Irish Culture and Indie Horror: A Chat With Solo Developer Dan McGrath
Despite being a country known for its rich culture and folklore, Ireland very rarely finds the more horrifying elements of its mythology portrayed in video games. If you grew up in Ireland, particularly in the sparse wide-open countryside far from any urban city, your friends, parents, and relatives would have most likely told you stories of the many morbid creatures and spirits that supposedly walked the plains of Ireland. Everything from The Morrigan to the well-known Banshee would have kept you up late at night as a child. For Dan McGrath, a part-time indie game developer in Cork, Ireland it was these stories along with his love for more conventionally popular horror that would shape his game development journey.
McGrath may or may not be your typical perception of an indie developer. He works a full-time job, lives in a small apartment in Cork city and makes games in Unity using his long-outdated laptop. Drawing on the borderline primitive graphics that have come to be associated with the original PlayStation, he creates short, narrative-centric games in this style as both an aesthetic choice and out of system requirement necessities. McGrath’s daily life is full-on with a day job wrapping up at 6pm as he dives into his game development passions from the late evening into early hours of the morning.
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When sitting down with McGrath I was anxious to know exactly where this fusion between Irish folklore and conventional horror had come from. Growing up loving the works of John Carpenter, The Thing has become a lifelong inspiration for McGrath’s work, its influence most prevalent in some of his most popular titles Harmful and Harmful and The Second Tape.
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