The early-2000s marked a high-point for horror fans with a steady flow of some of the genre’s most influential games being released on consoles in a five-year span.
While the slower pacing and fragile protagonists of Japanese-style horror dominated much of the spotlight, The Suffering and The Suffering: Ties That Bind were among a small group of North American games that helped pave the way for future titles with their action-oriented approach to horror.
To mark the re-release of The Suffering and its sequel, we talked with the Project Lead, Lead Designer, and Writer, Richard Rouse III, who is currently developing The Church in the Darkness; the debut title from his independent studio, Paranoid Productions.
Tell us a little about your history in game development and your role in The Suffering series.
I started out making what would now be called indie games for the Macintosh – games like the RPG, Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis, and tactical FPS, Damage Incorporated. Those were very small teams with me doing all the design/writing and most of the programming as well. I went to Surreal Software wanting to work on bigger games, spent some time on a (eventually cancelled) Western called Gunslinger, worked as a designer/programmer on Drakan – The Ancients’ Gates for PS2, and that led to being lead designer and writer on a new horror title we were doing with Midway. The game was originally called Unspeakable and I ended up working on the original The Suffering and the sequel Ties that Bind for the next four years. By that point I had stopped programming and had become more of a creative director, but as a fun fact I did code the conversation system in the original game.
More than a decade later, there are still fans of The Suffering calling for …read more
Source:: GOG – Good Old Games
