Dead Space

• 1. Introduction

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  Dead Space is a science fiction horror franchise created by Glen Schofield and owned by Electronic Arts. It begins with a message. Isaac Clarke, a systems engineer, receives a plea from his girlfriend Nicole, who works aboard the USG Ishimura. The ship has stopped answering radio calls, and Isaac joins the search and rescue team sent to find out why. From that single trip grew a run of video games, a remake, spin-offs, two animated films, comic books and novels. Critics came to rank the first game among the best ever made. Yet the publisher judged the series as a whole to have underperformed. What is the object at the center of the horror, and why do people worship it? How does a mining tool become one of gaming's most celebrated weapons? And how does an acclaimed series end up shelved for years?

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• 2. The Red Marker

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  The Chicxulub crater is where the trouble starts. In the 23rd century, researchers working for EarthGov find a double helix-shaped alien artifact there and name it the Marker. Humanity has by then used up most of Earth's natural resources. The world government keeps its people supplied with fleets of planet crackers, giant ships that break whole planets apart for raw material. The Marker gives off a steady electromagnetic field from no visible source. Researchers believe it could supply limitless energy and end the ecological crisis.

  Copying the Marker proves possible, but imperfect. Research stations across the colonies try to reverse engineer it. They cannot match the original's unidentified alien material and use bismuth instead. As a result the duplicates come out red, while the original is black.

  Michael Altman, the lead researcher, breaks the project's secrecy by leaking it to the world. EarthGov has him assassinated, hoping to smother the news. It backfires. Altman becomes a martyr, and his ideas about the Marker become the seed of Unitology, a cult-like religion that spreads quickly across Earth and the colonies. Unitologists hold that worshipping the Marker will reveal the true origin and meaning of human life. They also believe it grants eternal life and will make humanity whole in an event called the Convergence.

  The same electromagnetic fields carry a darker effect. Researchers learn that the Marker and its copies make living people paranoid and hallucinatory. They also make the dead rise as Necromorphs, biological monstrosities that attack the living. EarthGov shuts the project down, abandons every research station involved, and hides where they were. It knows that Unitologists would do almost anything to find a Marker and bring on the Convergence.

  Commentators have compared the fictional cult to the real-world Scientology. The developers replied that they only meant to portray a secretive cult, and that the similar name caused unfortunate implications. Their stated idea was for Unitology to stand for illogical thinking about things people do not understand, such as the Marker and the Necromorphs. It is not meant as a criticism of religion itself. It does draw on the falsehoods and corruption that can hide inside one.

  By the 26th century, a planet-cracker vessel called the USG Ishimura is working the world of Aegis VII. Its crew unearths a Red Marker near an abandoned colony. The captain, a devout Unitologist, orders it carried aboard.

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• 3. Strategic Dismemberment

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  The health meter in Dead Space is a glowing strip built into the spine of Isaac's suit. That suit is the Resource Integration Gear, known as the RIG, and it produces every menu in the game. The interfaces exist inside the fiction, so co-workers could check his health at a glance. Opening one does not pause the action. The player character stays visible on screen at all times. When Isaac enters a depressurized area, a readout on his back counts down his remaining seconds of oxygen. Sound drops away, except what his RIG would carry to his ears as vibration, such as the rounds from his own weapon.

  Two modules give the RIG its puzzle-solving and combat tricks. Kinesis lets Isaac grab, lift and carry objects, and fling them at high speed as improvised projectiles. Stasis slows a target to a crawl for a short time. That lets a player slip past fast-moving hazards such as fan blades, or hold back an onrushing enemy. A slot-based inventory holds weapons, ammunition and healing items.

  Necromorphs are reanimated corpses that do not depend on nervous, respiratory or circulatory systems. The usual logic of stopping power therefore fails against them. Players are pushed toward what the games call strategic dismemberment, shooting off arms and legs rather than aiming at the head or chest. Some creatures die easily this way. Others change their attack patterns, or even spawn new enemies when killed. The guns are mostly repurposed power tools and mining equipment, such as rotary saws and gravitic repulsion tools. Dedicated military hardware appears more often as the series goes on. Ammunition stays scarce, and every Necromorph type has its own gruesome way of killing the player, matched to its claws, blades, fangs or probosces.

  In the first two games, players upgrade the RIG and weapons at bench workstations. They also buy and sell items at vending machines for in-game currency. The third installment scrapped the store entirely. Suit Kiosks now handle RIG upgrades, and the bench lets players craft their own weapons from parts scavenged along the way.

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• 4. The Plasma Cutter

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  A dead engineer, a smear of bloody writing and a tool: that is how the first game hands over its signature weapon. The Plasma Cutter lies in the dead man's grip beside text urging Isaac to cut off the Necromorphs' limbs. An audio log later repeats the advice.

  The Cutter began life as an industrial tool and was reshaped into a pistol-like weapon. It fires energy beams in a precise horizontal or vertical line, depending on how it is rotated. That precision suits enemies that shrug off ordinary firepower and are vulnerable to severed limbs. In Dead Space 2, Isaac jury-rigs one from a medical laser. In Dead Space 3 it returns with weakened power. Players who carry a save file over from the first game unlock the Cutter immediately in the second. An achievement called One Gun asks players to beat the original game and its remake using nothing else.

  The team at EA Motive rebuilt the remake from the ground up. They still insisted the Plasma Cutter look and behave as much like the original as possible, citing how iconic and memorable it was. They added visual details that suggest how a real tool would operate. They also added an upgrade system like the one in Dead Space 2, so the guns change in appearance as modifications are installed.

  Heather Alexandra of Kotaku read the weapon as a portrait of Isaac, "just a ship engineer in a bad situation". She called it "surprisingly strong for a default weapon" and set it against Resident Evil 4, where Leon Kennedy's pistols fade in usefulness. The Cutter never fades, whatever new Necromorph appears. Edge magazine called it a "signature weapon" and "the deep-space equivalent of the hastily snatched kitchen knife". The same publication said Dead Space 3 was "poorer for it" after weakening the gun. Matt Purslow of IGN observed that "it's rare a pistol gets to be the star of the show in a video game". Padraig Cotter of Screen Rant went further, calling it "gaming's most underrated handgun".

  The weapon has even escaped its own franchise. A fan modded the Plasma Cutter, firing modes included, into Fallout: New Vegas, built to pair with a separate mod that lets enemies be dismembered while still alive.

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• 5. Isaac and His Ghosts

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  Kendra Daniels, a member of Isaac's rescue team, turns out to be a double agent. She betrays him near the end of the first game, then is killed by a huge Necromorph before she can flee. Isaac takes her ship and escapes Aegis VII after defeating the creature, leaving the Marker to be destroyed by a sabotage attempt he had set in motion. He is the only survivor. Then he hears something behind him and turns to see a horrific hallucination of Nicole.

  Nicole Brennan was the Ishimura's medical officer, and logs reveal that she took her own life long before Isaac arrived. The Nicole who guides him and appears at his side in moments of struggle is a hallucination. The Markers created her to manipulate him into serving their agenda. In the second game she returns, a sympathetic antagonist. Iyari Limon voices her in the first game and Tanya Clarke in the second.

  Dead Space 2 shows what that manipulation cost. Isaac is mentally unstable after destroying the Red Marker. EarthGov captured him and took him to the Sprawl, a vast space station built into the remains of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Its scientists pulled information out of his mind to build another Marker. A dementia-like illness from the first Marker leaves him confined to a hospital there, until a Necromorph outbreak caused by the copy throws him into a fight to survive.

  Nolan Stross shares that ward. He was once a high-ranking scientist and lost his mind after contact with the Red Marker. He and Isaac try to destroy the Marker together, but Stross's madness wins out, and Isaac has to kill him. Curt Cornelius voices him. Like Isaac, Stross is named for two science fiction authors, in his case William F. Nolan and Charles Stross. Isaac's own name blends those of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. He is a silent protagonist in the first game. From the second game onward he is voiced by Gunner Wright, whose motion-captured performance also shaped how the character looks and moves.

  Ellie Langford escapes the Sprawl alongside him, and is voiced by and modeled after the actress Sonita Henry. They begin a romance between the second and third games, which falls apart partly because Isaac hesitates to risk his life against the Markers. A few years later, Unitologists led by Jacob Danik activate a Marker near the colony where Isaac lives, causing another outbreak. Ellie has gone to Tau Volantis, one of Earth's oldest off-world colonies, seeking the true origin of the Markers. Earth Defense Force Captain Robert Norton helped her find evidence that the planet is the Marker homeworld, and she sends him to recruit Isaac.

  Sgt. John Carver enters here. He is the hero of the graphic novel Dead Space: Liberation, which shows a loyal EarthGov soldier with a troubled home life. Danik kills his wife Damara and son Dylan. Ricardo Chavira voices and models him. Carver is usually a non-player character, but Dead Space 3 allows a second player to drop in at any time, and Carver becomes that player's character. In that mode, extra side missions open up that explore his guilt over how he treated his family.

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• 6. Visceral's Gamble

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  Around 2005, a studio inside Electronic Arts called EA Redwood Shores pitched an unusual idea. The studio had spent years making movie and tie-in games and wanted an original property of its own. Its proposal was a second sequel to System Shock, and executives showed little interest. Then Resident Evil 4 arrived in 2005 and quickly became a top seller. The team rewrote its concept as a horror game set in space, and EA warmed to the idea. Glen Schofield described the goal as "the most terrifying game we could acquire". The result, released in 2008, was Dead Space. It did well enough that EA renamed the studio Visceral Games in 2009 and ran it as a "genre" studio.

  Jason Graves composed the music for every mainline entry and most of the spin-offs. His recurring collaborator Rod Abernethy served as an early advisor on the first game. James Hannigan co-composed the score for Dead Space 3. Two film scores went to other composers: Seth Podowitz for Dead Space: Downfall and Christopher Tin for Dead Space: Aftermath.

  Visceral tried to recreate the formula with Dante's Inferno, which did not perform as well. EA sent the studio back to Dead Space for a sequel, released in 2011. Critics welcomed it, but its large development budget meant the sales did not pay off. For Dead Space 3, EA requested key changes to attract a wider audience. These included co-op play and faster gameplay. That last request collided head-on with the slow pacing that survival horror depends on.

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• 7. Acclaim and Arithmetic

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  The figure was 193,000 units. That was what Dead Space sold on release, according to NPD Group data for November, landing in tenth place in North American sales. It was the only new EA property in that top ten. Early analysts blamed heavy competition, and sales improved as the praise accumulated. By December 2008 the game had sold 421,000 units across all platforms. Given its extensive marketing costs, it was still seen as a commercial disappointment. EA chief executive John Riccitiello said the company would have to lower its expected income for that fiscal year, citing several such disappointments, Dead Space among them. In February 2009 chief financial officer Eric Brown confirmed that all versions had sold one million copies worldwide.

  Critics, meanwhile, kept raising the game's reputation. Game Informer wrote in 2018 that it stood out for its gameplay gimmicks and atmosphere. Play magazine, in a 2015 feature on its production, said it set itself apart by adding more action to established genre elements. It compared the atmosphere favorably to BioShock from 2007 and Metro: Last Light from 2013. Kotaku in 2014 called it "one of the best horror games of the seventh generation of consoles".

  Dead Space 2 earned near-universal acclaim. Some reviewers compared its bond with the first game to that between James Cameron's Aliens and Ridley Scott's Alien. EA shipped nearly 2 million units in its first week, which sounded strong but was considered financially disappointing. Dead Space 3 drew a cooler, though generally favorable, reception. It sold 605,000 copies in North America in its debut month and was the top-selling game in both the United States and United Kingdom in February 2013. It still fell short of the company's expectations.

  A fourth main game was cancelled as a result. Visceral had ideas ready, but EA moved the studio onto other existing projects, and Visceral closed in October 2017. Former creative director Ben Wanat said the plan grew from the flotilla section of Dead Space 3. Players would drift among the wrecks of dead starships, gathering parts to give their own craft faster-than-light travel and reach a new system. The order of star systems would have been fixed, while play within each system would have been more open. The team had considered switching the protagonist from Isaac to Ellie Langford. Producer Chuck Beaver said on the Here's Johnny podcast that the story would have been "about Isaac being a unreliable narrator having the player not know what was true or not". He added that it would have been about Isaac "either remaining the Herald for the Necromorphs or saving earth".

  The silence lasted until early 2021, when rumors of a revival surfaced inside EA. In July, Venture Beat reported it would be a remake of the first game, in the vein of the Resident Evil 2 remake. EA confirmed it at its EA Play event that same month. Motive Studio built it on the Frostbite Engine, and it was released on the 27th of January 2023.

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• 8. Beyond the Main Series

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  Dead Space: Extraction reached the Nintendo Wii in 2009 as a rail shooter. It follows colonists from the Aegis VII colony as they are beset by Necromorphs created when the Red Marker is removed. A 2011 PlayStation 3 port added PlayStation Move support, and the game also came bundled with the limited editions of Dead Space 2 on that console.

  The story also spilled onto the page. Antony Johnston wrote a comic book miniseries, illustrated by Ben Templesmith and published by Image Comics from March to August 2008. It serves as a prequel to both the first game and the film Downfall. Johnston's 2010 comic Salvage follows a band of scavengers called the Magpies, who discover the seemingly abandoned Ishimura after the first game's events.

  B. K. Evenson wrote two novels. The first, Dead Space: Martyr, appeared in 2010 and is set roughly 200 years before the games. It follows geophysicist Michael Altman, who finds a mysterious signal inside the Chicxulub crater and secretly obtains a piece of the Marker. He leaks it to the public and spreads the visions it gave him. The second, Dead Space: Catalyst, appeared in 2012 and is set 250 years after Martyr. In it, EarthGov tampers with dangerous Black Marker technology in hopes of solving an energy and resource crisis.

  In 2013, filmmaker John Carpenter said he was interested in making a Dead Space film, and EA spoke of plans for a film series. In 2023, Carpenter remarked that a film was in development, though with a different director than him.

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