![]() ![]() ![]() The former LGS staff became a sort of creative diaspora, scattered across the game industry and putting the Looking Glass DNA into other games and genres. I’m sad that Looking Glass went under, although maybe it was ultimately good for the hobby. This genre was also called “Looking Glass Games”, back when the now-defunct Looking Glass Studios was the only one making them. Also “451 Games” was popular for a while, but it lacks any sort of descriptive element that people like their genre names to have. ![]() I always found that one a little pretentious. Like, isn’t the word “sim” sort of explicitly reserved for Maxis-styled high-level simulation games? I guess it’s an improvement over “Thinking Man’s Shooter”, which is what we were calling these things 20 years ago. I guess we’ve decided that we’re calling this genre “immersive sim”? This is kind of confusing. It's very meta to imagine the characters in the game were brainstorming possible titles FOR the game. Here someone wrote psychoshock on the dry-erase board. There’s no evidence to support this, but it’s a really interesting idea NeuroShock would also work, IMO. and would make it part of the informal System Shock / BioShock lineage. And we all know how much Zenimax LOVES their trademarks.Ĭhris Franklin has suggested that the game could have been / should have been titled “PsycoShock”, which would have been thematically appropriate It certainly would have fit better than “Prey”. ![]() The game was still untitled when the publisher came to the developers and suggested they use the name “Prey”, since they owned the trademark for it. It’s not that the name is invalid, it’s just not a great fit. Yes, they’re space-monsters who kill people so it kind of works, but we don’t usually talk about infectious agents / alien invasions in terms of predation. The behavior of the antagonists is less predatory and more “viral infection”. The “Prey” branding doesn’t make a ton of sense here. No, this game has nothing to do with the 2006 videogame of the same name. Every time I come back to the game I appreciate it more. I loved it even more the following year when the Mooncrash DLC turned the game into a roguelike. I loved it back in 2017 when I made it my GOTY. ![]()
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