While he’s been mostly inactive since the turn of the century, during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, director John Carpenter was widely regarded as one of the reigning masters of the horror genre. His resume includes classics like The Thing, Christine, and They Live, but unquestionably his most famous work is 1978’s Halloween. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis in the role that launched her career, Halloween’s premise is a simple one: masked murderer Michael Myers stalks a group of teens — led by Curtis’ Laurie Strode — through his home town of Haddonfield on Halloween night, systematically killing them off one by one.
A phenomenal success, Halloween spawned a franchise that has so far produced 10 total films, with an 11th in development. Halloween has also been merchandised in pretty much every possible way, including via theme park attractions at Universal Studios’ annual Halloween Horror Nights event, and countless releases of each film on different home video formats. Surprisingly enough, one area of pop culture that Halloween has never really made headway in is the world of video games, unless one counts a loosely related Atari 2600 game released back in 1983.
For fans of Halloween and its iconic killer Myers, that’s all about to change, thanks to the PC horror game Dead by Daylight. For those unaware, Dead by Daylight was released this past June, and allows players to assume the role of either a masker slasher-style killer or one of his potential victims. The killer’s goal is naturally to wipe out all his targets, while the victims work together to stay alive. During NYCC, Dead by Daylight publisher Behavior Interactive announced that an upcoming DLC pack will enable players to play as either Michael Myers or Laurie Strode, inside a digital recreation of Haddonfield from the original Halloween film.
The DLC pack will — as one might imagine — be released on Halloween itself, presumably for both maximum horror fan enjoyment, as well as maximum marketing value. However, for any fans wondering if this will essentially just function as a Halloween-related palette swap of the existing Dead by Daylight gameplay, producer Mathieu Cote insists that that is very much not the case:
“[It’s] going to change quite a lot of how the game is played. With this big street that’s got nowhere to hide. Well-lit. And then these houses that you have to go in and scavenge what you need in there. It’s based on the original movie. Michael is the ultimate stalker. So as opposed to all the other killers that we have, Michael sees you and he watches you. So the power of Michael grows as he’s stalking you and watching you. And at some point he will be able to build up that meter, that power, until he becomes evil incarnate.”
Michael Myers’ triumphant arrival into the land of digital mayhem seems to be part of a mini-trend in the last few years of introducing popular horror monsters to the video game realm. Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees will soon receive his own officially licensed game, while villains like A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface, and Predator’s… Predator have all thrown down as guest fighters in the Mortal Kombat series. At this rate, one wonders how long it will take for a full-on fighting game starring horror characters to hit the market.
Dead by Daylight’s Halloween DLC becomes available on October 31, 2016.
