Striking Distance goes beyond Dead Space with the highly evolved survival horror of The Callisto Protocol

By Chris Schilling

Glen Schofield sighs, and shifts in his seat. The Striking Distance CEO is clearly excited to give us an exclusive glimpse of the opening of his studio’s forthcoming science-fiction horror The Callisto Protocol, as well as an extended look at a later section of the game. But he’s aware he has something else to address first. You wouldn’t exactly say he’s happy to talk about it – “I want to put the attention back on the game and not on this,” he says – but equally it’s clear he doesn’t want to simply sweep it under the carpet.

“Well, you know…” he begins, and sighs again. “It was a thankyou,” he says, finally. He’s talking, of course, about a tweet he posted shortly after his return from a trip to promote The Callisto Protocol at Gamescom. Quickly deleted, its message about life at his studio – “working 6-7 days a week, nobody’s forcing us. Exhaustion, tired, Covid but we’re working… 12-15 hour days. This is gaming… U do it cause ya luv it” – created a firestorm among fellow developers and media alike. As per Twitter tradition, condemnation was fast and far-reaching, accusing Schofield of promoting the kind of culture of overwork that has become endemic in the videogame industry – aculture which, fortunately, many of its leaders are working to address.

“I’VE BEEN THROUGH CRUNCH TIME THAT I NEVER WANT TO PUT ANYBODY THROUGH. I WAS ON RETURN OF THE KING – ARGUABLY THE WORST EVER”

This is very different from making a Call Of Duty, Schofield says: “In this you’ve gotta make sure that your mood is right – that the mist and the fire and all that are in just the right place”

Game The Callisto Protocol

Developer Striking Distance Studios

Publisher Krafton

Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

Release December 2

That includes Schofield, who says he has read just about everything everyone has written about him since, and if there’s a hint of sadness when he says “I’m the freakin’ devil to people… this is my first blip in 32 years [in the industry],” it doesn’t feel at all like self-pity. He’s been around the block enough times to know what overwork feels like at its worst, and rejects the notion that his words had anything to do with his ‘old-school’ approach to work. “I may be old, but I’m not old school. I’ve been through crunch time that I never want to put anybody through. I was on Return Of The King – arguably the worst ever,” he says. “Look, I’ll be honest with you – for the last three years, we’ve been really good. We talk about it all the time. We have 120-something people that work from home, we’re in 17 states, and we pay California wages. We try to be fair.” (In recognition of its track record, the studio won a Best Places To Work award from Gamesindustry.biz earlier this year.) “Look,” he says firmly, “I do not believe in crunch, man. I had three kids during it, and I took two days off for each one, right? And nowadays, I’m so happy that we can give six weeks off. And it’s mandatory. You. Take. This. Time. Off.”

He concedes that time off has been at a premium for “a small strike team” of staff in recent weeks, who he says have simply been tweaking and refining the game, trying to make The Callisto Protocol better in its closing weeks of development. “I was just thanking ’em,” he says of the tweet. “You know, when people know that there was passion [invested] and you’re just trying to let them know that this was out of passion and just trying to get things done. I mean, they’re artists and engineers and sometimes it’s just hard to put the pencil down, you know?”

It’s evident that Schofield is a hands-on kind of boss, the type who likes to muck in wherever possible rather than delegating; indeed, he says “sometimes I think of myself as just one of the guys” just as we’re about to ask the same thing. But, he says, having gone “really deep” into the various articles written about him following his misstep, he’s acutely aware that what he says carries weight. “So when I say, ‘Hey, guys, I’ll be in Saturday’, I started thinking: I bet people may be guilted into coming in. And if I say something, how does a manager below me say that to people? ‘Glen’s coming in so you’d better come in’? So I can get better at this. I know I need to change all the time. You change with the times or you’re not a good leader.”

Striking Distance Studios CEO Glen Schofield

Fittingly, the theme of change, or evolution, is at the heart of The Callisto Protocol. It’s there in the way its story is told, it’s there in its systems, and it’s there, too, in Schofield’s approach to game design. There is no escaping that this bears more than a slight resemblance to Dead Space, from the copious gore to the zombie-adjacent enemies, down to the tight framing of the action, the camera hovering close to its protagonist’s shoulder as he takes up a sizeable amount of screen real estate. But, while the game’s director goes on to clarify the many ways in which it’s different, you also sense – certainly from a commercial perspective – that he’s not entirely unhappy about the comparisons. In fact, in some cases he has actively embraced the similarities, refusing to reject ideas purely because they might bring The Callisto Protocol closer to its spiritual predecessor, from the forceful stomp that yields credits and ammo from corpses and crates to the diegetic health gauge, which this time appears as a holographic projection on the back of protagonist Jacob’s neck.