As you might imagine, there were various inspirations behind the towering monstrosities that co-op shooter Evolve lets you and your friends battle to the death.
Speaking to Shack News, Turtle Rock creative head Phil Robb said the team drew inspiration from classic movie monsters, as well as the most “terrifying, f**d up **” that Mother Nature has created.
The original idea for Evolve came from a simple wish. ”Most of our ideas come from simple little seeds,” Robb explained. ”In this case it was: you know what I’ve never been able to do? I’ve never been able to get together with my buddies and hunt something big and mean. The idea for Evolve actually predates Left 4 Dead. It’s something Chris (Ashton) came up with and we’ve been noodling on for many, many, many years. It’s just now where the hardware has gotten to a point where we can actually do justice to the vision that we had.”
As for the design of the game’s various gribbly monsters, there were plenty of classical sources for the team to draw on.
”With Goliath, we went for classic,” said Robb. ”The first monster is everything you expect from a giant monster, it should do everything you would want to do: throw giant rocks, breathe fire, jump huge distances, climb up walls. All that stuff. So we looked at Godzilla and King Kong, those two particular monsters were a huge inspiration for Goliath.”
But a big ape and a chunky, fire-breathing lizard are tame concepts compared to the worst that nature has to offer. ”With Kraken it gets a little more obscure. A lot of people have compared him to Cthulu, but we also looked at a lot of nature. We’re big fans of Sir David Attenborough. I’ve got to tell you, man, nature comes up with more terrifying, f*ed up ** than we could ever come up with. So deep down in the sea, where there’s giant squids–if you look at the way Kraken moves, it’s very much like a giant squid. It’s very much based on those creepy deep sea creatures.”
Interestingly, Robb adds that the big bads were originally intended to be played as first-person, before the team realised that a third-person viewpoint was more practical.
”Initially the monsters were all first-person, but we were running into a lot of weird problems with that,” he explained. ”One, when you’re in a first-person perspective of a 30-foot monster, the world moves very slowly because you’re high up. It’s like you’re in a plane, you’re moving 600 miles per hour but everything looks like it’s moving in molasses. It sucked.”
”Not only that, but we’ve got Hunters who can put a harpoon in your back and stuff like that. In first person, it became very difficult for the monster to orient himself and so players would feel like: why can’t I move? It’s because he’s got a harpoon in his back and he doesn’t know it. So we were struggling with that problem, and a couple of guys on the team took it on themselves to do an experiment and try it in third-person. Almost immediately we were like wow, this works a lot better.”
You’ll be able to see for yourself when Evolve launches on PC and current-gen consoles this October.
