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Glen Schofield was off-grid. It was late 2017, and the veteran game director had wandered deep into the desert. He was at a retreat in Tucson, Arizona – a two-week restorative routine he embarks upon after every project. “It's a place where you can be anonymous,” he says. “I saw whatshisname from Apple there.” After six years, he had just finished directing the last of three Call of Duty games, which had sold some 70 million copies combined. The best-selling series had, at the most, transformed his life providing the anecdotes of boyhood dreams: days at NASA, weapons training with the Navy Seals, and appointments with NFL stars. Call of Duty asks – it gets.
There are downsides, though. A security detail once spent weeks outside his house because a gamer had threatened to behead his wife. For that and more, he was leaving Sledgehammer, the studio he had co-founded. But for what? He was older now, with limited projects left in him. Sitting in the sand, drawing plants, he decided he would make another game. It would be his return to sci-fi, the genre he’d obsessed over since childhood. It was in that realm he had directed 2008’s Dead Space – a breakout horror success that spawned multiple sequels and cult favouritism. One review by leading games website Gamespot called it “incredibly atmospheric and disturbingly gruesome”. The game got an aggregated 88 score on Metacritic, making Schofield a household name with gamers almost overnight.
To do it all again, he needed a team. Having led studios since 1998, Schofield has “collected” many people over the years. Developers he connected with creatively on Dead Space, three Call of Duty releases (Modern Warfare 3, Advanced Warfare, WW2), Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, James Bond: From Russia with Love, multiple Gex games, Blood Omen 2: The Legacy of Kain and many more. His Wikipedia page lists 26 titles in total – several other games were cancelled along the way.
He put out the word he was building something new. Many who joined were, in fact, not new – some of Striking Distance’s staff have worked with Schofield now for 10, 15, even 25 years, on and off. “I like the space that he gives me,” says Chief Technology Officer, Mark James. “I don't think that Glenn's ever dismissed an idea from anybody. Some creatives can be 'I'm the idea guy' – Glen’s not like that. Honestly, he's the reason I'm here.”
But gaming startups cost tens of millions before you’ve even coded a sprite. Financing is hard to come by. As is creative control. “I was looking for somebody who would take the game that I had, and let me make it my way,” Schofield says. After a year off, he heard that Krafton, the South Korean publisher of Players Unknown Battlegrounds, the fifth best-selling game of all time, were “looking for the Call of Duty guy.” They promised Schofield the creative room to build a culture of his own and not interfere – as many publishers do when their money's on the line. Krafton would build a new studio, Striking Distance – its first in the US – and finance Schofield’s new game, The Callisto Protocol (then titled Meteor Down). It would be a new single-player survival horror IP – a risk in the age of ‘live service’ games such as Fortnite and Warzone, and usually something you see with the relative safety of PlayStation or Xbox backing as an exclusive.
From June 2019, Schofield and an original team of 50 worked out of a makeshift office. They fleshed out the world, characters and locations; more than 6,000 pieces of concept art were drawn. After eight months of staffing up to quadruple the size, they had their opening party at their new base. Seven days later, the world went into lockdown.
“We’d just built our first studio,” Chief Operating Officer Stacey Hirata says. “Now we had to build 200.”
Glen Allen Schofield did not grow up wanting to make video games. Growing up in New Jersey, he’s been drawing faces since the age of five. Inspired by political cartoons, he found his knack for sketching. “I didn’t know if these people were good or bad,” he says. “I was just like ‘Wow! Look at that nose.” As he got older, his palette diversified from cartoons to landscapes. Eventually, he found science fiction. “When Alien came out, wow. That changed my world.” In the late '80s, his artwork won a competition in science fiction monthly, Omni Magazine. The prize was a trip to NASA. “I spent the week with Buzz Aldrin and his family,” he says, “We're at one giant lunch at NASA with like 5,000 people. Everyone’s in uniforms and I'm just eating at the front table. I'm just a kid. And they go, 'We want to invite the winner of the poster competition up’. I'm like – he mimics a mouth full of food – 'Huh, that's me!'"
He bumped shoulders with institutions of the fantasy and science fiction worlds – Dark Tower illustrator Michael Whelan and Foundation author Isaac Asimov – when his work was selected by the Society of Illustrators. “I was on the ground floor,” he says, “but there were only two floors.” He eventually graduated from New York’s Pratt Institute, one of the world’s top ten art colleges. At 26 years old, the Saatchi Gallery paid him $45,000 for a commission. He’d later work as a storyboard director of 65 episodes of the cartoon television show, The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. His side hustle is still going today with painterly landscapes inspired by his move to California 20 years ago. “Not that New Jersey doesn’t have beaches,” he says, “but a beach in Jersey ain’t the same. There's stuff floatin’ in there!”
Now in his 50s (he wouldn’t tell exactly how far) Schofield has the kind of rocky, muscular face sculpted not by a chisel but a pummel. We're sat in his office a few weeks from the game's release. With a broad frame, desaturated buzzcut and arms like load-bearing columns, you’d think he’d have seen glorious combat, not paint pots and computer code in blacked-out rooms for decades. “You want a grape?” he asks, accent like gravel, one-handing an enormous bowl of seedless rubies. “Or a drink? It’s all sugar-free.” Slumping into an armchair in a long-sleeve big fit tee, the sun’s harsh half-light falls across his face, accentuating his stonework.
Despite his vibe of oo-rah bravado, Schofield's first game was 1991’s Barbie: Game Girl for Nintendo's GameBoy. His colleagues would leave women's purses on his desk to take the piss (it was the ‘90s). He had the last laugh when it was the company’s best-seller that year. His first 3D game, where he first got a taste for developing new franchises, was at Tomb Raider makers, Crystal Dynamics, designing the character of Gex the Gecko. Development teams were tiny and games were cheaper to make, but the culture back then was the “wild west,” he says. “I’d make crazy deals with people. I’d be like, ‘If you finish this level on time, I'll get you a guitar.’” He laughs. He has always looked after his people. He once sent a lead engineer to Japan for two weeks to practice karate with her favourite sensei after noticing she’d practice martial arts every day on her lunch break. “I’ve learned that over the years,” he says. “Ask for stupid stuff.” There’s no example better than how Dead Space came to be.
It all started with James Bond. It was the early noughties and Schofield was making 2005’s From Russia with Love for PlayStation 2 and Xbox. “Pierce had left and Daniel Craig was like three years from being signed,” he says. “But we had a contractual agreement that we had to do something [with the licenses.]” He suggested making a period Bond to avoid issues with Brosnan’s departure. Despite EA already having its slate of games for that year, Schofield was given three months to prepare a vertical slice. “We had a great presentation,” he says, explaining how the team had built Connery, the car, and the driving and shooting mechanics.
After an hour and a half, Don Mattrick, who’d later run Xbox, gets up, “He's like 'Why the fuck wouldn’t we make this game?’” Before pointing at Schofield, “‘You go get Sean Connery, and this game is approved.'”
He would end up spending a few weeks in the Bahamas with Connery; the actor even signed a baseball, which is still on his office wall. But critics didn’t love the game, calling it “pedestrian.” Schofield was devastated. He quit after EA added salt in the wound, reducing the amount of time and people he’d have to make the next game.
On his last day, the interim President of EA, Paul Lee, phoned to try and convince him to change his mind. Schofield was sat in his car. “Paul goes 'OK, just level with me: what will it take?'” he says. “And I said, 'I want to make a science fiction horror game.' I thought I heard him fall off his chair.” Schofield asked to handpick 18 to 20 people and to be left alone for a year and a half while they figured out a concept.
At the same time, he was looking at moving house, “Paul goes, 'Anything else?' and I'm like, ‘Pay a point and a half on my mortgage.’ I'm guessing he didn't tell my boss who ran the studio at the time. Because he called me one day a month later, and goes 'What the fuck is this? It's a $125,000 hit.'”
His reply was clear, “I'm gonna give you a great game.”
Dead Space looms large for Schofield. Around 14 years after its 2008 release, a remake is close – it comes out just two months after The Callisto Protocol debuts. Considering that EA has done six-tenths of nothing with the franchise since 2013’s Dead Space 3, it’s unfortunate timing. “I might be the only developer in the history of video games who is competing against his own game,” Schofield says.
He bristles at the term 'spiritual successor'. Throughout making TCP he steered as far away from anything that could tie him back to his origins in sci-fi horror. Almost to the detriment of the new project. Eventually, he got over his ego, lifting some mechanics from Dead Space, like the immensely satisfying stomp kick you use to crush enemies. “I wanted the stomp,” he half shouts. “It felt weird not doing it because it was in my own game. What, so I can’t copy myself?”
At Striking Distance’s studio in San Ramon, just outside San Francisco, the first few hours of The Callisto Protocol are playable in their fullest form – darkened amphitheatre, enormous OLED TV, and a full surround sound system. The game is brutal, and beautiful – one of the first games to utilise ray tracing, the next generational lighting technology, to full effect on PS5 and Xbox Series consoles. It’s impressive for a new team with new tools. And it wants to shit you up. “I just like the adrenaline rush,” Schofield says of horror. He spends an entire dinner one evening talking about his love of Alien, The Thing, Martyrs, as well as Korean horror movies he’s been binging on. “It brings out emotions that you don't get every day. When were you last scared? In real life, it just doesn't happen.”
No horror game is complete without a claustrophobic setting. Dead Space had USG Ishimura. Alien Isolation had Sevastopol. BioShock had Rapture. The Callisto Protocol has Black Iron, a prison set on the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon. Whether it can hold up against the genre’s best is yet to be seen when the full game is out. Art Director Demetrius Leal explains how The Geisel Library in San Diego and the Lloyds of London Building were key inspirations for its visual language: heavy, oppressive, overhanging shapes and a brutalist offshoot called bowellism, where the innards of buildings are exposed. The team combined this aesthetic with an AI technique called generative design to get more alien-looking structures. “The oppressive language matched the language of our creatures,” Lael explains. “They're mutating, they're organic, they're seeking out our destruction.”
Fighting those creatures was one of the key areas that Schofield wanted to improve versus the combat from Dead Space, which relied more heavily on ranged weapons. “Not that that was wrong,” he says, “but I felt we could do a more personal job.” In The Callisto Protocol, melee combat is a focus, bringing you face-to-face with the deranged humans (Schofield’s greatest fear) who have been infected with a virus called ‘Biophage’, turning them into seeping monstrosities. Combat feels heavy and mechanical, the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller is working overtime to deliver a wonderful sense of haptic feedback. Enemies keep coming even after you sever their limbs and crush their skulls. Even in an age of desensitization to ultra-violence, it is remarkably gory.
To keep that brutality immersive, Striking Distance has pushed character rendering to an extreme. In Schofield’s office, there’s a photograph side by side with a screenshot of the protagonist, Jacob – played by Transformers’ Josh Duhamel – and his mysterious companion, Dani – played by The Boys’ Karen Fukuhara. The difference between real and rendered is imperceptible. You can zoom into individual sweat lines on characters’ faces, which glisten in the ray-traced light, and see refractions in their eyes. To achieve this, Striking Distance hired Jorge Jimenez whose work with character faces on Call of Duty had caught Schofield’s eye. “He’s so damn smart,” Schofield says. “I built a studio around him in Zaragoza in Spain. He just pushes the boundaries to where I'm sometimes like 'Stop! I can't even tell.”
The collective cross-continent effort has been huge. With every employee remote, the team needed full development setups in every household. They had a 100 terabyte-a-day problem: getting 500 gigabytes of data to 200 developers, every day, without fail. Security costs went up, as did the logistics. James ended up going to Twitch, the live streaming service, to facilitate collaboration via private online streams. “COVID alone added tens of millions,” Schofield says of the financial outlay. “And communication sucked, especially the first two or three months because production started and we're at home. Sometimes I look back and I don't know how the hell we did it. We just persevered.”
Schofield has learned many lessons. Now he wants to pay it forward. “We were lucky in my generation,” he says, “and I've had a lot of opportunities.” Joining games in the early days put him at the table with legends like The Sims creator, Will Wright. “Look at me, talking like an old man.” He shakes his head a little. “But I guess I’m kinda there.”
He knows he is fortunate, but he has regrets. Not many; long drives to previous studios, and the pervasive crunch culture of game development – something only recently being effectively tackled by the industry at large – reduced his home time. He took just two days of paternity for each of his kids. “On down days, I know that was awful to my wife,” he admits, “but you had no choice back then. You just worked it. You never knew when it would end.” He built Striking Distance to do things his way, and there he has succeeded. Remote work, hour flexibility and minimal crunch mean that the studio won a ‘Best Places To Work’ award in 2022 from the business title GamesIndustry.biz. “I think we're really good with our people,” he says. “We give them the little things, the big things.” No guitars this time.
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Now, he is just waiting. Will The Callisto Protocol be his next Dead Space, or another From Russia with Love? “You think every one might be your masterpiece,” he says. “It may not be that, but you're giving it your all.” Meanwhile, he is preparing for a transition – “cleaning things up” and “stepping back” from the finicking that he’s been mired in daily. “Directing a game, man – it doesn’t shut off,” he says. He sees a video game as 3,000 ideas with 100,000 creative decisions. “And those creative problems stick with you until you get the answers.” Therefore he wants to train the team to get 90 per cent of the way, so he can be the final ten. That new way of working hasn’t begun yet. He can’t honestly say if he’ll be able to stop himself from fiddling when it does.
He’ll finish 2022 with his canvases. “I have this giant half-painted painting that I've got to get back to,” he says. He struggled during COVID. “It's the only time in my life, believe it or not, that I hit an artist's block. But at the same time, I'm making a freaking game, so there's no creative block at all.” Just outside his office, the rest of the studio is ready for a launch party (“we’ve got swag out the wazoo''). It’s been temporarily transformed from a place of creation to a place of celebration and relaxation. The performance capture stage is empty save for a massage table. Schofield has his next retreat planned for just after – to Carlsbad, California this time. You suspect he’ll return with one or two more kernels. His art supplies are ready. There are hiking routes all around. “There's not a desert,” he says, “but I'll find my place.”
