We recently visited Supermassive Games at its studio in Guildford London for an exclusive look at Man of Medan, which you can read all about in our latest issue of the magazine. The first game in The Dark Pictures anthology, Man of Medan, launches this summer, and it takes a lot of inspiration from Until Dawn’s mechanics. This left us talking a lot about Supermassive’s former hit, and the team was candid about why, after doing an Until Dawn spin-off and prequel for PSVR, it was ready to try something new.
Supermassive has heard the demands for an Until Dawn sequel, and while it wants to provide more of what that game did, it didn’t want to go for the obvious sequel with its next big venture. “After Until Dawn, [many] started to request a sequel, and it still happens today, so we know there is a fanbase that likes this kind of thing,” says CEO and executive producer Pete Samuels. “A lot of [creating the anthology] is about our desire to serve that fanbase from our perspective and to serve us ourselves in what we love to do, which is do more stories and characters, and do it more frequently than one or two every few years.”
The team also wanted a clean slate and feels an anthology of standalone games will offer them more creative freedom. The Dark Pictures anthology features five different games, all focusing on different subgenres of horror. “On an anthology, it’s a great opportunity to wrestle with a new subject, a new genre, and with characters that you can develop specifically for that story. You’re not tied to historical characters that you have to use,” says game director Tom Heaton.
Series producer Dan McDonald adds: “If we were making sequels, we don’t know who survived. I mean we could probably work it out from your game save, but we don’t want to make a sequel to that. We want to make a different story with different people.”
