Halloween is the latest in a long line of asymmetrical multiplayer horror games to release over the past decade, and like all the others, it’s faced lots of comparisons to Dead by Daylight (DBD), the decade-long leader in the genre. It’s an “easy” comparison to draw, Illfonic chief creative officer Jared Gerritzen said, but ultimately it’s inherently flawed.
“It’s literally cricket versus baseball. It’s so easy to see an image of cricket and say it’s exactly like baseball; it’s like, really, is it? No, it’s not. Like, here are all these differences,” Gerritzen told me in a Zoom call. Illfonic is no stranger to this space, having made Friday the 13th, Predator: Hunting Grounds, Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space all before Halloween.
“We make a game bespoke for that franchise, for that group of horror fans, and for the people who love that monster.”
Gerritzen said that “others” make something more like “mixtapes,” which have their own merits, but the projects are too different to directly compare, as some players do.
“And it’s like, how could you not want something that is built purely for Halloween? Like, if you’re a horror fan, if you’re a Halloween fan, how would you just be okay with it being a secondary piece? We build things for that love of that movie, and I feel like they deserve it.
“I feel like when we choose IPs, we choose the things that we love, and that we feel could be something amazing, and it’s cool that other games exist that put characters in as playable, but we don’t want to make it [only] playable. We want to make it Haddonfield. We want to make it Michael [Myers]. We want to make Michael’s abilities and put all these characters that were beloved into it.”
Gerritzen’s words hit on something I’ve been grappling with recently, when I tried to explain how very different DBD is from the field of bespoke, licensed, multiplayer horror games. I love DBD, but I love Halloween, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and most of the others that have filled this space, too. Though there’s only so much time in the day, and sometimes one game of this sort does have to beat out another for my free time, I keep them all in my rotation.
“If you’re a horror fan, you should consume everything, you know?” Gerritzen added, imagining a similar sentiment in horror movies to prove how silly he thinks it sounds. “‘Oh, I’m just gonna watch only movies from this director.’ It’s like, ‘Come on. No, you’re not. You’re gonna watch everything.'”
As for the people who wrote Halloween’s obituary before it had even been released, Gerritzen reminded players of Illfonic’s track record.
“How many Illfonic-published games [have shut down]?” he asked rhetorically. The answer is none, as he confidently implied. Friday the 13th was shuttered due to a rights issue, but Illfonic didn’t publish it, and it remains a unique case in this space anyway. Meanwhile, the team’s other games in this genre are still running today.
Gerritzen explained how this talking point has become a refrain for players in this space, and how the team blocks out the noise.
“As soon as we started doing Predator, people were asking about it,” he recalled. “Same in Ghostbusters, same in Killer Klowns, same in [Halloween], and it’s like, cool. All we have to do is prove you wrong. Predator has 30-some-odd predators right now. You know, we’re talking about doing some really cool stuff with that. Klowns has all this great stuff. Like, we slow things down for sure. But it’s not like Illfonic has ever shut a server down [or] closed down shop. Halloween has a lot of really long legs, and we’ve got a lot of stuff ready, you know, and it’s exciting. So we can only prove them wrong. That’s literally all we can do.”
Halloween: The Game is out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. For more from Illfonic, here’s why A Nightmare on Elm Street game hasn’t happened yet.
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