“As a kid, I’d sometimes go to work with my dad,” Brady Bell tells me. “We’d drive onto the MGM lot, and I’d see coin-op games through the window of one office. ‘That’s Mr Spielberg’s office,’ my dad would say. I remember thinking, ‘Wow – he gets to make movies and play games. That’s the life.”
Years later, Bell found himself sitting in an LA office while the legendary director gave him notes. Modelers around them were working on outrageously expensive workstations, painstakingly creating mockups for Jurassic Park sequels. But there were no dinosaurs on Bell’s screen, not even a tiny Compsognathus or a dinky little Anchiornis. Bell was showing Spielberg a cutscene packed with hellish creatures, occultish symbols, and the tastefully wood-panelled walls of a sprawling gothic manor.
That’s because Bell wasn’t part of DreamWorks Pictures, Spielberg’s movie studio, but DreamWorks Interactive, the game development studio Spielberg founded in 1995. He was the producer on the small team making Clive Barker’s Undying, a first-person horror shooter made in collaboration with the author who created Hellraiser and Candyman.
Last month Clive Barker’s Undying celebrated its 25th anniversary and while its makers would be the first to say it wasn’t a shooter that changed the direction of the games industry, they will tell you that the project was a true labour of love.
They will also tell you that Clive Barker was really quite insistent that they make protagonist Patrick Galloway more fuckable.
When Clive Barker’s Undying launched in February 2001, its campaign armed players with both exotic weaponry and powerful sorceries, which might have seemed overkill were you not pitted against demons, ghosts, unhinged monks, skeletons, and the twisted remnants of the accursed Covenant family. The initial backdrop for all these uncanny shoot-outs was a sprawling manor home – the Covenant estate – in 1920s Ireland, but like any self-respecting paranormal investigator, you’d soon find yourself exploring derelict monasteries and Lovecraftian nightmare-cities.
Bell was part of the small development team from its earliest days, even before it became a horror game. “Undying started as a Western,” he explains. “I’d always loved the genre, had fond memories of Lucasarts’ Outlaws, and was excited by the challenge of making a great, low-tech FPS.”
“It was a huge leap of faith on their side”
Eagle-eyed readers will note that Clive Barker’s Undying is not especially rootin’ or tootin’ – though Galloway does start the game armed with a formidable six-shooter. No, Brady’s Western dreams were squished faster than a varmint in a cattle drive, when DreamWorks Pictures – anticipating the release of 1999’s The Haunting – made clear that they’d prefer the Interactive team work on a horror game instead. Though, they weren’t insistent it be an adaptation, a choice Bell was grateful for, saying it was “a huge leap of faith on their side.”
This pivot to horror led the team to focus their prototyping efforts squarely on how they might use lighting, audio, and level design to create suspense and atmosphere. “There was an old Quake mod I loved – fan-built levels inspired by the Alien franchise,” says Bell. “You crept through the entire first level with only distant sounds. You’d tiptoe down hallways, hearing strange noises, watching the tracker on your pulse rifle slowly build tension. The loudest element was dripping water reverberating across the hull. You’d open a bay door and the volume was jarring. By the end your heart was racing and your palms were sweaty… and you still hadn’t seen an alien. I loved that.
“We put our finished visual slice in front of Steven Spielberg, and he said, ‘Go.’”
The team was quick to assemble many of the constituent parts that would eventually make up Undying. The Covenant family home was soon replete with wood panelling and secrets. The works of HP Lovecraft were established as definite influences, particularly on the otherworldly city of Oneiros. But there was a sense that the team could use a helping hand developing these raw materials into something more.
“We wanted to get a known name in horror as a consultant,” explains Brian Horton, Undying’s lead artist. “And my friend Steve Niles said, ‘Hey, would you be interested in collaborating with Clive Barker?’ I said absolutely. I’ve been a Hellraiser fan for my entire life.”
“Writing a game story with a bust of Pinhead on the mantle was surreal”
“We held many all-day working sessions at Barker’s home,” Bell tells me. “I vividly remember showing up at his address and realizing the ‘home’ was essentially where he kept his paintings. Clive paints while he writes, and the house was filled with – no exaggeration – thousands of paintings stacked on top of each other. No furniture, just rooms of paintings, floor to ceiling. Then we’d go next door to the house where he actually lived. That’s where the story work took place. Writing a game story with a bust of Pinhead on the mantle was surreal.”
“We would show him the content, and he was very interested,” Horton explains. “He loved the blend of Lovecraftian and Gothic horror, but one thing he didn’t like was the hero.” At this point in the game’s development, the player character was Count Magnus Wolfram, a fearsome slab of a man with a shaven head and some vaguely mystical tattoos. “Clive said, I don’t enjoy this hero, he’s not someone I relate to. And in Clive’s words: ‘He’s not someone I’d want to fuck.’
“So, that was his feedback.”
On another occasion, Bell recalls that he and the team arrived ready to talk about what to name the game. “Clive was very passionate about naming,” Bell explains. “He was great at it; we were not.”
The name that the development team had arrived at? Siog. Clive Barker’s Siog. “It had a folklore connection to hidden people beneath the earth, if I remember correctly,” Bell recalls. “Clive just stared at us in a way that said: ‘Guys… come on.'”
I’d always assumed that Barker’s contributions to Undying were largely totemic – a known name to catch a would-be buyer’s attention on store shelves. In the same way that Tom Clancy wasn’t walking around the corridors of Ubisoft telling level designers where to put rappel points on buildings. But Horton and Bell both separately insist not only that Barker made meaningful contributions to the game, but that he was an exceptional collaborator.
He’d be the first to say he didn’t know much about video games other than that he loved the medium,” explains Horton. “But he was taking all the ideas that we had had and helping us shape them in a way that matched his sensibilities. And he helped us to improve our own sensibilities – our ideas of what scares us, you know? He asked a lot of great provoking questions. And he was very respectful of the team, and the fact that we had put so much work into it. I’ve always held the lessons I learned from Clive very close to my heart.”
“You’d expect the brain behind those stories to be dark, broken and twisted. Clive couldn’t be more opposite”
“He was generous – truly generous with his time and talent,” says Bell. “He was as much a teacher as a collaborator. In a brainstorm session, Clive would come up with the best idea, then dissect ‘why’. Looking back, it must have been maddening for him. He was surrounded by experts in our field but, comparatively, children in his. His books were filled with terror, with evil, with fear. You’d expect the brain behind those stories to be dark, broken and twisted. Clive couldn’t be more opposite – just an absolute delight of a human. We’re wired to romanticise tortured souls providing works of art. In the case of Clive Barker, he had the most magnetic and positive personality of any creative talent I’ve worked with.”
And as for the problem of the insufficiently fuckable protagonist? Horton worked with Barker to address his concerns that a musclebound count might not be especially relatable. “I did a bunch of concept art for that, and we were looking at Robert De Niro… I can’t remember the film’s name… but there was a film Clive was really into, and I was able to use that version of De Niro and make my own version of it, and that’s the version of Patrick Galloway that you see in the game.” 15 minutes of skimming through promotional material for Robert De Niro movies eventually leads me to suggest that the movie in question is 1986’s The Mission, which Horton confirms for me.
(Although I haven’t seen The Mission myself, I do note from the film’s Wikipedia page that it appears in the Vatican’s Alcuni film importanti, a 1995 list of flicks recommended by Pope John Paul II and Cardinal John Patrick Foley. So Clive Barker clearly wasn’t the only person who was “really into” De Niro’s performance. This, I will add, is not the kind of research I envisaged when I pitched this piece, but here we are.)
With Barker’s help, the project took on a more definitive shape. Horton worked with technical art director Kyle McKisic to make the alternate universe of Oneiros stranger and more responsive to the player’s presence, with platforms that seemed to snap into place in front of your feet as you walked over abyssal drops, and enemies that “melted up from the ground”. Among the many contributions of lead designer Dellekamp Siefert, meanwhile, was pitching the team on “a Maya-like wheel” interface to let players quickly switch weapons and spells mid-combat. Today, a radial menu and the ability to dual-wield spells and guns may not feel especially noteworthy, but both were genuine innovations at the time.
The team was small – Horton recalls a core group of just 15 or so people – but they were close. “The art team was extremely tight, and, whether it was Jeff Haynie, who was the art director, or Jonathan Gregerson, or Dan Keller, or, you know… everyone was just so in sync. And everyone had a lot of ownership, over the ingredients, whether it was a mission that they were working on or characters, everyone chipped in. On all fronts. It was just such a wonderful familial team.”
“Was it optimal, efficient, and perfectly clear? Not even close,” Bell adds. “But it was genuinely exciting.”
“Steven was incredible and remains my hero to this day”
Crucially, the team also felt that they had the backing of management, up to and including Spielberg himself. “Steven was incredible and remains my hero to this day,” says Bell. “For the Interactive group, it was his general support and interest that was most strongly felt. He never assumed his generational talent and experience translated to game development. Instead, he asked questions. He was fantastically curious about everything.”
And then, the ground shifted beneath their feet. DreamWorks Interactive was acquired by Electronic Arts, in a deal that would see the studio rebranded to EA Los Angeles.
Initially, this deal didn’t affect the Undying team too much. “EA acquired DreamWorks Interactive largely for Medal of Honor,” Bell explains. “Which was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because they paid relatively little attention to what we were doing – we got to craft the exact game we wanted. A curse because when we were done, EA was shocked by how violent it was. I remember the first advertisement marketing developed: a top-down view of a spiral staircase descending into darkness… covered in blood. That’s when EA fully became aware of our little game.”
Horton remembers hearing rumours that EA’s management was less than pleased to find themselves lumbered with a Mature-rated game. “Anecdotally, I heard that someone at EA held up American McGee’s Alice and Clive Barker’s Undying, and just said ‘We will not make games like this ever again.'”
Clive Barker’s Undying launched with a fraction of the marketing support that its development team hoped for. The critical response was enthusiastic (some magazines really championed the game to their readers – I remember it was the dearly departed PC Zone that convinced me to give it a try), but sales were disappointing. “It’s one of those cult games that resonated with people who did play it,” Horton tells me. “Unfortunately, it just didn’t reach as many players as we wanted.”
“It never fails to surprise me how fondly fans remember the game, or how often other developers reference it,” Bell tells me. “To this day, I’ll get emails forwarded from fans expressing their passion for Undying, or sharing photos of themselves dressed like characters for Halloween. After Undying, I started leading Medal of Honor games and we were visiting developers to evaluate licensing their tech. Id Software was the gold standard of hardcore, cool, high-quality technology and games. Walking through their offices, we noticed how many developers had a copy of Undying on their cubicle shelf. That was a proud, ‘Hell yeah’ moment.”
When looking back at decades-old games, the temptation is so often to trace a line to the present day. It’s just so narratively neat to be able to claim that a game left an indelible mark on the medium, inspired a generation of game makers, or presaged some tectonic shift in the industry. I’m not sure any of that quite fits with Clive Barker’s Undying, and when I ask Bell and Horton about the game’s legacy, neither of them make grand claims. “It was simple, right? You look at it now and there’s a primitiveness to it,” says Horton. “But our team was so small. I mean, we were punching way above our weight class with the amount of people we had to make that game.”
But it’s clear that the project was memorable and meaningful to those involved. “Undying has shaped my career choices more than I sometimes realise,” says Bell, who went on to be the creative director for the Medal of Honor series, and is now vice president of product strategy at Wizards of the Coast. “I got into this work because of my love of film and games – combining the two has always been my passion. I haven’t always gotten the opportunity to fully lean into that, but it’s never been far from what I do. Here I am, twenty-five years later, shaping Magic: The Gathering sets aiming to do the same thing.”
“It’s definitely one of those games that I feel very proud of, and I mark in my history as a developer,” says Horton, whose subsequent career includes serving as a creative director at Infinity Ward and Insomniac Games, and is now a head of creative at 2K. “I’ve been very fortunate to have a 31-year career, and I still hold Clive Barker’s Undying close to my heart, and all the people who worked on it.”
“And I always imagine, what if we were to remake Undying for the modern systems and take some of the same ideas that we had and really blow it out?” While I don’t see it happening, I can’t help but join Horton in his fond imagining. Just think how hunky and De Niro-esque Patrick Galloway could look on a modern PC.