Alone in the Dark interview: tech to advance the horror genre

by Nick Doerr { May 20th 2007 at 7:30PM }

The upcoming Alone in the Dark title has a lot to compete with when released late this year or early next year, but it still looks like a step in the right direction for the original survival horror game. Presented in New York with a fictional story ... timeline ... thing, the game sounds kind of like an interactive film noir. Game director David Nadal recently talked about the technology used to make the game a whole new kind of horror. Since we love doing it, we'll summarize the important points below. As always, read the interview if you're particularly interested in the subject.

AitD relies on the Twilight engine used in Test Drive Unlimited. This engine will help build a very realistic New York City and it also allows the development team to alter whatever it needs to between consoles and PC with ease -- meaning everyone gets a very professional and polished port.
The team has built a completely new rendering engine that delivers "photographic" features for lighting (since the game isn't exactly daylight-friendly), giving an extremely cinematographic look to the game.
Physics is key, so advancements have been made on the Twilight engine to take this into consideration -- AI has also been ramped up.
The musical score is interactive -- based on what you do, the music will shift. Fire off a shot, and the music will raise in tempo. Explore a dark corridor, expect slow, low-noise suspense music to take over. A nice effect.

As we've said, this is a simple summary. Nadal goes into much more detail about the lighting and physics engines, but we won't bog you down with a bunch of terminology here. The game sound excellent and we're very excited to try it out. Time will tell how it progresses!

Tags: 360, Alone in the Dark, AloneInTheDark, Atari, Microsoft, PC, PlayStation 3, Playstation3, PS3, Sony, Xbox 360, Xbox360