“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.
