.:Edward Carnby:.

Born 1897 in New Oreleans, Edward Carnby was raised in a loving, well-to-do household. Here, Carnby's parents encouraged him to develop his sense of curiosity, adventure and free spirit. After his formative years, and against the will of his parents, Carnby joined the army and specialized in covert operations along with intensive hand-to-hand combat and weapons training, moving up rank swiftly to the rank of first lieutenant until he was unceramoniously dismissed.

In search of a new life after the army, Carnby began concentrating all his efforts to the study of physics, chemistry, religion and art history. During this time, he was recruited to investigate paranormal activity in a haunted Louisiana mansion called the Derceto. This experience with the paranormal, along with Carnby's innate sense of curiosity, led him on the path of paranormal investigations. In a short amount of time, he soon became a reknowned investigator specializing in paranormal affairs.

During one of his cases, Carnby befriended a 14-year-old orphan named Theophile Paddington whom he took under his wing and utilized his assistance in paranormal cases. Carnby never stopped his research in art or religion and was especially interested in the occult and other such "forbidden" matters. In this search for a forbidden lore in China, Carnby discovered a strange stone amulet. Not knowing the powers that this stone possessed, he brought back the stone and commenced research with the help of the young, yet promising, Theo. But the stone revealed itself to be a powerful artifact, both evil and corruptive. Realizing quickly that the stone was not only a danger to his young pupil, but also to the whole of humanity, Carnby left the continent for Europe to dispose of the amulet for good.

More than 70 years after his journey to Europe Carnby awakens in New York with no memory of his past and with no changes to his physical appearance. Despite his amnesia, Carnby's nature is still formidable and resilient. Now, against the backdrop of New York City, Carnby must not only battle against insurmountable odds and apocalyptic forces but also seek the truth and to uncover the secret.

.:Theophile Paddington:.

Theophile Paddington was born in London in 1914. His parents died shortly after his birth, and as such he was raised in an orphanage. As Theophile grew up, he began stealing, defying the law and abiding only by his own rules. Terribly scarred by the early loss of his mother and father, Theophile grew to be unruly and completely unwilling to accept any guidance from others.

His early destructive behaviour finally came to an end when he met Edward Carnby, as a 13 year old runaway, during one of Carnby's investigations. For the first time in his life, Theo felt useful and capable when Carnby enlisted his help. Aware of the young boy's abilities, Carnby invited him to live in his house - to study and make something of his life. The young Theo quickly showed great interest and invested his energy in both the art of sciences and the many mysterious experiences that Carnby shared with him. As time went on, he became wiser and wiser as he opened his mind to the world's ancient religions and philosophies. While he studied for himself, he also did so for Carnby, in whom he viewed as a strong surrogate father.

After a trip to China, Carnby returned home with a mysterious object that was a part of humanity's strangest and darkest history. Theo felt drawn to this object and both he and Carnby knew that they had fallen across something far greater than they could ever have imagined. Once Carnby realized the danger of the situation, he made the painful decision to take the object to Europe with him for an unknown period of time and leave his pupil at home to search for a way to counter the immense power of his burden. Carnby's sudden departure left Theo feeling betrayed by his mentor - though he soon found himself diving completely into his research while waiting for Carnby's return. But he never did return. Despite Theo's numerous efforts to locate his teacher, it was as if he had dissapeared without a trace.

Time has moved on and 30 years have passed in which Theo eventually had a fulfilling career as a professor and life as a happily married man. He had long since left his painful past behind and has taken comfort in his daily life. Hard times are again in store for Theo when his wife passes away. Around this same time, he begins having reoccuring dreams about his lost predecessor and he is driven deeper and deeper into his past research all the while feeling as though Carnby would eventually return. As Theo is aging he decides to move to New York, more precisely near the Metropolitan Museum, where he finds a job and obtains permission from a university to study ancient relics. His knowledge in alchemy and estoric dogmas is now as powerful as Carnby's before he left.

Everyone in the museum sees Theo as a kind old hard worker fascinated bgy the ancient arts (which he is), but his application for a job of curator in this museum was not a coincidence and through years of studying, the scholar has made startling discoveries there. Theo is now sure that something irreversible is about to happen, something that will change everything. And he feels ready for it, for he has waited his whole life for this moment.

quote .:Hervè Sliwa, Lead Designer, Eden Games:.

As lead game designer on Alone in the Darkmy job is to design all the content of the game, the story, and the game's rules of interaction. I've worked at Eden for 6 or 7 years and my last project here was Kya: Dark Lineage. Before that I worked for Infogames for 6 years, including working as the lead game designer on Sheep Dog and Wolf.

I was always a hug gamer playing a lot in my room. I really loved video games, but I never dreamed that it would become my job because I didn't even think it was possible that making games could be a job. So I started to study music in Lyon and to make some money after college I was working as a tester for InfoGames. From that moment I realised that making games could be a real job, so I did everything I could to make it happen, and after two years I had my first temporary contract.

My favourite games of all time are probably Zelda, Half-Life and the first Metal Gear Solid. Zelda because it's Zelda and maybe because it has such a perfect blend of RPG and action styles - I spent so many hours on this game, I love it. Half Life because it has maybe the best perspective on the situation of gameplay - the first game where I felt like a normal guy in this specifc situation and you need to survive. It was a really amazing game when I first played it. Metal Gear was the first time I felt that a game could be better enteraintment than a movie, and it was really important for me. And of course, and it's no bullshit, but Alone in the Dark, the first one. I played so many hours on this game because it was such a huge step in terms of technology and narrative, and it was really amazing.

Alone in the Dark is a huge legacy because it was one of my favourite games. It means innovation, breaking the rules, and trying to bring something new in interactive entertainment. It's a masterpiece, a huge legacy for us. To do a re-make of alone is a kind of gift - It's something I dreamed about 10 years ago. Honestly, I applied to Infogames because it was the company that made the first Alone in the Dark. It's such a beautiful game, and when I realised Infogames was in Lyon where I was studying, I applied because of Alone in the Dark, so it means a lot to me to have the opportunity to develop this game. It was incredible that InfoGames was in Lyon, where I was studying.

We have a great respect for the first Alone in the Dark and we want to respect the legacy of that, but we also want to put our souls into the new game. I would say the new game is not a sequel, it's a new approach to the game with new innovations and new rules. Of course you don't need to play the first one to start this one, but we have little connections between the two games.

The project started in my mind 10 years ago when I was on a trip to New York City, my first trip to the US. Just after I arrived, I was waiting in Manhattan and I went up to Central Park. New York at night is lights everywhere - the cith that never sleeps. I arrived in front of Central Park very late at night and the park was very dark. I was in front of this huge dark square and it was really weird - it was such a contrast between the dark square in front of me and the lights in the street everywhere. It was like a parallel world, the world of light and the world of darkness - it was amazing. At that moment I had a flash in my head that it could be a great playground for a new Alone in the Dark game.

When I came back from the trip I had lots of photos of the buildings around the park and I started to imagine lots of different situations and possibilities for the game, different scenarios in the park, adventure plots and so on. At that moment I was working on Sheep Dog and Wolf, so I put all my ideas in a box. After Kya: Dark Linage we found out Atari had the brand and we had the opportunity to propse a new project, so I took all my ideas out of the box. We had a brainstorm at Eden and proposed the first ideas for the new game and that was the start of the new Alone in the Dark.

quote .:Hervè Sliwa, Lead Designer, Eden Games:.

We were so impressed by the legacy of Alone in the Dark we wanted something very ambitious and very innovative, so the first proposal was in fact maybe a little bit too ambitious and innovative, which meant it looked very risky to a producer. And we had a difficult start - the project was killed once, and after that we were so motivated to make this game, we worked on it and came back with a technical demo and a proof of concept of all the most risky elements, and Atari said 'Okay, let's take the risk', and since then we've had full support to develop the game. Pre-production started in 2003 then full production started 2 years ago in early 2006. The team built up fast and today there is around
120 people working on the game.

The main source of inspiration for this game was the narration, that's to say finding the best way to create the perfect narration for this type of game. At Eden we were all addicted to the new TV series like 24, Lost, and Prison Break. We thought about this and said, 'hey, maybe there's a new way to tell the story in a game'. The length of the game is close to 10 to up to 15 hours of gameplay and narration and so it's not the same place as a movie which is around 2 hours. Lots of games try to copy the narrative structure of a movie, but it fits better with a length of a TV season, so we had the idea to split the game into an eposodic structure.

From TV there's the work of one guy I respect a lot, which is J. J. Abrams. He's the guy behind Lost and Alias and a movie which was recently released called Cloverfield. I'm a huge fan of this guy and his work. He did a conference about how he works with the mechanics of what he called the magic box to create different plot twists. His work is a real source of inspiration for me.

My goal for this game is for the audience to say, 'oh yes, now a game can be more interesting than a movie'. We think in this media we provide everything a movie provides; we can have animation, acting, sound, music everything of a movie, but we have something more which is interactivity, so you can be directly inside the story. With this approach the main goal is to give the feeling to the audience that now it's time time to re-think about entertainment.

What we try to achieve with the game is to have the broadest audience possible with lots of different types of gameplay, but we don't want to dissapoint the more core gamers so we're trying to create a blend between the two worlds, give lots of innovative content and new action, new types of gameplay, but we want to really make it accessible.

The most exciting thing in the game is we're trying to provide lots of variety. Our goal from the beginning was to try to provide as much variety as possible in one adventure. The first thought was, in a movie like Indiana Jones or something like that the hero can run, jump, fight, drive a car, jump out of the car, use the car as a bomb etc, and everything in a full adventure and with a good narrative structure. Of course it's very hard to provide this in a game because it needs a lot of technology and different engines. If you make a car game it's not like an adventure game or a fighting game - it seems to be impossible. But we thought we maybe we could do it, so that's why the project was maybe too ambitious at the beginning. So from the start we tried to see how all this variety of gameplay elements could come together. After lots of research and development of all these features we made our first prototype and we were able to have our hero run, jump, get in the car, get out of the car, use every object around him, and we said, 'ok, now we can build a full adventure for our game'.

To put everything together was a nightmare, but one of the most enjoyable things is when everything comes to life. When you dream about some situations for years,then when you play it, it's unique. It's hard for a designer to say what he's most proud of because by definition I'm not proud of anything, I always want more more more, but maybe one thing is the fact that we are breaking some video game rules and bringing some other real world elements. One thing I'm proud of is you don't need a specific key to open a specific door, you can open the door without a key. If you are imaginative enough and creative enough you can build your own weapon and blow up the door and to hell with the key puzzle. It's just a little example but it was so hard to build a level design and game rules to say 'ok, no more key, no more specific game rules', and try to make a good adventure game with that, but things worked out pretty well.

What we expect from the audience is, 'holy shit!' But also to feel, it could be me. The idea is you are someone in a very specific situation, but it could be anyone. So it's not a caricature of a perfect guy, it's just a normal guy in an extraordinary context. You have to face up to all this shit happening around you and you don't have a full arsenal of lots of weapons, you have to find them, to build them and be creative enough to survive. What I expect from the audience is, 'maybe if I tried that and could get past this, and oh, it works!' Maybe you could try another way and it works too because it's just logical and we don't need to explain all the rules of the game because it's as close as possible to the rules of the real world.

quote .:Hervè Sliwa, Lead Designer, Eden Games:.

To build all this variety of gameplay elements and features in Alone in the Dark we built our own technology. There is a full R&D department working on the tool we use at Eden - it's an in-house tool called Twilight 2. The interesting thing about Twilight 2 is it's the same tool we used for TDU. It was so flexible that with updates on it we can make all that we need for Alone in the Dark.

There is another technical team working on the game engine specifically for all the different platforms to run everything in the game. We had the chance to develop a very open engine to bring together everything in the game - I don't know if it would have been possible with another engine. The great thing for the designers is that everything had been thought of like Lego blocks, so if you have an idea you can pick a little part of the engine, add another part, meld them together and you have what you expect to have. After that you can play with it inside the game and build some specific situations or puzzles. The designers were able to prototype the game mechanics themselves and the engine helped us a lot to do that.

How we managed to balance the innovation with fun in the game is by working nights (a lot) and the key word is iteration. You don't have any other method. If something was never done before you need to build it, test it, see what goes well, what goes wrong, and you need to improve it and improve it, test it, improve it. We do this for all the features in the game, lots of iteration, iteration, iteration.

It was fun because when we talked together about some gameplay situations in the game after some discussion we realised that nobody in the development team played the same situation in the same way. Sometimes we talked about it and someone would say "we need to improve that because when you use this object to fight these monsters and..." I would say "but you used that object to fight these monsters? You're supposed to do that!" "No, no you can combine this with that and it gives you this result", and I'd realise that yes it's logical. We had lots of unexpected situations just from the creativity of the player - that was really, really interesting.

On the other hand, it was difficult to manage lots of people on the project, and the new generation of game console brought lots of new issues. The team grew so fast that we needed to re-think all our processes to build a game. With this new type of content it created a new type of issue so our everyday work was re-thinking everything, which was very, very hard.

The choice of Central Park is important, because what we want with Central Park is to give the player some realistic environments to put all the extraordinary things in perspective. If you have a realistic environment everything not normal seems very, very weird. If you are in a completely weird environment, the weirdness is normal, so what we want is to use the park to give the perspective on all the paranormal activity.

Of course the park is also very useful in terms of environment because it's very rich in terms of variety, there are plenty of buildings, there is a huge museum, lots of lakes, there are some parts which are very cute and charming and there are some more wild forest parts, and have lots of bridges and roads.

When we went to Central Park to do some research in temrs of environments, we took tons of photography and we walked miles and miles. When we saw something we stopped and said "Oh, we can have something here", and we thought about how to build specific situations. Sometimes we simulated the situations of the game in the park, so it was quite dangerous sometimes, but it was interesting!