The Quarry interview – interactive movies and multiplayer horror

metro.co.uk:

As Supermassive add a new multiplayer mode to The Quarry, GameCentral talks to the director about the difficulties of making an interactive horror movie.

British developer Supermassive Games has been making interactive movies for a long time now. Despite starting out creating DLC for LittleBigAdventure, they hit it big with 2015’s Until Dawn for PlayStation. A survival horror that put the emphasis on cinematic presentation and binary decisions, it was an unexpectedly big hit and despite a falling out with Sony led to The Dark Pictures series and last month’s The Quarry.

The Quarry already had plenty of multiplayer options at launch but now it’s added the Wolf Pack mode via a free update: an invite-only mode where one person plays the game as normal and up to seven others watch, while voting on the decisions as they come up and forcing them on the player.

It’s one of several clever ideas that change how you experience the game and creates new ways to involve people that would never usually play video games. So we spoke to director Will Byles about Supermassive’s unusual approach to survival horror and why it is they make video games instead of movies…

GC: Why have you characterised this as the spiritual successor to Until Dawn and not any of The Dark Pictures games, considering they all work in broadly the similar manner?

WB: So, the biggest difference between The Quarry and Until Dawn and The Dark Pictures is… length is one thing. The Quarry is about eight to 10 hours depending on how you play it. So it’s much more about character development and character relationships. They’re all pretty douchey characters to start off with, ’cause it’s teen horror. If you remember at the beginning of Until Dawn, they’re all really super