(tense music)
- The Callisto Protocol will, in fact,
scare the pants off of all of us.
There will be no more pants.
- [Narrator] What is fear?
- Fear is such a basic part of who we are.
- [Narrator] Where is it created?
- Atmosphere in a game like this is everything.
It's terrifying, but it's beautiful.
- [Narrator] And how can we use it?
- With horror, there's no rules.
(cocoon shatters)
(monster shrieks)
- [Narrator] Glen Schofield and the developers
of The Callisto Protocol invite you to join them
and some very special icons of horror.
- I think it goes back to the earliest times
around a campfire.
- The perfect horror experience is something
that scares the piss outta me.
- Think of it as a rollercoaster.
- I want it to make me feel things,
I want it to startle me.
- They're all magic tricks.
That's what we are doing in the movies.
- [Narrator] As they discuss
crafting the perfect horror experience.
(monster growls)
- The five tenets of horror for The Callisto Protocol
are brutality.
- Atmosphere.
- Tension.
- Helplessness.
- And humanity.
(pants)
- [Narrator] The Callisto Protocol is Mastering Horror.
(tense music continues)
- Helplessness and hopelessness usually go hand-in-hand.
They both refer to an experience of being out of control.
(tense music builds)
- As a storyteller, it's important to ride that line
between helplessness and hopelessness.
You want your characters to be
in the biggest pressure cooker situation possible.
- Where, if you're the audience watching them,
"Oh, you poor thing.
How are you gonna get out of this?"
Which is the essence of drama, you know?
- No, no, no, no! No!
No! (cries)
- But at the same time, you have to keep an element
of hope in that story or you're gonna lose the audience.
- Come on. - I can't!
- Yes, you can! We're almost there.
- I look at helplessness as a physical condition.
Helplessness, "I don't have enough ammo.
I don't have the right weapon.
I don't know what to do here."
- It really should be a situation where, based on sort
of scarcity of resources that you feel like, you know,
only by the skin of your teeth
are you getting through every single encounter.
- But it is limited.
There's a sense that this is just the situation
for now and maybe there are ways
that we could get out of the situation.
- You need to have even that little bit of spark
of fight left in you, no matter how dire things have become.
Once you become hopeless, it, to me,
that sort of means, like, giving in
- Hopelessness is very long term.
It is future-oriented.
- A hopelessness is despair, it's an emotion.
And the best thing in a horror game is like, "I have hope!"
And then you dash it, right?
You just smash that hope.
- Callisto is not conducive to hope.
That place is pretty hopeless.
And if you're able to escape off Callisto,
where are you escaping to, what, space?
Space wants to kill you more than anything.
- So it's a very fine line to make sure that you're keeping
your characters as helpless as possible
without falling into hopelessness.
(explosion rings)
- [Woman] Jacob! Jacob!
(Jacob yells)
- For me, you know, the humanity
equals the emotional investment that I have
in the story or the script.
- You go to a movie to feel something
but you also go to identify with a character.
- Everything in fiction is all about relatability.
So you can watch the Walking Dead and you can see zombies
and know that zombies aren't gonna ever happen,
that's never gonna be a thing.
But the people in the Walking Dead that are dangerous
that they do encounter, that's very real.
I mean, a lot of that stuff, you know, happens day-to-day.
- That's another thing that, you know, you can say humanity,
but you can actually just replace
that word with vulnerability.
It's the most terrifying thing that there is.
- All of the characters within this game
have something that you can relate to.
They have a sense of humanity
and so you can actually care about them.
You want to survive, and that's what drives you forward
in the game, and that's what hurts you
when the brutal things happen or when you run out
of resources and you get that anxiety and that fear.
- One of the things I think is interesting
is how the main character starts to lose a little humanity
as he has to progress, right,
like, 'cause he has to do things
that he wouldn't normally consider himself doing.
And as a player, you're playing this person,
not realizing, "Wow, look at the horrible stuff
I'm gonna have to do to survive."
(mechanism shifts)
(monster yells)
(body squishes)
(tense music continues)
- With The Callisto Protocol,
one of the things that we were aspired to do
was to tell a simple story with complex characters.
We wanted to have characters that changed,
that grew, that went on an emotional journey
that you followed them along on.
They came out the other side
not quite what they were at the beginning.
- That's what people are going to relate with,
I think, the most.
They're going to be more invested in the characters
and they're going to want to turn that scary corner
and fight for what's right
because they're invested in these characters.
- A big part of it is having characters that are,
that you can empathize with, that you can connect with,
that you can feel their humanity, that,
at their core, there's a sense of sort
of emotional realism built into the story.
- Most of the time on games, you don't know the entire plot.
- Every time we get to rehearsal,
we go through every single page of what we're going
to work on for the next few days.
And Chris and Scott, they explain everything to us.
- Because we told the story in such,
it was so disjointed.
You know, we'd shoot, like, the end of the game first
and then they'd, they were sort of writing it as they went.
They'd realized, "Okay, this works,
we need to fix this, or we need to, you know,
amp this part of it up more."
So you're constantly sort of,
"Okay, what happened before this
and what are we doing?"
And he was amazing at sort of, and Chris Stone,
like, sort of explaining where we were in the story.
- And so what we found sort of early on was that,
to really deliver the kind of scares and intense feeling
of terror that we wanted, it was critical
that we have the foundation of strong characters
and narrative to build on.
- [Dani] It isn't about escape, Jacob,
not anymore. - Then what's it about?
What's it about?
- Answers!
(monster growls)
- [Woman] Soon everything will become clear.
The truth of Black Iron.
(monster shrieks)
- The cast of The Callisto Protocol is, by far,
the best cast I've ever worked with on any project.
- We don't have a big cast,
but they've all brought something to it,
they all got into it.
- These are people that share our love for the genre
and wanted to bring sort of an essential humanity
and realism to the roles.
- To see a human being, especially portrayed
by a very able actor like Josh, you empathize.
You put yourself in that position.
That actor is reminding you how terrified you'd be
if you actually saw that.
What would that be like if that was real?
And a good actor like Josh can remind you
and scare you (laughs) in ways that you're not prepared for.
- You know, Josh is someone that we were lucky enough
to work with on previous projects.
- We love working with Josh.
- Josh was awesome. Are you kidding?
- He takes the script and he goes a little bit further.
He adds his own humanity.
He gets into the character so much that, at some point,
he's going, "Well, this is the way he'd do it."
- I approach it like I do any movie.
You know, I really try to be as emotionally invested
and committed as I can, even though you're in these crazy,
you know, mo-cap suits with a giant helmet
and a camera looking you right in the eye
- Max!
(grunts)
Max!
Let me go!
What are you talking about?
(muffled voice)
- We see their performance
because we capture everything at the same time
on large mo-cap stages with cameras on the face.
We get to see their entire performance.
And I think you can see the quality
of their acting come through.
- It's nice to be able to have people
who have an imagination.
For them to be able to kind of get themself immersed
in the scene while they're standing on a stage,
it kind of asks something new of them.
- The creative team essentially created a playground for us.
And for those who are not familiar,
the performance capture stage is a bare warehouse.
- You don't have that many props.
- No costumes, no sound, no nothing.
- And you don't have any set around you.
It's all make-believe sets.
They'll take boxes and say,
"Okay, this is a Jeep over there,
this is the pipes stuck together, and that's the doorway
into this crazy chamber and there's 20 dead bodies
and four monsters coming at you from the ceiling."
So it's all about your imagination,
so it makes it much harder.
- [Dani] Open up!
(Dani pants)
- [Man] Whoa, whoa, whoa, you don't know what you're doing.
(Dani pants)
- I love seeing Karen in the game
because we are both actually huge fans
of The Boys. - We love The Boys.
- We love The Boys.
And suddenly, like, seeing her in a full speaking role
was fantastic.
- Karen brought a lot of energy, enthusiasm.
This was the first time that Karen had worked in games.
- There's a learning curve that it takes and she,
you know, she learned very quickly.
- I remember the first day on set, I was
in my full body motion capture suit with the dots
on my face and a huge camera right here on a helmet
and it was kind of this weird,
out-of-body experience where I had to sort of
relearn how to walk and talk and work with my surroundings.
(tense music continues)
- [Director] Very quick survey.
All right, see Dani down there.
There she is. And hop down.
(monster shrieks)
- Those things don't give up.
We better get moving.
- You know, some of the other guys,
I hadn't worked with with Sam Witwer,
but, you know, I had heard of him.
He's fantastic.
- That dude is crazy.
Sam is one of the most committed actors I've ever seen.
That guy is fearless.
- (laughs) Definitely mad, capital mad.
- Sam is a guy that has worked, obviously, extensively
in games and animation.
He understands this world top to bottom.
He's also a guy that loves coming in and playing.
- When you let a bunch of creative people show up
and you trust that they have some ideas
that maybe you haven't thought of
and you let them push those ideas out there,
provided you have someone who's really good
at saying, "No, no, no, no, that's too much,"
you're gonna get some really interesting, unique stuff.
521, me and you, we got some unfinished business.
Yes, we do.
As you can see, things have changed.
(tense music continues)
- We go through, you know, a lot of efforts
to try to immerse them in the scene as much as we can.
- As a performer, the creative team was amazing.
- They're very much about the rehearsal process,
very much about, like, giving us as much previz
as they can so that we understand the world,
they understand what it's gonna look and feel like.
- We show them video reference, we play music for them,
sometimes we show them imagery.
- They have artwork of all of the infected,
scary, terrifying monsters. (laughs)
- And you get a little background on it and you understand
that, "Okay, I'm a tough, lifer prison dude.
I don't stand a chance against that thing."
(monster growls)
So yeah, that environment of being
in the performance capture volume is unique,
but I think it's a lot of fun.
(air horn blares) - Nailed it!
- You go to a film right now and you're gonna sit there
for two hours and you're gonna feel like you're kinda part
of the movie, but you're always kinda a little bit detached.
You're a viewer.
You know, the difference of the game is you are,
you are that character, right?
You, everything you do, you have agency
over what you're doing in that game, and you have agency
over the choices you make that create that story.
You know, so the combination of just
that interactive element and where technology
is now with the graphics and the visuals
and being able to get actual performances
from actors versus just, you know, slapping someone's VO
on top of some random person moving around.
Those are very different sort of experiences.
- [Dani] Who did this and why?
- [Jacob] It's like someone's trying to cover up
what's happening here.
So what happened to the original colony?
(tense music continues)
- All in all, when you're done playing
The Callisto Protocol, I hope that you look back on it
and think to yourself, "Man, first of all,
I had a lot of fun playing this game."
- I think the hope is that you kinda set down
that controller feeling a little bit shaken,
like you've gone on a journey.
- I want them to feel excited, scared, and have fun.
- I want 'em to do what I'm probably gonna do,
which is flip it, turn it, and hit go again.
- I want them to walk away going, "What a ride!
(exhales) I need a nap."
- I just can't wait for the fans to play it
and I can't wait to see everyone's reaction to it.
- I want people to walk away and just go,
"That was a good, that was a good sci-fi horror game, man."
(tense music continues)