Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, Gun Media and IllFonic were working together on Summer Camp, a horror game built to look like the slashers of a bygone era. The announcement trailer gives off strong Friday the 13th vibes, right down to the canoe wading through a (likely haunted) lake that surrounds the titular camp. No one knew it at the time, but this game would go on to ignite a spark in the video game horror space for years to come. Today, the trend of asymmetrical multiplayer horror games using licensed slashers and other Hollywood monsters still feels like it’s only just begun.
Early on, Summer Camp was purely a homage; it was meant to recall the imagery of Jason’s attacks on camp counselors through the ’80s and ’90s, but it wasn’t officially attached to the IP. Around the same time, the Friday the 13th licensor group Horror Inc. and Crystal Lake Entertainment caught wind of the project during a period in which they had already been working with Steve Harris, today the CEO of Boss Team Games, and his partners at Diversion3 Entertainment to help find collaborators for a video game based on the IP. Summer Camp looked to be a great fit. Rather than a new slasher character meant as an ode to Jason Voorhees, what if the game could use the killer himself in his iconic hockey mask and all?
Harris and his partners approached Gun Media and asked if they’d be interested in changing its game from a clever homage to an officially licensed tie-in. Naturally, that was enticing for everyone. Following another investment round and a few more years of development, including a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, Friday the 13th: The Game launched in 2017. Overloaded servers marred the game’s early days, but it eventually grew to nearly 15 million lifetime players while bringing the many iterations of Jason to the game.
Alongside Dead By Daylight, launched just a year earlier, Friday the 13th revealed a burgeoning market for asymmetrical-multiplayer horror games. On one team, you have the killer, and on the other, you have several of his would-be victims–a natural fit with many horror franchises.
It’s interesting to see what this subgenre looks like today and to estimate how it may look a few years from now, considering so much of the landscape is owed to a landmark legal case involving the Friday the 13th licensing rights and some of the original film’s collaborators. First argued in court in 2020 and settled a year later, the outcome demanded that products using the Friday the 13th IP could no longer be sold or worked on. For Gun and IllFonic, this sadly included their game.
Friday The 13th: The Game is, in some ways, the inception point for a trend that looks like it’ll continue for years to come.
DLC plans such as new maps, characters, and cosmetics were abruptly cut short; the game’s post-launch support was no more. Effectively, it was snuffed out like one of Jason’s victims in the shower; they never saw it coming. Both Gun and IllFonic were forced to move on to other projects, but because of their success with Friday the 13th, something else began to take shape.
From the cemetery plot of the Friday the 13th game, several more projects of a similar nature have sprung out of the ground: games like Gun’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, IllFonic’s Predator: Hunting Grounds and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and Boss Team Games’ Evil Dead. Hollywood is increasingly interested in video games, and the people and teams that helped transpose Friday the 13th from film to a modern console and PC multiplayer game are being leaned on to make more magic happen with other icons of the horror genre.
Seeking to understand better how such deals are made, why they may sometimes fall through, and what else horror fans can expect to see in this emerging pocket of the games industry, I spoke to Steve Harris, CEO of publisher Boss Team Games, Wes Keltner, CEO of developer-publisher Gun Media, as well as Jared Gerritzen and Jordan Mathewson–chief design officer and design director, respectively–of developer-publisher IllFonic.
Through these talks, it became clear to me that licensing is sometimes a minefield that these horror-obsessed teams navigate nonetheless. Though it was a love of the genre that got them involved in the first place, they’re now being viewed as the go-to creators when Hollywood comes calling with more horror icons in need of video game adaptations.
When A Licensor Calls
“The appetite’s there,” Keltner told me. “Hollywood is starting to understand that video games are bigger than movies and music combined. I think, before, the conversations I was having, even in 2018, there were still film companies out there that were looking at video games as a way to market a movie. And obviously that’s not how you do it.”
Sometimes, on the Hollywood side, collaborators are too focused on the next part of a franchise, not what Gerritzen called “the beloved part,” which may be the original, such as it is in the case of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Other times, it may be a blend of parts, like with Friday The 13th: The Game, where many iterations of Jason are represented because he isn’t really in the first movie and doesn’t don his iconic mask until the third one. IllFonic would later use a similar approach with Predator: Hunting Grounds; in the game, the many versions of the titular creature span all of the movies and then some. The essential parts that make sense as a game can vary, but movie studios don’t always envision those parts as important in the first place.
For “the better part of the last 15 years,” Keltner said, movie studios have been involved in games but in a different way, and it’s a way that studios like his and the others I spoke to aren’t really interested in as much, if at all. “What they’ve been leveraging their IP to do is free-to-play mobile games” as a way of “supporting a movie that was about to come out,” he continued. “And in their eyes, the cheapest way to do that and to get the maximum amount of eyeballs was to do a mobile game, make it free. And maybe it generates money, maybe it doesn’t. But that wasn’t their motivation, necessarily.
“So you had some folks that kind of understood video games, but they understood it from a mobile space. But what I’ve been seeing in the last few years is folks coming over, they’ve been at AAA publishers, and they’re coming in and saying, ‘Mobile is one facet. If your goal is just word of mouth to support a new movie, stick with mobile. It’s probably not a bad idea. You’re going to get it done faster. Gonna be a lot of eyeballs that won’t cost as much. Go for it. But if your goal is to potentially create a whole new platform, where a new generation of people are going to experience this IP in a way they couldn’t before, you need to start looking at console and PC. It’s gonna cost more, it’s gonna take longer, but the impact is 1,000 times what could have happened if you just made a mobile game.'”
Keltner explained how his team has used Friday the 13th as a “case study” to bring to interested rights-holders from the movie world to demonstrate how a well-made video game can be the rising tide that lifts all proverbial boats for an IP. “You’re going to see more people–a whole new generation of people–renting your movies, buying your movies, buying merch, looking for Halloween costumes. You’re going to start trending on Instagram, TikTok–like, all this is going to happen from the game.”
Similarly, Harris added that the film industry has “caught on” to the enormity of video games, he told me. There’s money to be made, and where that’s the case, Hollywood is open for business. “Most of the studios,” he said, “now have gaming divisions,” naming MGM, Lionsgate, and Legendary as examples, who seek out the right developers to adapt their IP. “They understand what the process is, and they understand the challenges that we have from the development side and marketing side. But they’re astute. They know what’s involved.”
IllFonic expressed the same. “There’s just been a major amount of growth in the past few years of respect for video games,” Gerritzen said. “Because when [Friday the 13th] happened, it was still that era of like, ‘Oh, IP, slap a game together, make a game.'”
All three teams said the change seems to be driven largely by a generational divide. As older Hollywood executives have been filtered out for younger people who are more likely to have played games all their lives, these people have built bridges between the old guard within Hollywood and the game developers who are eager to bring their IP to life.
Gun’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre was the first licensed horror PvP game to use a 4v3 setup.
“They’re starting to see that there are passionate people in [the games industry] who are wanting to do a lot to elevate what they have into something that’s going to attach to the generation of people who are much more into video games, and they’re starting to understand it as the entertainment medium that it is,” Mathewson told me.
The appetite is so strong, I was told, that these studios are more often being pitched to rather than proactively sending out feelers to see if they can get ahold of a beloved horror property. While Boss Team sometimes enjoys a more direct line to Hollywood given Harris’ prior career in filmmaking, serendipity has been a reliable ally, too. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre game, for example, grew from Ian Henkel, son of the film’s writer Kim Henkel, having played and enjoyed Friday the 13th. The younger Henkel wanted to see Gun’s take on his family’s IP, and a few years later, it exists–as one of the scariest games I’ve ever played, no less.
IllFonic’s Predator: Hunting Grounds has a similar origin story. Gerritzen said it started when the team “high-leveled” the game’s concept one night. “The next day, [IllFonic CEO Chuck Brungardt] walks past a guy. He gets introduced to a guy from [20th Century] Fox, and he’s like, ‘Oh, we were just talking about Predator last night.’ And then they talk, and he’s like, ‘Yeah, I just got a new creative director; his name’s Jared.’ And the guy knew me, and he’s like, ‘Oh, let’s jump on a call next week.'”
Rosemary’s Maybe
But just having a line to communicate isn’t enough to make a deal happen. Scheduling meetings eventually means negotiating, and sometimes those talks break down for a number of reasons.
“I would say a half-dozen to maybe 10 other horror IP [rights holders] have come to us that we had to politely decline. They just either didn’t fit what we wanted to do, we didn’t really feel that passionate about the property, or the terms that were being discussed were not conducive to our side really making any money,” Keltner revealed. He gave an example of how an early meeting might unfold, telling the licensors, ‘I want to take your movie. I want to turn it into a game like this. And here’s what Gun does. Here’s what we’ve done in the past. This is my budget, and this is the team that’s going to work on it.’
“You find out whether or not it’s going to fit right. And we usually get to the money, like, real fast, because that’s usually what can throw everything off. Like, what are the terms of this deal? So you don’t get into the nitty-gritty of the creative around the game. You always go for the big thing first, which is, like, ‘What do you want? What cut do you expect from this,’ you know?”
The snag, Keltner told me, is “almost always money or creative control.” Gun had even made it to the prototyping stage with one project before it had to bow out. “That company wanted complete creative control and ownership of the code, and I’m like, ‘You don’t get that. That’s not how this works,’ you know? And they’re like, ‘Well, then we’re not doing this deal.’ And I go, ‘Okay, see ya.’ And we had to stop everything.”
Some horror icons have shown up all over games, like Ghost Face shown here in Hunt Showdown, but don’t yet have their own games to call home.
As Gerritzen has learned working at IllFonic, Hollywood behaves very differently from the games industry. In his mind, it operates more like a “giant quagmire” when it comes to ownership. “A game is an employer paying people. A movie is like a bunch of outsourcers, I’ll say, or contractors. And it’s like, ‘Okay, well, anything that I make, I own because you want to pay me the cheapest.’ Now, you have all these people owning different pieces of different things and all of that.” In seeking the right partners to adapt IP, IllFonic has “gone through it all, really,” he said. “And so now when we look at IPs, those are major factors that have to come into play […] Is this free and clear? How many people are in it? We could talk about, ‘Oh, man, wouldn’t it be cool if this, and wouldn’t it be cool if that?’ And then you start to talk to people, and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s owned by 13 different people.'”
While doing research for this story, I learned that the licensor for the Scream franchise is not the same entity as the licensor for Ghost Face, the iconic mask worn by the killers throughout the film franchise. To my dismay, this seemed to be news to each of the teams I spoke to, which hinted to me that none of them are secretly making the asymmetrical Scream game I long for. But it also elicited varied reactions from the developers I met with. The idea of multiple licensors was sometimes seen as a red flag. But sometimes, having multiple licensors isn’t the headache it might appear to be.
“With Evil Dead, there were five different licenses involved in that,” Harris told me. “Frankly, I thought it would be more challenging than it ended up being. But you know, it was [about] coming up with an idea that allowed us to sort of very cleanly divide what we were doing with each of the [licenses] and got everybody on board with the idea that we were going to do this mash-up. And once everybody had signed off on that, it was pretty easy.”
I Saw The IP Glow
Even for those with proverbial scars from the Friday the 13th court drama, more recent and tidier collaborations have renewed the hope that this subgenre can survive Hollywood’s IP quagmire. Keltner spoke highly of the Henkel family, who, in stark contrast to much of Hollywood’s MO, exclusively owns the rights to the original 1974 Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The Henkels have worked with the studio to bring several new characters to the game based on a lore bible that the film’s screenwriter, Kim Henkel, has kept for decades.
This allowed the team to expand on but remain faithful in spirit to the source material. It’s even led to a new mode in the game called Rush Week in which Johnny, one of the characters exclusive to the video game, leaves the infamous Texas home to torment sorority sisters in the vein of an entirely different horror classic, Black Christmas.
That sort of freedom to take the IP and build something new is crucially important to the game makers, who need to know the film studios or other rights-holders will trust them and give them the space to experiment at times. Because both parties are fans of the IP, it’s in everyone’s interest to adapt it in a manner that feels true to the source, even when things stretch beyond a movie’s original vision.
“We put [makeup effects artist and director Tom] Savini and Elvira into [Killer Klowns From Outer Space] and it was just like–this doesn’t make sense, but they’re [horror] royalty,” Gerritzen said excitedly. “In Predator, we made female predators. In Ghostbusters, we added a ton of new stuff, talking spirit guides and all that. You have to know the IP before you start working on the IP. It’s kind of like if someone were to come to IllFonic or me and say, ‘Hey, I want to write a book about you,’ or ‘I want to do a documentary about you,’ and they don’t know anything about you. It’s like, I’m not going to trust them to do this.”
Game studios working with licensed IP sometimes want licensors who grant them the latitude to mix things up in novel ways.
Because IllFonic has established itself as a major player in this space, licensors have come to trust the team with their IP more easily, usually thrilled to see what a game can add to the franchise in ways the movies never could. “Like, we’re really massive horror fans,” Gerritzen told me. “And, you know, I definitely think that the horror community is so welcoming to so much stuff […] For us, it’s like, we can do something really huge. We can do these things that would have blown their budget out of the water in most cases. And so for us, when we talk to the creators or the IP owners, and we get deep into it, most of the time they’re beyond ecstatic that we’re adding to their world and to their universe.”
I Know What You Did Last Collab
Working in the space of licensed asymmetrical horror games also comes with an added complication: Dead By Daylight (DBD). Behaviour Interactive’s horror game has been the genre leader for years, even as its intentions are slightly different. Whereas games like Killer Klowns, Friday the 13th, and Evil Dead are bespoke, standalone games meant to capture the spirit of singular movies or franchises, Dead By Daylight is basically spooky Fortnite, with a roster of dozens of monsters–some original, but many licensed, too. The list of screen legends includes characters in these other teams’ games, like Michael Myers and Leatherface, but also many others who haven’t been given their own games (yet), like Chucky, Freddy Krueger, and my personal favorite, Ghost Face.
Harris told me the DBD question does come up at times, but that it usually isn’t something that prevents a standalone experience existing alongside it. “I’ve had conversations with different rights holders [and asked] ‘Well, if you do a Dead by Daylight character, or put it in Fortnite, or whatever it is, does that limit your ability to do a standalone game?’ […] I don’t really think so. I think they’re very distinct in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish and how the games would play.”
Keltner similarly cited how DBD brings in many iconic characters, but always does so in the context of the game’s 4v1 mode (or the newer 8v2 mode) that involves starting noisy generators to open an escape path as killers stalk the map. DBD can fit almost any horror icon in its format, but it’s always going to be in its format. “All the power to [Behaviour], because people love it,” Keltner told me. “And we went down this other route, which was cinematic and true to the one, singular IP. So instead of trying to be the Swiss army knife where you can take any IP and stick it in this thing, we wanted to concentrate on, ‘Let’s make the complete Jason experience.’ And seeing those two avenues, I think Hollywood looked at that and went, ‘Oh, wow, look what you could do.’ You could leverage single characters, or you could take the entire IP and try to make a game based on it.”
Dead By Daylight has helped shape the genre, even as it intends to do something different than most of its genre counterparts.
“Asymmetrical games just provide this perfect chemistry when you’re trying to bring these things to life,” Mathewson said. “Because I think we all recognize there’s a really substantial cross-pollination between the fanbases of these types of movies and people that like to play games. And we are them. We grew up with these things, and we had that connectivity and really resonated, you know, at a younger age. And now, we’re getting to this point, we’re making games, and we have access to this new game type that really fits in well with these different IPs.”
Being the subgenre’s busiest, most-called-upon studios could also drive competition amongst the teams. Perhaps when you’re operating at the level of popular FPS or sports games, that’s truer. But the people I spoke to only had nice things to say about their peers from other teams.
“It’s rival schools,” Gerritzen said. “Like, that’s all it is. It’s not like Halo versus COD type of stuff. You know, it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun.”
“I’m ride-or-die for IllFonic,” Keltner told me. “We’ve been in the trenches. We spent five years together [on Friday the 13th]. I mean, you get to know every lead and every person under their lead, and their wives’ names, and you’re hanging out at their studio, you’re getting pizza and beer with them at night, you’re setting up at three in the morning waiting for the build to cook, and you’re just telling stupid stories so you don’t fall asleep. I mean, it’s just, they are bros, through and through, right? So anytime I see them get [an IP], I’m the first cheerleader. I never look at it like, ‘Oh, dang it. I should have [gotten] that’ or whatever. And I want to work with them again, 100%.”
“We’re all off working on different things and trying to bring new experiences into the world in slightly different ways,” Harris said. “I would have loved to do something with Predator, but IllFonic did it. They may have wanted to do something with Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Gun did it. So fortunately, if you look at the products that are coming out, we’re all trying to be very faithful to the source material. We’re trying to advance gameplay within the asymmetrical space. And you know, as long as we have some success in doing that, I think the real winner there’s the player.”
House Of 1000 Concepts
Harris’ words spoke to one other insight I sought from each of the teams: their horror IP wishlists. Let’s imagine, I told them, there is no quagmire. They can have any IP. They’re all open and willing to collaborate. Which series do they reach for first? The answers were excitingly diverse.
Keltner named several that have been stirring in my mind for a while too, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Thing. “I also have a soft spot for Return of the Living Dead, just because it was a very different, very punk, very nihilistic approach to making zombie stuff. And it just felt like it carved right through pop culture to where now people say ‘braaaaaiiins’ and that didn’t exist before that movie.” He named one more too, presumably knowing it’s spoken for: Halloween. Though Boss Team recently published RetroRealms Arcade–retro-style platformers based on Halloween and Ash vs. Evil Dead–the team has also revealed a second Halloween game is in the works, built in Unreal Engine 5.
Specifics about the gameplay or its genre beyond being a horror project have not been revealed yet, but it would stand to reason it may be something like the asymmetrical games we’ve seen to date. Curiously, the folks from IllFonic were cagier in naming specific IP on their wishlist, laughing off the question and insinuating that perhaps one or more of the franchises that would be on their wishlists has already been checked off but not yet revealed publicly.
Joked Mathewson, “I tried to think of something, but yeah, it’s a no-win scenario.” Whether IllFonic is Boss Team’s partner on the upcoming Halloween game, I can’t say for sure. But Mathewson did note that IllFonic has no plans of exiting this space any time soon. “We’re going to use everything that we’ve built up to this point to continue to thrive, to bring everything to a new level, because we love games,” Mathewson added. “We love these types of games specifically, too, and we feel like there’s a lot more to add to it, and we’re going to keep doing it.”
A Nightmare on Elm Street’s dream setting seems like it would be conducive to crafting interesting new gameplay hooks.
Harris and Keltner said similar things, though everyone stressed the need to keep pushing the genre forward. If these asymmetrical horror games feel too similar, you’ll lose everyone but the “5%” of players, Kelter said, who are the “horror nerds” like those within these studios and who would play them anyway.
“Anything can become oversaturated, but I think that reflects back on ourselves and the other companies that you mentioned, always advancing that genre of games,” Harris told me. “Otherwise, it will just become stale. I mean, if you’re not doing something new–put the IP aside for a second–if you’re not making a game that’s offering players something new, then there’s not a point in doing it.”
For Keltner, it’s about aligning his team’s vision with IP partners who can match their zeal. “What are their goals? What do they want to achieve? I want authenticity. I want a white-glove approach. I want interesting design. I want forward-thinking design. And I want horror nerds who are not going to leave any stone unturned, and that it’s something that, hopefully, can stand the test of time.”
