In February 1959 nine hikers cut their way out of their own tent in the Ural mountains and walked into the snow at minus thirty degrees. The famous Dyatlov Pass incident spawned multiple documentaries. Now, indie developer Sam Gilmore has made a trailer for the game that should have been made about it. Not a modern game, a PlayStation game from around 1998. The kind that would have sat on the shelf next to Silent Hill and Resident Evil.
The game world is built in Unreal Engine. The developer wanted an actual playable-feeling space rather than a series of set-dressed renders. As a result, the slope, treeline and tent site all exist as one level that the cameras move through.
The characters were made in Blender. The developer started from a low poly template model and adapted the textures in Weave, so that each of the hikers carries the right 1959 kit, the anoraks, the ushankas, the socks that matter so much later on. The foliage came from PS1 asset packs, which have the exact vertex count and texture density the era demands, but the snow landscape and terrain were generated from scratch in Blender so the mountain would be ours.
Back in Unreal, the effects did most of the atmospheric work. Snow and fog were built there, and the fog in particular is a deliberate nod to Silent Hill – not just a look – but a way of controlling what the viewer can and cannot see. Cameras were kept largely fixed and set on a tilt, in the spirit of Resident Evil.
The final piece was the render itself. Every shot was exported at 320 x 160 and then upscaled to HD in After Effects with no smoothing, so every jagged edge and every crawling texture survives at full size.
According to the developer Sam Gilmore:
It would have been easy to render clean and then add a retro filter. It would also have been wrong. The limitations have to be real.
What do you think? Should this concept trailer be turned into a full game? If so, let the developer know on Instagram and Twitter!
Be sure to watch the unique trailer for Dyatlov Pass below.
