Eternally Yours: Shadow Of The Eternals Returns, Again
At Denis Dyack's new company
'Tis that dark and fateful day when spirits cause mischief for the living, making us speak in awful stilted ways with words like "'tis". Frankensteins stomp through the night in search of good shoes for tall people. Draculas commandeer the rail network for their parties. Revenants come back to reclaim their stolen breath. So here's former Silicon Knights Denis Dyack again, with another new company, trying again to make Shadow of the Eternals, a "spiritual successor" to lovely GameCube survival horror Eternal Darkness. After two failed Kickstarters last year, now he's planning even more ambitiously to make it a transmedia extravaganza, looking at film and television too.
It's a curious spiral of ambition. The first Kickstarter wanted $1.35 million dollars to make the first episode of Shadow of the Eternals. Developers Precursor Games cancelled it when it raised only 10% of that in three weeks. The second attempt was looking for $750,000 to make a longer, non-episodic game. It didn't reach half that. Now, gosh, who knows what the plan for this grand aspirations is?
Dyack's new outfit Quantum Entanglement Entertainment envision film, TV, and games merging in some way, he told IGN. You know, transmedia stuff.
"A lot of the television that you're seeing is really bleeding into a lot of the things that we do in video games," Dyack said. "A lot of the things that you see in film are bleeding into a lot of the things that we do in video games. I wanted to do something that was a lot more than just video games."
As for Shadow of the Eternals specifically, that's in production. Again. "(We're) looking at it from a film and television side," he said. "We've got more going on that we're just not ready to talk about yet."
I'd be delighted if this all spawned a worthy follow-up to Eternal Darkness, but it's been demonstrated twice now that the gaming public don't trust in it. I suspect the unconfirmed rumours about Dyack's behaviour at Silicon Knights are a large part of that. Actual, proper investors will be the only way this gets made. I do hope it's good.