Squad-based shooters got their first taste of paranoia as UK developer Computer Artworks created a sequel to John Carpenter’s cold day in hell.

Blood on snow, axes buried in a frozen doorpost, a dog’s head splitting open like the petals of a flower: as a videogame license, The Thing is intriguing but unconventional.

John Carpenter’s story of shape-shifting alien infection descending on the crew of an Antarctic research station carefully rations imaginative and oddly lovable splatter while also creating a taut psychodrama. Though it satisfies the guns-and-monsters credentials for a thirdperson shooter, the strength of the 1982 film lies not just with the horrific special effects transformations, as humans turn into alien freaks, but in more problematic territory for games: the mistrust that grows in a situation where anybody could turn out to be a monster in disguise.

Throw in the fact that the film is two decades old, and that its ending is a near-perfect piece of polished ambiguity which has long proved sequel-proof, and that simple sojourn into a world of monster closets begins to look a lot more complicated.

So it’s apt that Computer Artworks, the developer which finally took up the license, was intriguing but unconventional too. As the name suggests, the company founded in 1993 by pioneering digital artist William Latham started out a long way from videogames, providing unnerving computer visuals for acts like The Shamen, and creating the immensely successful Organic Art application.

Feeling the lure of more complex projects, Latham’s company eventually left such abstract work behind to create PC game Evolva in 2000. A thirdperson action title featuring a genetic engineering character-upgrading system, Evolva was an ambitious project for a company starting out in games.

“The types of deals in those days were more healthy,” says Latham. “Virgin, the publishers, were keen on innovation, and Evolva did lots of innovative stuff like picture-in-picture and being able to switch between characters.”

Such a focus on pushing boundaries was to become a recurring theme for Computer Artworks as, acknowledges Latham, were the difficulties inherent in such a focus. While Evolva promised the prospect of freeform mutation, the team discovered that if the experience was too open-ended, the player could lose their way. “Eventually, we had to spend a lot of time constraining what the player could do so that the game made sense.”

Evolva cemented Computer Artworks’ reputation as a developer with a special skill for disturbing imagery – just the kind of team Universal was looking for to develop a videogame sequel to The Thing. In turn, Latham was delighted to find a project that allowed him to continue experimenting, but with the backing of a strong commercial IP. It was this dynamic which would define the game.

If Latham was worried about the pressures a huge publisher and a mainstream license might bring to his individual and rather cerebral company, he hid it well. It helped that it was Universal which chose Computer Artworks in the first place, largely on the strength of Latham’s own previous work, and this respect and understanding of the developer’s skills seems to have been in evidence throughout production.

“[Universal] were very good to work with,” says Latham. “They told us to come up with original ideas. It wasn’t like a Harry Potter license. There weren’t strict guidelines, as long as we retained the quality of the original work.”

Universal wanted a true sequel, with a story that took place shortly after the film’s climax. Quickly, a basic plot was outlined and the gameplay started to emerge: a squad-based shooter in which the player would lead a rescue mission to Outpost 31.

“I’m reasonably happy with the story,” says Latham. “One of the problems with game production is time. There are a couple of passes on the script and then: wham! You’re straight into production. One of the most sensible things I did was get a very good storyboard artist, Paul Catling, to do visualizations of what the game would look like. The story then came out of a dialogue between Andrew Curtis, the design lead, and producer Chris Hadley.”

Between them, Hadley and Curtis would settle on an ingenious solution to the problem of the film’s ending, in which the last two survivors of Outpost 31 sit out a mistrustful stalemate, each suspecting the other to be an alien impostor. The first level of the game reveals a single frozen body, leaving the question of what became of the other survivor to ferment in the player’s mind and urge them forwards.

As the team entered development, the game’s central concept came into focus: the player’s need to constantly keep morale high among his AI teammates, giving them ammo or weapons to keep them calm, testing them for alien infection, and ensuring that nothing in his own behavior makes them suspect him of being an alien himself.