Pipe Dreams – The Thing

The term ‘classic’ is thrown around all too often these days. Not that I want to become that old man shaking his walking stick at the latest sensations at the age of 23, but in my eyes something must hold up for at least two decades before it truly earns its wings and the title of ‘classic’. There are some true greats of our time which will almost certainly, one day, be deemed classics, but for now, in my eyes, it must have been released prior to 1992 or we have not got an accord on that “classic” label.

However, we’ve got three decades of unadulterated awesomeness behind John Carpenter’s 1982 classic – The Thing. The movie ranks up there as one of my all time favourite greats of the horror franchise and one which I have owned from VHS, to DVD, to Bluray and likely beyond. It was also a video game, exactly two decades later, in 2002 and was, at best, a mediocre third person shooter. Gameplay was rather mundane, voice acting was God awful, and almost every enemy was a Half Life rip-off. In 2011 they released a remake of the 1982 movie and it was, without question, the closest you could come to pissing on the franchise without taking your underwear off. I say we, the video game industry, begin to make up for this by remaking the 2002 video game and making it AMAZEBALLS.

The original game had some truly brilliant ideas for the time, but it was just lacking the technology required in order to fulfil these ideas’ potential. The Thing (2002) was the first video game to implement a trust system, where your team spoke and reacted differently depending on how much they trusted you, and was shockingly maintained continuity with the movie as the plotline was technically the closest thing The Thing (1982) had ever had to a sequel as the events occur after the movie — unlike the 2011 movie which was technically a prequel. The issues mostly lay in a lack of development time and money; now however, I believe that this game could happen with enough fan support.

The only element the 2002 game was missing was the technology and fine polishing. Binary Domain has shown that trust systems can now be implemented brilliantly in a squad based scenario, there’s a myriad of games which use squad controls and orders, and if they can nail 50% of what Amnesia: The Dark Descent did in terms of atmosphere then we may just be on to a winner here! There wasn’t anything wrong with the original game, it was just bland, but I believe a sequel of that video game is the answer. There would definitely need to be a different plot, I believe we can do better than the 2002 video game, and really push the trust/fear element and you can sign my ass up for a £39.99 pre-order at any games retailer right now. The only real remaining issue is how to get the public to rally behind this game idea, because I’m pretty sure this is not one which is going to get a Kickstarter miracle.

I say, as this is Pipe Dreams after all, that we bring in John Carpenter to do the writing and characters for the game! He’s already worked on F.E.3.R. and that was unexpectedly good, and he was merely a consultant. With an incredibly small film budget he made the classic Thing movie, imagine if we gave him a major studio and an average game budget to see what he could do with it. To put this into perspective; The Thing cost $15 million, a relatively small budget for a major motion picture starring Kurt Russell, and the game Too Human is rumoured to have cost $60-100 million. Therefore, I suggest, we take all those currency notes that are being thrown at these bad games, and move them to John Carpenter’s wallet!

You know what? Why stop there? Let’s bring the Amnesia team on for this, let’s grab Kurt Russell – he’s surely free to do a simple voice over cameo, and we could even create some sort of rule that says there won’t be a mandatory horde multiplayer mode and will instead be in place of stuff like ‘Invasion’ which is effectively an infected lobby only with ALIENS. Oh! There could even be a separate co-op mode where your team must decide whether or not to trust NPCs, or a score bonus if a player gets infected outside of view of the others and then remains in the team. In a sort of ‘time bonus’ scoring system. You see? You see how these all work?! Go out there, watch the original 1982 movie, play the 2002 video game on the platform of your choice, ignore the 2011 movie to death, and then come here and tell me you wouldn’t want them to make a whole new The Thing – 2014 video game version.

That’s it for this episode of Pipe Dreams, my name’s Duncan Aird and I approve these dreams.

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