THE MAKING OF: Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Videogame mechanics don’t progress anywhere nearly as quickly as the visuals that power them, so cinematic storytelling and character evolution are becoming increasingly important in modern gaming. The Last Of Us, Detroit and Enslaved: Odyssey To The West are just a few of the more recent games that have tried to blur the boundaries between two very different forms of entertainment, but they certainly weren’t the first. 18 years ago, another game was also slowly blazing a trail, a trail that would guide its developers to the forefront of the industry, but eventually see it collapse under its own hubris. The game was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem; the company, Silicon Knights. Both were spearheaded by Denis Dyack, and when we talk to Denis about his magnum opus we speak to a man who loves Eternal Darkness and the art of storytelling as much as he loves his three cats, Gracey, Willie and Owen.

“I’m a big fan,” reveals Denis when we ask him about ’ origins. “I think it was a hallmark series because, for the first time on television, they actually told a story that was continued over the whole year and then they had a story arc that was meant to go for five years, and that had never been done on TV before. We looked at and said, ‘This is groundbreaking,, looked at this whole phenomenon happening at the time with , and we said, ‘We should do something like that.’ So the idea was to have lots of characters and really tell a story arc that meant something over a long period of time.”