By Kieron Gillen on August 7th, 2008 at 3:49 pm.
Dead Space’s comic connection proves to be more than Antony Jonhson and Ben Templesmith’s prequel comic. Warren Ellis, the Stalin of Southend-on-Sea, has just mentioned on his mailing list that he wrote a whole load for the space-survival-horror. Full quote beneath the cut…
Warren says:
Oh, I got released from an NDA the other day, so I can finally say that I wrote a bunch of the groundwork, backstory and structure on the forthcoming EA videogame DEAD SPACE, which recently got a comic prequel from the hands of Antony Johnston and Ben Templesmith. I believe there was at least one other writer on the project, but I’m sure there’s some of me in there somewhere.
If we were to bet, any bit that involves something really horrible happening to someone, posthumanism and smoking. Last time Warren contributed to a PC game was the brilliant and conceptually splendid Hostile Waters , so we have to take this as a good sign.
07/08/2008 at 15:56 Duke says:
Oh Great!
I love HW and still play it sometimes!
My interest in this game just skyrocketed!
07/08/2008 at 16:03 TychoCelchuuu says:
Woot!
07/08/2008 at 16:11 Little Bobby Bobbertson says:
This is good news
07/08/2008 at 16:12 darkripper says:
Then he should do an NEXTWAVEized version of it where you can kick the aliens in the ass and when you do it they EXPLODE.
07/08/2008 at 16:19 cullnean says:
can you ask him if theres any chance of Shoot his constatine story getting released?
07/08/2008 at 16:25 Diogo Ribeiro says:
Shoot probably won’t get released officialy but you can still find it in the intrawebs, if you haven’t already ;)
07/08/2008 at 16:30 Dracko says:
But he hasn’t written the main core of the story, right? As much as he can work a set up, I don’t want to have to sit through any more of the now trite Ellis’ tough-guy/quirky-strong-girl nonsense lines any more than I have to.
07/08/2008 at 16:32 cullnean says:
@ dracko: shush you
07/08/2008 at 16:46 crozon says:
damn that reminds me i lost my copy of hostile waters. maybe good old games will have it on their site when they go live.
Anyhow really hope this game is good. looks very promising.
04/10/2009 at 21:38 Bhazor says:
They do.
07/08/2008 at 16:49 heliocentric says:
“I’m an aviator, a-vi-a-tor!”
“I waited my whole life to die, now i get to have some fun”
“I blow things up, not clean them up”
07/08/2008 at 17:05 Sum0 says:
I’m increasingly disturbed by the way the previously unconnected spheres of RPS, Warren Ellis, and Kenickie are beginning to converge, what with the mention of Kieron and Lauren Laverne last week.
07/08/2008 at 17:14 Dracko says:
cullnean: No, really. The novelty of his style wears thin exceedingly quickly. I don’t want the man writing the dialogue for an engineer stuck in a FUBAR situation. I’m all for him crafting the space-horror setup, but he can leave the adolescent sub-Whedon (Not a Whedon compliment, that) prose at home.
P.S. http://nadshot.com/category/hellblazer/
07/08/2008 at 17:24 Chris says:
A NextWave game would be one of the best things ever. Hell, I would pay a lot for a NextWave DLC pack for Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
07/08/2008 at 17:29 Mark Stephenson says:
@SumO
Gillen is just trying to make up for lost time as he only found the W.E.F. two days before it was closed. ;)
07/08/2008 at 17:31 danarchist says:
I have based my life on Spider Jerusalem from Transmetropolitan. A little crazy sure but I wasn’t doing anything else at the time.
Warren Ellis could write a grocery list on the back of a coupon and I would pay to read it. I can’t imagine a game with his writing in it lol
07/08/2008 at 17:35 Cooper says:
http://www.freakangels.com
Free Ellis. Yay.
07/08/2008 at 17:55 Mike says:
Dracko: As ridiculous as that site is I only saw Ellis’ name on one of those pics so I’m not clear on the relevance.
I wouldn’t call myself an Ellis fan but I certainly enjoyed Crooked Little Vein and think his current Astonishing X-Men (A comic I imagine Dracko must really hate with its having both Whedon and Ellis as writers) is pretty good so far.
For the US market Dead Space is in a brutal gaming month sandwiched in with Far Cry 2, Ghostbusters, and Fallout 3 so it’s going to have be amazing in order for me to put one of those away to get to it.
07/08/2008 at 18:52 DeliriumWartner says:
*perks an ear up* Wait… Did someone just insult Whedon?
07/08/2008 at 21:29 Solario says:
@Dracko: I think it’s a simplification of his work to say that he writes purely stock characters. This isn’t a All-FPS-Games-Involve-Space-Marines type of thing. There’s some nuance and some cleverness to it all. Or even a Judd-Winnick-Everyone-Has-AIDS. And certainly not a Frank-Miller-Whores!-Whores-Whores-…whores. But I’ll agree to disagree. ;)
And I’m sorry, but is this news? Because I’ve known about it for quite some time, given that I mentioned his involvement back in some of the first coverage on this site. And comics writer and artist Rick Remender (of Crawlspace: XXXombies, Fear Agent, Strange Girl, Sea of Red, Night Mary, Doll & Creature and a shit load of other stuff) is at least one of the other writers who worked on.
07/08/2008 at 23:01 The Shed says:
Ellis is like my main dude. I’m gonna make my APB character look just like Richard Fell.
Byline; the Dead Space plot is actually a fantastic beast. I was even more impressed with the game when I read the backstory.
@Dracko:’ tough-guy/quirky-strong-girl’ was a pretty good call, but I think that’s the skeleton of his characters; theres a lot more to them than that. Jerusalem/ Assistants fits that, but these characters are so twisted by the world they live in that it works/ doesn’t seem “thin” at all. Fell/ uh… The woman from the bar(?) very loosely fits that, and they are strong characters (who only occasionally interact) in their own right. Whoa, also calling it sub-Whedon is exceedinly harsh, Ellis is in a different league altogether (not necessarily a much better league in terms of dialogue, but entirely different league styles).
08/08/2008 at 00:02 Willem says:
Everytime you guys post about Warren Ellis, I jump up and think: “Warren Ellis involved in games? This I gotta read.”
Then it turns out it’s the bad Warren Ellis.
;_;
08/08/2008 at 00:44 Rath says:
Mis-read the article title due to crap eyes, and briefly wondered why Harlan Ellison would ever get back into videogames after ‘I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream’. o_O
08/08/2008 at 01:09 Jae Armstrong says:
@Rath:
O_o
…
o_O
…’kay…?
Anyway, this has gone from “looks mildly interesting” to “holy shit there’s something I’m actually looking forward to on PC this year”.
08/08/2008 at 01:42 James T says:
I can’t say I made the same mistake, but yes, I’d much, much, much rather have a Dirty Three score than a Warren Ellis script.
08/08/2008 at 02:01 Morningoil says:
Yee-ah, well I think they’re both awesome (awesomer: I once knew a girl who went out with someone called Alan Moore, not, obviously, the Alan Moore, but still it was tremendously exciting for both of us, and even more so when they decided to get married. The best bit? Her first name was Moore, so, Moore Moore, and, as far as I know, that is what she is now called … )
I saw Grinderman recently and though Cave was having one of his slapdash days the band were on top form.
As for the game, well, see Yahtzee’s review of Ninja Gaiden this week … these corridor-y things (not that DS is in exactly the same game-space as NG etc, but survival horror and platform games and action-adventure titles are all starting to merge into some kind of broad 3D-gestalt-game-entity, don’t you think?) are starting to get a little old … BUT the obvious response is who cares about old or new or borrowed or blue, the question is, is it good? God of War Chains of Olympus, which I’m playing through at the mo, certainly is.
Dead Space? Not sure. It looks like it could be cool, but then the in-game trailers looked a little meh.
In summary, then: a provisional meh.
08/08/2008 at 08:58 malkav11 says:
This is news that makes me somewhat more excited about it, although only somewhat, as unlike Hostile Waters or Cold Winter, he doesn’t seem to have actually written the dialogue or cutscenes so much as storyboarded it in early development. So, y’know, the fertile mind of madness, but not unadulterated. Oh well.
And I think dracko’s being hugely unfair to the man. Yes, he has some definite quirks and stock characterizations, but by no means does he drag them out at every turn. All you have to do is play the aforementioned games for that to become clear. And there are definitely other examples out there.
08/08/2008 at 14:12 Esha says:
If only it had been the good Mr. Grant Morrison, then I could’ve been truly excited. Warren Elis has always struck me as the Dog-hating Taiwanese rip-off of Grant Morrison, and therefore I’ve never been all that interested in him.
08/08/2008 at 17:42 Rath says:
Grant Morrison is currently too busy dragging material from the late 50s Batman comics into the present and sending Bruce Wayne absolutely bug-fuck crazy on heroin as a result.
08/08/2008 at 18:48 malkav11 says:
Grant Morrison is a lot weirder than Warren Ellis. Partial reason for me saying so – Morrison is a practicing magician (as in, magic, not as in sleight of hand or performance art) in real life, or at any rate believes himself to be. Warren Ellis draws the vast majority of his bizarre scenarios and depravity from real world news. FELL, for example, is heavily based on real stuff that’s really happened.
11/08/2008 at 10:34 Mooey Poo says:
Ellis’s