Developer: Dreamworks Interactive

Genre: Action/Horror

Clive Barker is one of the world's best-known horror authors. He has worked in a wide variety of media, and is the author of ten novels, six plays, several screenplays (three of which were made into movies that he produced and directed), countless short stories (many of which comprise the six volume series The Books of Blood). In addition he has also worked in comic books and television and produced several movies, including the Academy Award winning film Gods and Monsters. His latest projects include a four-book children's series called the Abarat Quartet, which will be made into a Disney animated movie, and the creation of a chilling series of toys for Todd McFarlane's Todd Toys and Clive Barker's Undying, a first person action game that he worked on with developer Dreamworks Interactive. We were recently given the chance to sit down with Clive to talk about his work on Undying as well as what he feels makes a video game truly frightening, his thoughts on games in general and their potential as a medium for artistic expression.

Sharky Games: The game had already been well into development when you were brought on board. How did you wind up working on Undying?

Clive Barker: They ("they" being Dreamworks) had a game which they were not entirely happy with. It showed a lot of promise but it wasn't quite working. And they'd spent a lot of money on it, and they knew there was something marvelous there, but they couldn't figure it out. They were so close to it, they'd been working on it for a long time, [but] they couldn't see the wood from the trees. A friend of a friend of mine said to [Stephen] Spielberg, "how about Barker?" and Spielberg said, "Yeah, bring him in. Let's see." So I went in and first, I loved the guys [at Dreamworks Interactive], thought they were really cool guys, just really nice people. And then [I] started to solve the problems. Which were fairly extensive. There were some narrative problems, there were some character problems, [and] we had a really charmless hero.
We had this fellow called Magnus. Count Magnus Wolfram. Who was bald, tattooed, looked like a comic book hero. And I got them all in a room, and I said, "Look, does anyone in this room know a count? No. Does anybody in this room know anybody called Magnus? No. Does anybody really want to be in this guy's skin? Since this is a first person play, why would you want to be in this man's skin? Why would you want to play [as him]?" And so we threw him out, and I said, "Look. You've got a gay man in charge here. Bring me somebody I want to sleep with. Bring me somebody fabulously sexy." And because my training is in art, I drew some sketches; they were mainly of what I wanted his face to be. And this brilliant artist Brian Horton about ten days later sent me the character that now appears on the screen. Who was wonderful, he's everything I wanted. He was just the right kind of character. He seemed like somebody you would want to be, somebody you would want to play, whose skin you would want to occupy for a period of time. Even if you are going against the hordes of hell, at least he was going to do it with a smile on his face.

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