“It was early days for squad-based games, and the fear, trust and infection mechanic was quite innovative for the time,” says Latham. “It came from very early meetings where we all watched the film to come up with brand identifiers. We decided there should be a novel AI element that mimicked what happened within the film: you never know who’s going to turn.”

This idea would lift the game above a simple shooting title. “Originally, the game was going to be a lot more open and dynamic: any event could happen,” says Latham. Ultimately, however, as with Evolva, the developers found themselves reining in an innovative idea that was starting to threaten a coherent experience. “We had to scale it back,” sighs Latham. “There were a few cheats to make it entertaining. We tried to mimic human behavior, but at the end of the day it didn’t matter too much how you treated your teammates.”

It’s tempting to see such ‘cheats’ as the result of publisher pressure, but Computer Artworks itself was the driving force behind the changes. Admitting that the team had ignored, to their detriment, a lot of the playtesting feedback they received on Evolva, Latham was determined not to let things get over-complicated this time.

“UK developers are famous for innovation, but in the longer term that hasn’t been to the UK’s advantage. The consumer doesn’t always want that extreme level of innovation. Computer Artworks was always pushing the boundary, but in some cases we’d push it too far, and the fear, trust, infection mechanism was a case in point.”

Despite such issues, the finished game is clever and compelling. The slow opening is perfectly paced to create a sense of claustrophobic dread, and even given the limitations imposed on the AI system or the scripted set-piece transformations as NPCs erupt into aliens at specific moments, the suspicion created when a new potential teammate appears is a more than ample reward. More importantly, the cabin fever of the original film is captured beautifully. While the hardware placed limitations on the degree of flesh-tearing horror Latham’s team could create, the excellent art direction, with its eloquently suggestive tableau of hours-old bloodstains, echoes the film.

“I think given what the technology allowed I’m very pleased with the game,” says Latham. “It’s one of those games that people still talk about, and other games have imitated the AI mechanisms. In the industry people are still aware of it. It is of the period, but I think it still holds its own.”

It was inevitable, though, that The Thing would pay a price for being ahead of its time, particularly in its original aim to have AI-driven NPCs really affecting the storyline. “It would be interesting to have a crack at it on PS3 today with procedural technology,” says Latham, wistfully. “But there’s always that balance. You give the player the option to wander left and right, but you’re ultimately taking them down a funnel to guarantee some kind of story element.”

The Thing sold over one million copies, topping charts in the UK and Germany. However, despite its success, Computer Artworks closed its doors in 2003, a year after the game’s release. “We finished The Thing and there was a gap before we signed any other products. Because things were slow, we then signed a number of other deals that we probably shouldn’t have. A classic scenario.”

Compounding that, the relationship between publishers and developers was changing. “Quite a few other UK developers went bust that year. Creators of games, unless they’re big-league, have become service providers. In the film world, the director might have a lot of clout – in the game world creative control is passed back and forth depending on how the publisher feels.”

Today, Latham is still working in the liminal zone between art and entertainment. As founder of Games Audit, he offers project management services for the videogame industry, applying the lessons learned from managing Creative Artworks. As a professor of computing at Goldsmiths College, he also teaches an MSC course in games and entertainment programming, while heading various research projects.

“One thing I’ve learnt is that you need to draw a distinction between entertainment and research and art,” Latham concludes. “I’ve gone back to the research and art side. We’re doing a project with Imperial College, taking DNA sequences and presenting novel types of visualizations.” While this is bioinformatics rather than game design, it’s applying game programming techniques with the potential aim of creating new medicines. “We’ve written software which simulates the way proteins fold, which has implications for cancer,” says Latham. “From my point of view I’m back doing innovative work. Some of the morphological aspects which were represented in entertainment form in The Thing, I’m now investigating in the real world.”