Dead space remake divider11/21/2023 People internally were like, 'Oh that could work, yeah, why not.' So that's kind of how the name came to be." So, you know, Necromorph, why not?' So it stuck. "So it was actually my wife coined the term Necromorph, because she was looking at the design, like, 'I don't know what to call these things they're made out of dead bodies and they're alien forms. It just didn't sound scary and it didn't sound like, you couldn't really relate what it was just by hearing the term," says Wanat. It was the sort of thing you would just never tell the players, but it was like the thing they had on the books. "We had a proper name for them, and it was part of the mythology. Concept art for a Necromorph, as seen in an EA blog. In fact, it came as a light suggestion from someone outside Visceral Games entirely. Now billed as the godfather of the Necromorph, Wanat tells me that the origins of the monsters' name wasn't even decided from the start. The early concept art work for Necromorphs, which Wanat keeps catalogued on his ArtStation portfolio, is even more gnarly than what made it into Dead Space. "Think about science fiction movies that really are scary, and that John Carpenter movie is really kind of one of the quintessential, okay, now that is some really messed up stuff going on with the creatures there." "We were looking at that and really amazed at a lot of the creature design, and they were taking a lot of cues from what we were also looking at, which was John Carpenter's The Thing," says Wanat. It wasn't the sole inspiration though.ĭuring development, the team's attention was drawn by another action-horror game: the now-legendary Resident Evil 4 and its spiky Regenerators, pitchfork-sharpening villagers, and parasites. "We really wanted something organic, and we didn't think robots would be scary enough." Eventually, they were influenced by the monsters in System Shock, and from there on, the idea of an infection being the source of the threat stuck like the flu. The team explored the idea of killer robots, but the idea didn't quite stick. But what? That leaves a lot of possibilities," says Wanat. It was like, all right, it's going to be science fiction, it's going to be horror. We hadn't even settled on what the threat was. "It was pretty wide open in the beginning. That's why it's surprising to hear Necromorphs creator Ben Wanat, production designer on the first two Dead Space games and creative director on Dead Space 3, tell me that Necromorphs weren't even a day-one idea for the spaceship-bound survival horror. You never forget the first Necromorph you see, nor the last. The Necromorphs have in their decade-plus in the video game canon claimed a corner of their own, not just in the realm of video game horror, but all horror. It's exhilarating, and refreshes not just players of the first game about what they're up against, but introduces the monsters to new players as well. The transformed humans drop from the ceiling and pop out from unexpected spaces. The monsters are a dash of Alien's Facehuggers, sprinkled in with what you might expect from a gruesome zombie movie. Necromorphs are revolting, as we see in the opening's frantic escape. Poor Clarke has been asleep for so long, and this is what he wakes up to. His eyes turn white, giant insect-like legs sprout out of his back, his neck shoots up like a giraffe, and finally, his face morphs into a ghastly beast. Then in a flash, the man is stabbed in the skull by a Necromorph. In just its first minute, hero Isaac Clarke awakens in a straitjacket in an insane asylum, where he learns from the star of the spin-off Dead Space Ignition that the monsters of the series-Necromorphs-are at it again. There are few game openings that are as simultaneously terrifying and thrilling as the start of Dead Space 2. Stay tuned for more in the weeks to come! Monster of the Week is a three-part series where we dive into the creation of iconic monsters from video games with the game developers who helped bring them to life. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team. This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247.
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