"What we really wanted to do was build a game that was Resident Evil meets Half-Life," says Siefert. The tale had all the makings of a gothic fable, complete with four dead siblings trying to come back and claim their only surviving brother. The first stab at bringing the world of Undying to life came in the form of an imposing bald-headed hero, Count Magnus Wolfram, a master of the occult who travels to Ireland in the 1920s to rid a haunted manor of its supernatural inhabitants. "To us a horror game is having action but also having a story around that action," says Bell.
While the team was still a skeleton crew, Bell and Siefert knew they were going to need to develop a story to tie together the horror elements.
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Though the team didn't even have the license for the Unreal engine at that point, Spielberg liked what he saw and immediately gave the green light. Over the process of a few weeks leading up to the meeting, five employees taught themselves the Unreal Editor and built levels that demonstrated things such as "spooky chairs that would fly at you inside of a manor," according to Siefert.
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Click for full size imageīefore long, Siefert and Bell were sitting in the conference room at Dreamworks showing Spielberg a demo for a game called Undying.
For Bell and Siefert, this was exactly the clean slate they needed. No doubt aware that Dreamworks was coming out with Jan DeBont's The Haunting that summer, Spielberg wanted the team to build the Resident Evil of first-person shooters. Luckily for these two, Steven Spielberg came to them with an idea: Let's do a first-person horror game. Dreamworks Interactive's Trespasser ended up proving that even fancy physics can't make up for deficient gameplay, so when Bell and Siefert were given the chance to move on to a new project in January 1999, they vowed to make gameplay the foundation of the design.
In fact, ask Brady about the last game he worked on, and his response comes with a built-in apology: "Trespasser, but don't blame me for it," he says with a wince. Just off the 405 freeway on the west side of Los Angeles, game designer Dell Siefert and producer Brady Bell are two likeable guys who fall into the latter category. While some game designers are lucky enough to have worked on a successful game in their careers, many more developers still find that first hit elusive.