One of the most exciting announcements at last week’s The Game Awards 2020 ceremony was The Callisto Protocol, a new survival horror game from the makers of Dead Space. The third-person game is being developed at Striking Distance, a studio headed up by industry veteran and Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield. Striking Distance is, of course, a studio established by PUBG publisher PUBG Corp. in 2019 to work on games set in the PUBG universe. In fact, when Schofield announced the studio to the world, he confirmed that the team is already working on a narrative game set in that universe, so we rightly assumed it to be some sort of shooter. But what Schofield didn’t reveal at the time was its name or genre. We now know that The Callisto Protocol and the mysterious project set in the PUBG universe are one and the same. Schofield told IGN in an interview that the upcoming horror game takes place 300 years into the future of the PUBG universe. “The funny thing is, I came in with this story when I went and met with the PUBG people for the first time and started talking about [The Callisto Protocol] and building a studio. I presented this game to them, and so what we did was we made it fit within the PUBG storyline,” Schofield explained.
We spoke to chief development officer Steve Papoutsis about why the studio went back to its roots with survival horror. “There’s just a passion here for horror games from me, Glen and some of the wonderful team we have assembled,” said Papoutsis. “We were hoping to do something that was single-player driven, story-focused that provided a lot of opportunities for scares. We had some cool ideas around the theme in terms of where it’s going to take place – on a prison colony on Jupiter’s dead moon, Callisto. That was literally the top-line lift pitch.” You can read our full interview at the link, or check IGN’s chat with Schofield above.
