THE MAKING OF. . .
FEAR
The blood, sweat and tears that went into Monolith’s horror-loaded shooter
By Graeme Mason
Format 360, PC, PS3
Developer Monolith Productions
Publisher Vivendi Universal Games
Origin US
Release 2005
Speaking to the developers of FEAR, we’re asking them to dig up memories from almost two decades ago. But to trace the game’s origins properly, we must go back further still, to the firstperson shooter boom of the mid-’90s. “I played the hell out of the Duke Nukem 3D shareware,” FEAR designer Craig Hubbard tells us wistfully. “So I downloaded the Build editor and taught myself level design.” The 2.5D engine, created by Ken Silverman, powered the 3D Realms shooter, but it was another game created with Build, still in development, that caught Hubbard’s eye. “I was especially interested in Blood – that sounded right up my alley.”
The brainchild of Monolith’s Nick Newhard, Blood began life as simply ‘Horror 3D’, eventually transforming into a macabre version of Duke Nukem, complete with a wisecracking lead character and bizarre enemies. Hubbard was proudly shown the game at Monolith’s Seattle offices, after offering to give the developer’s website a free redesign. “It turned out they needed a level designer. One thing led to another, and I got hired to help finish Blood,” he says. As an avowed horror fan, it was a dream come true. “I first played Resident Evil the night that Blood went gold. It was the original version, with the laughably terrible cutscenes and voiceovers – but I fell in love instantly.”
Hubbard’s first full project at Monolith was the mech game Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. The first game to use the developer’s LithTech engine, Shogo was a minor hit, before the arrival of the series that pushed the developer towards FEAR: “The No One Lives Forever games were wellreceived but didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped. So we decided it was time to make a game that all of us would rush out and buy on day one.”
This thinking led the team to action cinema, which by the turn of the millennium had come a long way from the ’80s and early ’90s movies that had inspired Duke Nukem. “The original concept was a straight-up action movie-style experience,” Hubbard recalls. “We wanted highly kinetic combat, with debris, destruction and enemies cartwheeling through the air.” Some of this is apparent in the finished game, with its Matrix-inspired bullet time (known here as Reflex) and helicopters buzzing overhead – but, as prototyping began, the limits of technology constrained some of the team’s bigger blockbuster ideas.