Dead Space: Artifact
January 27, 2023 saw the release of Dead Space, a remake of the original 2008 scifi horror shooter. For many fans and casual observers this is a chance to restore the dignity and legacy of a series brought low by the worst excesses of the triple-a game industry; they’ll tell you that Dead Space was a horror experience stretched to the breaking point by publishers and executives who just didn't get what it was and why it was so special. This isn't entirely the case, though to be sure Dead Space suffered greatly as a result of meddlesome publishers and the realities of the industry. Rather, Dead Space was and is a microcosm of a moment in time, a model in miniature of the games industry as a whole during the PS3/Xbox 360 era. It was a time of transition between games as they had been and games as they are now; the emergence of game franchises as multibillion dollar businesses, the growth of recurrent user spending, and weird crossovers. Dead Space (2008) is a transitional fossil, perfectly capturing this timeframe and the bonanza of unsustainable growth and cutthroat tactics which transformed the industry. The life story of Dead Space isn't the story of one series being ground down by the gears of capital; it's the story of videogames as a whole.
The Little Horror That Could
The original Dead Space was released on October 13, 2008, going on to sell over a million copies and become a seemingly unlikely hit in an age when single player games had become unfashionable with publishers. It was a gnarly, violent sci-fi horror shooter which drew plenty of inspiration from Resident Evil IV as well as 1979’s seminal Alien with (for now) just a trace of Lovecraftian cult horror. It stood out as something of a throwback, a disconcerting horror experience which threw players off balance by making its grisly dismemberment mechanics the most efficient way of dispatching enemies, rather than the pretty little headshots gamers are normally conditioned to pursue with frightening dedication. Players were cast in the role of the silent Isaac Clarke, an ordinary engineer stranded aboard the derelict Ishimura, a mining vessel which is one part USCSS Nostromo, one part Resident Evil haunted house. Armed only with repurposed tools like nailguns and laser cutters, Clarke must fight his way past the sinister necromorphs, zombie mutants created by space magic.
Despite latter day mythology, Dead Space did not emerge from nothing as an unlikely darling. It had the weight of Electronic Arts distributing and promoting it, and was the subject of a significant hype cycle. The marketing budget for a game or movie is, as a rule of thumb, estimated at equal to that of the game/movie itself, so there was significant money behind the promotion of Dead Space, much of which focused on the grisly death animations visited upon its silent protagonist, emphasizing that gnarly, edgy appeal. Further, within the same year as Dead Space's release there was a comic book miniseries from Image Comics, a rail-shooter spinoff for the Nintendo Wii, and an animated movie, none of which are the kinds of projects which can be thrown together overnight for a completely unexpected success. EA knew exactly what they had on their hands from the beginning, and the way they handled it was typical of both EA and the industry in general's approach at the time.
A look at the output of Electronic Arts, or even Visceral Games itself, shows an emphasis on franchises over individual games or even series of games. Dante’s Inferno, another Visceral project, came out of the gate with an animated movie, a comic book, and plans for a live action movie, even as the game itself flopped and never went on to have its planned sequels. Visceral’s ill-fated and questionably tasteful Jack the Ripper vs vampire sexworkers game, Ripper, memorably outlined at Polygon [link] was similarly surrounded by talk of prequels, sequels, movies, and a robust multiplayer even as the game never completed development. Visceral Games was in the business of making franchises, and business… was not actually booming.
Further, while microtransactions and shameless greed are often laid at the feet of the later entries in the series, it’s worth noting that the original Dead Space itself had an awe-inspiring number of content packs available to be purchased a la carte for real money. These twelve packs contained skins for the main character and his weapons, as well as exclusive weapons and weapon upgrades. These items generally ran between 1.50 to 3.00 dollars US after conversion to videogame storefront funny money, the same price point as the then infamous The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion horse armor DLC in 2006 [link]. Though long forgotten now, Dead Space’s content packs were a part of the first big wave of normalizing small scale DLC, a part of the long onslaught which dismantled the idea that a sold videogame was a complete product.
The Inevitable Escalation
If Dead Space riffed shamelessly on Alien, Dead Space 2 must be compared to Aliens; the bigger, badder, more bombastic sequel. Gone is the largely isolated and constrained experience of the first game, a lone, silent survivor fighting through an incomprehensible situation, instead the no longer mute Isaac Clarke finds himself in a story about a zombie outbreak on Titan and being drawn further into the schemes of the cult worshiping said zombies.This brought with it changes to the gameplay such as a more open setting, new, less idiosyncratic weapons, more streamlined design, and even a multiplayer mode. Dead Space was still action-horror, but the action had received a major promotion, making the game much less clunky and unusual than its predecessor.
2011 was a golden age for ill-considered and often thematically bizarre multiplayer modes in singleplayer games, which were stuffed into everything from Dead Space to Uncharted to Bioshock. For publishers, the proposition was simple; multiplayer games kept people playing longer and thus more likely to spend money on cosmetics, weapons, and other items, which become part of a haves and have-nots culture among players. In 2020 EA Games’ then-president Frank Gibeau would so far as to say that the single-player model of games was finished and that game developers were moving towards connected experiences. Ironically, in this same interview Gibeau pointed towards Dead Space specifically as an example of EA Games allowing publishers to pursue their own vision; considering where the series went, this statement seems inaccurate. The logic behind the move to online gaming should be familiar to anyone who’s played a modern live service game and tried to grind through a season pass to keep up with friends. Incidentally, Dead Space 2’s multiplayer mode was the one part of Ripper to make it out of development, as the new mode made use of much of the work done on its stillborn sibling series..
The sequel continued to hawk DLC in the form of costumes and weapons, while adding on a whole host of pre-order and special edition bonuses, and even a sequel chapter which tied into the first game’s spinoff; Dead Space: Extraction. Players inhabited the role of Gabe Weller, a space soldier trying to reunite with his wife, in a story which frankly didn’t augur well for the series’ narrative ambitions.
Whereas the first Dead Space had been at least somewhat on the bubble, an unknown quantity in need of justifying its existence, Dead Space 2 was not in the same position. Its overblown nature can be chalked up not only to EA wanting a more bombastic and mainstream product, but also the almost inevitable tendency towards escalation seen in sequels as developers find themselves with larger budgets, raised expectations, and a few simple tricks to sell their sequel as bigger and more important. Dead Space 2 was the series’ biggest hit and success as a multimedia franchise. In the year before and the year after Dead Space 2’s 2011 release there was also: a novel, another animated movie, a puzzle spin-off game, a mobile game, and an appearance by series protagonist Isaac Clarke in notorious Smash Bros. knockoff PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale. This was the apex.
World Killer
The sins of Dead Space 3 are myriad and often blamed for killing the series, admittedly true given that until the announcement of the remake, Dead Space had lain fallow since 3’s release in 2013. It very much did kill the franchise, but Dead Space 3 was not an outlier, it was a natural progression of the trajectory which Dead Space had long been on.
The story and action had by now totally shifted, Isaac Clarke spends most of the game teamed up with a secondary protagonist who is a cool space soldier, gunning down human enemies on a frozen planet rather than, you know, in space. Traditional gunplay against traditional enemies is a much larger part of the gameplay, and the zombies have been so sidelined as a threat that only a single main character is actually seen to die at the hands of what was once depicted as a horror so profound it nearly drove Isaac Clarke insane. Clarke no longer has time for that kind of interiority (indeed the initial idea that the secondary playable character would be a figment of Clarke’s imagination was ruled out) because he has baddies to mow down and, in a example of sequel escalation taken to near parodic excess, zombie moons to fight.
The DLC packs made their triumphant return, with seven sets of weapons and costumes, a sequel campaign set after the main game, pre-order bonuses, and (I’m not kidding) a set of weapons only available through entering a promo code found in Slim Jim packages. Microtransactions had evolved since the first Dead Space, and Dead Space 3 saw major innovation on that front. Where previous packs had consisted of cosmetics with no real effect on gameplay and weapons which a dedicated player could presumably make it through the game without using, Dead Space 3 introduced a crafting system, because it was 2013 and if you didn’t have a crafting system you’d be laughed at by all the cool kids, and also because a crafting system means resource management. Resource management which could be cut down substantially if players were to, say, buy a pack of non-renewable in-game resources for real world money to spare themselves the hassle. Between the shameless money grabs and the sense that the series had rapidly lost touch with its roots, Dead Space seemed adrift. Neither of those things really had anything to do with the end of the series though, which ultimately came down to the most fearsome and cutthroat force in gaming: sales goals.
As Dead Space had grown as a franchise, EA’s ambitions for it had grown right along with it, and despite selling 605,000 copies in its first month, the series’ third entry fell well below EA’s sales goals. One might question exactly what sales goals EA had in mind for a series which began as a relatively niche riff on alien zombie horror, but keep in mind that this was in the gold rush era of game publishing. Development costs kept going up, as did promotional costs, so sales goals followed. Publishers at the time were so incensed by the idea that they might miss out on a penny of revenue that they took major steps toward killing the used game market (only a few years before digital sales would essentially wipe it out anyway) through pre-order DLC, locked on-disc content requiring single-use codes packed with new copies of the game, mandatory internet connections, and even the discussion of fees to activate used games. Dead Space 3 itself locked off its multiplayer co-op features behind a purchase code for used game buyers, who had to shell out additional cash for the full experience. It’s no surprise that in this unsustainable atmosphere Dead Space was gradually transformed into the kind of four-quadrant crowd pleaser EA thought they wanted, only to fail anyway because what EA actually wanted was a license to continually make more money forever, ideally while doing as little as possible. Dead Space 2 had eventually sold over four million copies, but even the apex of the series was still considered a failure, thanks to EA’s lavish spending on promotion, a sector of the media industry which definitely isn’t a grift.
Dead Space was a Cinderella story turned into horror, the developer dream of a weird project becoming an unlikely darling and skyrocketing to mainstream status, before being gradually morphed into a more and more interchangeable product about armored space marines blasting monsters as the publisher spend years hollowing it out in search of a real life infinite money glitch. It was 2013 and Dead Space was dead.
Until today. January 27, 2023 saw see a Dead Space remake released from Montreal-based Motive Studio. Visceral Games is no more, just one of the many studios shuttered by EA after its ludicrous sales projections failed to be met, chewed up and spit out when the delicious flavor of money began to fade like bubblegum made from developers’ hopes and dreams. But enough time has passed now that people are nostalgic for Dead Space, bitter about the sequels, and ready to go back to the old ways, just as the first game was itself a throwback. The devs have promised no microtransactions, though at this point that’s a bit like saying that your new car doesn’t even need to be fed oats and have its horseshoes regularly changed. The industry has evolved; the money might have stayed just the same, but the ways they get it are different. In the original Dead Space games they got it through clunky DLC packs with outfits and guns, then story expansions, and finally with onerous gameplay requirements which players could pay to skip. Now it’s different, the zombified corpse of a dead franchise lurching into view, the mind and heart is gone, the original creators and developers all gone, but it’s something shiny and new, dripping with viscera, animated by a terrible and ancient purpose. You can cut off the head and it still won’t die. It wants your money.
Epilogue
The Callisto Protocol is a game made by some of the people behind the original Dead Space. It is a spiritual sequel to the franchise, channeling the same aesthetics and horror gameplay as the original series. The Callisto Protocol came out on December 1st, 2022, about two months before the Dead Space remake. It had a season pass with character skins, two game modes, and a story expansion. It sold two million units and underperformed because it didn't sell five million [link]. You can’t win.
