Interviews
[Interview] From ‘System Shock 2’ to ‘It Follows’ – What Helped Create Co-Op Horror ‘The Blackout Club’?
The Blackout Club is certainly an interesting concept for a co-op multiplayer horror. Left 4 Dead without the relentless gunplay. Friday the 13th, but less grisly. The Blackout Club borrows a little from the successes on multiplayer horror past, and shapes it into something new, with a bit of help from that most trendy sub-genre of the moment, the Spooky Amblin-inspired Adventure. How did developer Question go about creating this fascinating mash-up? We spoke to the game’s Lead Writer, Jordan Thomas about just that, and also found out about further influences, how the developer’s background with immersive sims came into play, and what the future might hold for The Blackout Club.
Bloody Disgusting: Members of the Question team have worked on revered immersive sims like Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dishonored and the BioShock series and that lineage is clearly visible in The Blackout Club’s gameplay. What immersive sims and co-op games did Question look to for inspiration during development?
Jordan Thomas (Lead Writer): The first immersive sim that took on the co-op problem was System Shock 2, in a release update well after the initial game hit shelves. It is referenced very rarely as a multiplayer game now, but for me (Jordan, sorta the lore guy at Question) it was formative, because suddenly we were exploring the abandoned space station and decoding the story together. Feeding off each others’ fear. I always wanted to bring that feeling to a modern audience, and there are elements of The Blackout Club that play with that.
BD: The Blackout Club also borrows heavily from the “suburban kids fighting monsters that adults are too oblivious to notice” subgenre of horror/adventure movies (Super 8, E.T., Stranger Things, The Goonies). What movies and TV shows inspired The Blackout Club’s setting and story?
JT: Well, you’ve certainly listed a few – also Twin Peaks, The X Files, Channel Zero, Supernatural to an extent. The ‘Strange Town’ and ‘Monster of the Week’ genres are exactly our jam regardless of our focus on teens. If you’re into movies, there’s Halloween, Hereditary and It Follows, The Blackout Club is an intersection of themes across all three of those – though it doesn’t spend much time talking at you, at least not directly.
BD: In the tutorial mission, players take on the role of Bells, a member of The Blackout Club who has gone missing. How important is it to the team to continue to tell Bells’ story as the game progresses? How important is story to the team as a whole, and how do you go about weaving narrative into a multiplayer game?
The Blackout Club is primarily built for replayability, so there aren’t a lot of traditional story missions. That said, we collaborated with the South Park folks on the intro because it was important to us to ground the world in a human story, and for a lot of folks – Bells is the thing that draws them in emotionally. In-fiction, the teenagers take terrifying risks. Some of them do so to expose the occult conspiracy, but some just want to find their friend. Most of our story is told via community interaction with the game during live events – check out our Discord for some examples, if you’re into mass-investigation. The hope is that like a lot of old cosmic horror, Lovecraft and his imitators, players feel like they’re uncovering little details and sharing it with international colleagues before they lose their minds and are devoured.BD: Some of the flavor text in this game —particularly the Sleepers’ ruminations— is really evocative. I love lore, and one of my favorite aspects of playing an immersive sim is the opportunity to pick up audiologs or diary entries that offer a look at the wider world. Do you plan to add more of that to the game?
JT: Thank you, I think I did okay with those! I love writing in the voice of the Sleepwalkers. Playing with that line between merely abnormal and truly paranormal was very important to us with The Blackout Club. We like to hang onto reasonable doubt about whether all of this is demonic, or just some change in mass consciousness.
BD: The Blackout Club’s map is clearly delineated into two tiers: the neighborhood and the network of caves below. Is it challenging, exciting or both to design two levels that are so visually different?
JT: It’s always both – the sleepwalkers move to an eldritch song, played by the great instrument that spans the town of Redacre. So when you hear the horror theme that plays when The Angel, our boogeyman, comes after the kids – it’s actually playing in-world. Stephen Alexander, our lead artist and co-owner, worked tirelessly with our contractor CJ Green to flesh out our fictional town of Redacre. They collaborated with me on the concept of the place, and of the maze-like instrument beneath. I think Stephen made them both feel charming and unnerving at the same time – there’s a small town sweetness to the suburban neighborhood which turns menacing at night. Meanwhile, the maze below is like nothing else. Our time on the Bioshock series might prepare you a little for the ambition of the place, but the period is harder to nail down, purposefully. We wanted it to feel timeless, like the vision of a mind that is far from human. The hope is that it feels like it transcends technology from a particular time, but relies more on the blood and sweat of the humans who occupy it.BD: The maze is basically one giant instrument. What structures, in the world of architecture or music, did the team look to as they designed this space? From Patrick Balthrop, our sound designer, and engineer:
BD: I always use the grappling hook, and to me at least, it seems like the grappling hook is substantially better and more versatile than the stun gun or the crossbow. Should players expect more tools in the future and/or buffs or nerfs to existing tools?
JT: Oho, that’s the 200 IQ pick. A lot of players miss the power of the hook because it’s not offensive. The fact that the debate over that is so fierce suggested to us that we were on the right track, though your mileage may vary. We’d love to add more tools, but we’re a tiny team and every one of them affects balance in pretty dramatic ways. So it’ll be about demand versus our resources. We believe in the game and we’re not done iterating on it – the 1.0 release is teaching us a lot about the leveling grind, the live event engagement that works best, the most optimal play-styles, and so on.BD: The Shape system, in which a mysterious being called the Shape invades the map and hunts players that commit to many “sins,” like kicking doors in or leaving bodies lying around, is pretty fascinating, and reminds me of the police in a Grand Theft Auto game. What inspired this system?
JT: In Cabin in The Woods, they go a little into the formula behind a lot of horror, right – you have to transgress in order to justify the audience taking cathartic pleasure in your death. To an extent, the Sin system is like that, the kids are breaking the rules, and slowly that draws the ire of our boogeyman, who the locals also call The Angel – kind of a twisted notion of a moral guardian. (The Shape is what the kids nicknamed it.) The limited visibility (you have to close your in-game eyes to see it), and the relentless pursuit of only the worst kid at the time, loosely inspired by It Follows. There’s also a lot of mythology about having a parasitical spirit or Nemesis-like figure attached to you, and we wanted to try actually simulating the needs behind such a creature.
BD: I’ve just started messing around in Old Growth, but I’m already excited to see what gets added to the map next. Do you have any news on when players can expect the next map expansion?
Only one episode remains in Season 3 of “Chucky,” and what a bloody road it’s been so far, especially for actor Devon Sawa. The actor has now officially died twice on screen this season, pulling double duty as President James Collins and body double Randall Jenkins.
If you thought Chucky’s ruthless eye-gouging of the President was bloody, this week’s Episode 7 traps Randall Jenkins in an elevator that feels straight out of an iconic horror classic.
Bloody Disgusting spoke with series creator Don Mancini and actor Devon Sawa about that ultra-bloody death sequence and how the actor inspires Mancini’s writing on the series.
Mancini explains, “Devon’s a bit of a muse. Idle Hands and Final Destination is where my Devon Sawa fandom started, like a lot of people; although yours may have started with Casper. I was a bit too old for that. But it’s really just about how I love writing for actors that I respect and then know. So, it’s like having worked with Devon for three years now, I’m just always thinking, ‘Oh, what would be a fun thing to throw his way that would be unexpected and different that he hasn’t done?’ That’s really what motivates me.”
For Sawa, “Chucky“ is an actor’s dream in that the series gives him not one but multiple roles to sink his teeth into, often within the same season. But the actor is also a huge horror fan, and Season 3: Part 2 gives him the opportunity to pay homage to a classic: Kubrick’s The Shining.
CHUCKY — “There Will Be Blood” Episode 307 — Pictured in this screengrab: (l-r) Devon Sawa as President James Collins, K.C. Collins as Coop — (Photo by: SYFY)
“Collectively, it’s just amazing to put on the different outfits, to do the hair differently, to get different types of dialogue,“ Sawa says of working on the series. “The elevator scene, it’s like being a kid again. I was up to my eyeballs in blood, and it felt very Kubrick. Everybody there was having such a good time, and we were all doing this cool horror stuff, and it felt amazing. It really was a good day.”
Sawa elaborates on being submerged in so much blood, “It was uncomfortable, cold, and sticky, and it got in my ears and my nose. But it was well worth it. I didn’t complain once. I was like, ‘This is why I do what I do, to do scenes like this,‘ the scenes that I grew up watching on VHS cassette, and now we’re doing it in HD, and it’s all so cool.“
It’s always the characters and the actors behind them that matter most to Mancini, even when he delights in coming up with inventive kills and incorporating horror references. And he’s killed Devon Sawa’s characters often. Could future seasons top the record of on-screen Sawa deaths?
“Well, I guess we did it twice in season one and once in season two,“ Mancini counts. “So yeah, I guess I would have to up the ante next season. I’ll really be juggling a lot of falls. But I think it’s hopefully as much about quality as quantity. I want to give him a good role that he’s going to enjoy sinking his teeth into as an actor. It’s not just about the deaths.”
Sawa adds, “Don’s never really talked about how many times could we kill you. He’s always talking about, ‘How can I make this death better,’ and that’s what I think excites him is how he can top each death. The electricity, to me blowing up to, obviously in this season, the eyes and with the elevator, which was my favorite one to shoot. So if it goes on, we’ll see if he could top the deaths.”
CHUCKY — “Death Becomes Her” Episode 305 — Pictured in this screengrab: Devon Sawa as James Collins — (Photo by: SYFY)
The actor has played a handful of distinctly different characters since the series launch, each one meeting a grisly end thanks to Chucky. And Season 3 gave Sawa his favorite characters yet.
“I would say the second one was a lot of fun to shoot,“ the actor says of Randall Jenkins. “The President was great. I liked playing the President. He was the most grounded, I hope, of all the characters. I did like playing him a lot.” Mancini adds, “He’s grounded, but he’s also really traumatized, and I thought you did that really well, too.”
The series creator also reveals a surprise correlation between President James Collins’ character arc and a ’90s horror favorite.
“I saw Devon’s role as the president in Season 3; he’s very Kennedy-esque,“ Mancini explains. “But then given the supernatural plot turns that happen, to me, the analogy is Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath, the character that is seeing these weird little things happening around the house that is starting to screw with his sanity and he starts to insist, ‘I’m seeing a ghost,‘ and his spouse thinks he’s nuts. So I always like that. That’s Michelle Pfeiffer in What Lies Beneath, which is a movie I love.”
The finale of “Chucky” Season 3: Part 2 airs Wednesday, May 1 on USA & SYFY.
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