Dead Space (franchise)

Dead Space is a science fiction/horror video game series and media franchise created by Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey, developed by Visceral Games, and published and owned by Electronic Arts. The franchise centers on a series of video games and includes two films and several comic books and novels. It began in 2008 as an eponymous video game aimed at creating, in Schofield's words, "the most terrifying game we could acquire", the game was successful and spawned a prequel and later a sequel released in 2011.
Each installment in the "Dead Space" franchise is a continuation or addition to a continuing storyline which began with the release of the original game. The game is set in a 26th century science fiction universe featuring environments, weapons, and characters typical of the genre. The series' chronology is not presented in a linear format, with sections of the storyline presented in the form of either prequels or sequels, and in different media aside from video games. Generally speaking, the series focuses on an engineer named Isaac Clarke and the horrors that surround him.
The video game series has been commercially and critically successful, selling over 10 million copies; the first game and its sequel received widely positive reviews from the majority of critics, and the first game has received a number of industry awards for many different elements of its gameplay and development.
Gameplay.
The "Dead Space" games are survival horrors, with the player character visible at all times. All menu interfaces are diegetic, produced by the character's "Resource Integration Gear" spacesuit for ease of communication with other characters. For instance, the character's hit point meter, built into the spine of his suit, is intended to allow co-workers to monitor his health, and when the character moves into depressurized areas, a readout on his back displays his remaining seconds of oxygen. All sound is removed from gameplay during these segments, save those which would be transferred to the character's ears by the vibrations of his RIG, such as rounds fired from his weapon. Since the menus are diegetic, opening them does not pause gameplay.
The character's RIG can be outfitted with two special abilities for use in combat and puzzle-solving. The "Kinesis" module allows the character to retrieve, levitate and transport objects, often heavier or more distant ones than could be accessed normally. These objects may also be expelled at high speed for use as improvised projectiles. The "Stasis" module causes its target to undergo an extreme slowdown for a short period of time, allowing characters to dart through rapidly moving obstacles such as fan blades, or hinder onrushing enemies. The RIG also has a slot-based inventory for carrying weapons, ammunition, healing items, and other objects.
Gunplay is influenced by the franchise's antagonists. Because Necromorphs are re-animated and re-purposed corpses, lacking dependence on nervous, respiratory, and circulatory systems, the conventions of stopping power are largely irrelevant to them. Thus, instead of targeting foes' heads or center of mass, players are encouraged to engage in "strategic dismemberment" by shooting off their arms and legs. Some Necromorphs can be easily defeated in this manner, but others may change attack patterns or even spawn entirely new enemies when slain. Relatedly, the game's weapons are characterized as being repurposed power tools or mining implements, such as plasma cutters, rotary saws, and gravitic repulsion tools, though an increasing amount of dedicated military ordnance becomes available as the franchise progresses. Ammunition tends to be uncommon, thus necessitating careful usage of the tools at hand.
In the first two games, RIGs and weapons can be upgraded at bench workstations. Players can also visit vending machines to buy or sell items for in-game currency, and upload new schematics to those stores in order to unlock new items. This was changed in the third installment, where the store was scrapped entirely; new "Suit Kiosks" allow the player to upgrade their RIG, and bench functionality was expanded to allow players to craft their own weapons, often by cobbling together parts and resources scavenged through gameplay.
Each type of necromorph has a unique way of slaying the player character, customized to whatever claws, blades, fangs, or probosces they happen to possess.
Synopsis.
Setting.
The "Dead Space" games are set in the future, where humanity has been able to colonize other planets. By the 23rd century, humanity has used up most of Earth's natural resources, and the world governing body, EarthGov, has fleets of "planet crackers", giant mining spaceships that harvest resources by breaking apart other planets, to gather materials for humanity to sustain itself.
During the 23rd century, EarthGov researchers find an alien artifact in the Chicxulub crater, which they call the Marker. The Marker emits a persistent electromagnetic field from seemingly no source, which researchers believe could be used to provide limitless energy and solve Earth's ecological crisis. Work begins to reverse engineer the Marker on various research stations across the colonies, but they are forced to use bismuth instead of an unidentified alien material, resulting in these duplicates being colored red instead of black as the original.
The project was highly classified, but the lead researcher Michael Altman leaks its existence to the world. EarthGov assassinates Altman hoping to quell the news, but it is too late: Altman is seen as a martyr, and his belief of what the Marker means for humanity form the basis of a new cult-like religion, Unitology, that rapidly spreads across Earth and the colonies. Followers of Unitology believe that the Markers will help to unify humanity, as to "make us whole", in an event known as Convergence.
Too late, the EarthGov researchers discover that the electromagnetic fields sent by the Marker and its duplicates cause living people to suffer paranoia and hallucinations, while also causing the dead to reanimate, becoming "necromorphs,” biological monstrosities which rise to attack the living. EarthGov immediately terminates the Marker project and abandons all research stations where the work had been done, covering up their locations, knowing as they did that the Followers of Unitology would desperately want to seek these Markers out in order to advance their beliefs and bring about Convergence.
Plot.
The first "Dead Space" takes place in the 26th century. Systems engineer Isaac Clarke is part of a rescue team called to the USG "Ishimura", a planet-cracker mining Aegis VII which had gone radio-silent. Their ship suffers damage while trying to dock, and while the rest of the crew looks for a means to leave "Ishimura", Clarke explores the ship, looking for his girlfriend Nicole, who had been stationed aboard it. The ship is full of necromorphs, and he fights through them, discovering that the "Ishimura" had found a Red Marker buried near an abandoned colony on Aegis VII. The "Ishimura" captain, a devout Unitologist, ordered his crew to bring the Marker aboard the "Ishimura", causing the crew to become paranoid, turn on each other, and leading to the necromorph invasion. Clarke himself starts having visions of Nicole, who guides him to return the Marker to the planet. Ultimately, it is revealed that one of the rescue team members, Kendra Daniels, was secretly instructed by EarthGov to retrieve the Red Marker, and she betrays and kills off the rest of the rescue team. Clarke discovers that the necromorphs were being controlled by a "Hive Mind" on Aegis VII who wants the Marker for itself. The Hive Mind kills Daniels when she tries to take the Marker back, while Clarke defeats the Hive Mind and flees in a shuttle. En route back to Earth, he experiences a hallucination of being attacked by a reanimated Nicole, showing the influence of the Marker on Isaac is still there and will continue to haunt him for the foreseeable future.
"Dead Space 2" takes place three years after the first game. Clarke wakes up aboard the Sprawl, a space station in orbit around what is left of Titan after being mined by humanity. His shuttle, along with the "Ishimura", had been recovered by EarthGov and taken here. He and Nolan Stross (the protagonist of "Dead Space: Aftermath") are patients in a mental hospital aboard the Sprawl but escape as the station is in the midst of a necromorph invasion. They learn that they both had alien codes implanted in their brains by their respective contacts with the Markers, and the Sprawl Director, Hans Tiedemann, under direction from EarthGov, has used this information to construct a Marker aboard the Sprawl, which allowed this infestation to occur. Stross eventually is overcome by dementia that Clarke is forced to kill him, but not before learning from him where Tiedemann's Marker can be found; his visions of Nicole continue, and she further instructs him what to do when he gets there. Clarke eventually defeats Tiedemann and makes contact with the Marker. The Marker mentally tries to have Clarke complete Convergence by linking with his mind, but Clarke fights back to remove the Marker's imprints within his mind. The Marker goes dead, and Clarke escapes with the help of Ellie Langford, a pilot that aided his fight, before the Sprawl explodes.
"Dead Space 3" occurs a few years later. While Clarke and Langford returned to Earth and dated for a while, their relationship fell apart. As Clarke is struggling with the breakup in his apartment on the moon, Unitologists led by Jacob Danik activates a Marker near the colony, causing a necromorph outbreak. Clarke is rescued by EarthGov soldiers led by John Carver and enlisted to help relocate Langford, who had traveled to Tau Volantis, one of Earth's oldest off-world colonies. They manage to find her ship, the CMS "Roanoke", and after a harrowing collision with a debris field, Clarke and the EarthGov soldiers make it aboard. Clarke clears the ship of necromorphs to find Langford and the remains of her crew still alive. They learn that Tau Volantis is the Marker homeworld, and that previous efforts have been made to find a Machine along with a Codex that can control this machine. Traveling to the planet's surface, pursued by Danik and Unitology-aligned soldiers, Clarke, Langford, and Carver discover an alien that contains the Machine, and that the planet's moon is actually a giant necromorph, kept asleep by the transmission of the Machine. By using the Codex, one can turn the Machine off, which will wake the necromorph via the signals sent by the Markers and initiate Convergence, where it will absorb the city and seek others to absorb into itself. Danik manages to deactivate the Machine but is killed as the city is pulled off the planet towards the necromorph. Clarke and Carver reactivate the Machine and deactivate all the Markers, while Langford manages to escape safely. In the "Awakened" DLC, Clarke and Carver, who survived the battle against the Brethren Moon, discover that the Brethren Moons are on course to Earth and arrive there just as the planet is being attacked. One of the Moons crashes into their ship, leaving their fates unknown.
Development history.
Electronic Arts (EA) Redwood Shores had developed a number of movie and tie-in games, though they desired to make their own intellectual property. Around 2005, the studio presented the idea of making a second sequel to "System Shock" to EA executives but had not gotten much support until the release of "Resident Evil 4" in 2005, which quickly became a top-selling title. That success led them to revise their "System Shock" concept, making it more a horror-driven game set in space, and which EA was more open to as to try to capture a similar type of success. The subsequent game became "Dead Space", released in 2008. "Dead Space" did well, leading EA to have Redwood Shores to become a "genre" studio, rebranding them as Visceral Games in 2009.
While Visceral tried to recreate a similar experience with "Dante's Inferno", the title did not perform as well, and EA instead has Visceral return to make the sequel "Dead Space 2", released in 2011. While it was critically well-received, the title was said to have not performed well financially due to a large development budget. EA had Visceral continue to make "Dead Space 3", but asked the studio to make key changes to draw more people to the title, such as adding co-op and introducing gameplay elements to help make the title faster, an aspect in direct conflict with the slow pacing of survivor-horror games. "Dead Space 3" was released in 2013 with generally positive reviews but did not sell well.
Visceral had planned out ideas for a fourth "Dead Space" game, but at that point, EA transitioned the studio to work on other existing projects, shelving the series to an end after the developer's closure in October 2017. According to former creative director Ben Wanat, their idea of "Dead Space 4" was based on concepts from the flotilla section in "Dead Space 3", where the player would need to go from the remnants of dead starships to collect parts needed to allow their own craft to survivor and gain faster-than-light travel abilities to get to a new system. The game would have been a hybrid between non-linear and linear storytelling: while the order of star systems the player visited would have been set by the game, how they proceeded within each system would have been more open. They had been also considering switching from Isaac to Ellie as the protagonist for the game.
Characters.
Isaac Clarke.
Isaac Clarke is the protagonist of the "Dead Space" series. Originally a ship system engineer, his life changes for the worse when a seemingly-routine repair mission becomes a struggle to survive the Necromorph scourge. Clarke originally chose the mission to make contact with his girlfriend, who was stationed on the damaged vessel. Clarke is named after science fiction authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. He is silent in the original game and modeled after actor Gunner Wright, but is voiced by Wright in the sequels.
Nicole Brennan.
Nicole is a medical officer aboard the USG "Ishimura" and Isaac's girlfriend. She appears at Isaac's side at times of struggle, but later logs reveal that she committed suicide long before Isaac arrived; her appearances have actually been hallucinations created by the Markers with the intent of manipulating Isaac into furthering their agenda. She appears in a similar guise over the course of the second game, serving as a sympathetic antagonist. She is voiced by Iyari Limon in the first game and Tanya Clarke in the second.
Nolan Stross.
Nolan Stross appears in "Dead Space 2" and was one of the protagonists in the animated feature "Dead Space: Aftermath". Stross was once a high-ranking scientist but suffered from dementia after coming into contact with the Red Marker, and was placed in a psychiatric ward of a hospital on Titan Station. Clarke meets Stross in this area. Like Clarke, the character is named after two science fiction authors, in this case, William F. Nolan and Charles Stross. While he and Clarke attempt to band together to destroy the Marker causing the events of the second game, his madness gets the better of him, and Isaac is forced to kill him. He is voiced by Curt Cornelius.
Ellie Langford.
Ellie is a major non-player character in "Dead Space 2" and "3". In the first sequel, she and Isaac work together to escape the Titan Sprawl, and between the two games, they begin a romance. However, by the time of the second sequel, they have separated, partially because Isaac is hesitant to wager his life stopping the Markers. Ellie, with the help of Earth Defense Force Captain Robert Norton, discovers evidence that the planet Tau Volantis is the Marker homeworld; she sends Norton to recruit Isaac, kicking off the events of the third game. She is voiced by and modeled after actress Sonita Henry.
John Carver.
Sgt. John Carver, Earth Defense Force, is a character in "Dead Space 3", and the protagonist of the tie-in graphic novel "Dead Space: Liberation". The graphic novel depicts his past as a loyal EarthGov soldier with troubled home life. Damara and Dylan, his wife and son, are killed by "Dead Space 3" antagonist Jacob Danik, and Carver joins forces with Ellie Langford to prevent Danik from triggering Convergence. He is voiced by and modeled after Ricardo Chavira.
Under normal circumstances, Carver is a non-player character, dispensing advice and guidance to Clarke but not assisting in gameplay. However, "Dead Space 3" features "drop-in drop-out" co-operative multiplayer: the game's single-player campaign can at any time become a co-operative experience if a second player joins via Xbox Live or other networking services. If a second player does join, Carver is that player's in-game character; as such, he can be seamlessly written in and out of the campaign at any time to facilitate the presence (or absence) of said other player. Additionally, if a second player is present, side missions become available that deal with Carver's guilt concerning the way he treated his family, as well as over their deaths.
Development.
During the development for "Dead Space", EA Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games) gave Isaac a portmanteau name from the science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. Isaac's parents Poul and Octavia, take their names from science fiction authors Poul Anderson and Octavia Butler.
During development for "Dead Space 2", Visceral Games decided to give Isaac a voice and chose Gunner Wright. As Wright's performance was motion captured, this influenced Clarke's appearance and movement in the game.
Reception.
The "Dead Space" series has received positive critical and commercial success.
The character Isaac Clarke received mostly positive reviews from critics. PlayStation Universe described him as a "corpse-slaying badass," saying: "starting off as the mute hero of the original "Dead Space", Clarke was finally given a voice and personality in the sequel, becoming a standout character in his own right". They added: "his willingness to help others and strong morals make him an ideal partner", and stated his best characteristic to survive is his adaptability. GamesRadar ranked Isaac, who has "a cool demeanor, and an even cooler suit of futuristic armor," as the 22nd "most memorable, influential, and badass" protagonist in games, also including him in other three "Top 7:" at the fourth place in their list of "The Top 7... Mentally damaged characters we love;" as the sixth most badass game character of the generation (as of 2012), and his romance with Nicole Brennan was ranked as the fifth most disastrous in video games. GamesRadar further placed him at number 30 in a list of the 50 best game characters of the generation. Isaac was featured as one of the characters IGN would like to see in an ultimate fighting game, adding, "He may lack the pizzazz of some other fighters on this list, but try making fun of him when he holds a space-age nail gun to your forehead." In 2013, "Complex" ranked him as the sixteenth most badass character in video game history. In addition, his helmet was listed by UGO Networks at six in "The Coolest Helmets and Headgear in Video Games" list. Although Clarke ultimately did not make the cut, "Game Informer" staff considered his inclusion in their "30 characters that defined a decade" collection, with Ben Reeves saying, "Not only does Isaac manage to combat his own battered subconscious, but he ends up saving the universe from the spread of a deadly alien menace. That’s a true definition of hero in my book."
Unitology.
A central theme in the games is the fictional antagonistic cult religion "Unitology". Its members are fanatical followers of Michael Altman, whom they claim leaked information that the Earth's government was suppressing about the alien artifact called the Marker. Their primary goal is to use this Marker to bring about the so-called "convergence" or "unification". Unitologists believe that human life may have come from space, and that by worshipping the Marker, they can achieve eternal life.
According to the developers, the fictional religion is supposed to represent people's illogical thinking about things they don't understand, such as the Marker and the necromorphs. Unitology has been confirmed to have its own scripture of some kind. While it is not meant as a criticism of the religion itself, it draws on the falsehoods and corruption that may be hidden inside one.
Many players and critics have drawn comparisons between the fictional Unitology and the real-world Scientology: both have science-fiction influences, collected large funds from their members, consist of multiple ranks within their system which determine access to certain information, and host a large number of influential followers such as CEOs and celebrities. The developers have stated that these comparisons are simply meant to portray it as a secretive cult, with the name similarity causing unfortunate implications.
Related media.
Film adaptation.
In 2013 filmmaker John Carpenter stated he was interested in making a "Dead Space" film. EA also spoke of their plans in 2013 to adapt the Dead Space videogames into a potential film franchise.