Blake to an oil rig. Blake himself was infected, and another outbreak would begin. Besides some concept art, the project never got beyond a short demo, prototyping a dynamic infection system that would have allowed different NPCs to be infected at different times each playthrough.
Rather than mourn what never was, it’s better to celebrate The Thing players did get. If you’re a fan of the film or horror games, it’s still absolutely worth your time if you haven’t checked it out – it’s a great example of PS2-era survival horror. And who knows, maybe one day we’ll get another Thing game. Why don’t we just wait here a little while; see what happens?