Philippe Morin​ is co-founder of Outlast developer Red Barrels.

This is the origin story of Red Barrels and the road we took to create Outlast. It’s been an intense and bumpy ride, but we have no regrets, and while we are always open to the possibility of time travel, we would not want to go back and change a thing about the experience. 

Stubbornness is the mother of butt-kicking.

After shipping Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune in 2007, I returned to Ubisoft Montreal as a creative director. I had learned many things working at Naughty Dog and was eager to apply them at Ubisoft. The two studios have very different design philosophies and production processes however, and it soon became obvious that I would need to revert to Ubisoft’s way, or go somewhere else.

I decided to leave Ubisoft again in 2009 and try something different. I joined EA Montreal to work on a new IP based on an original concept by Hugo Dallaire, formerly art director of Splinter Cell and Army of Two. I was attracted by the opportunity to start something new with a small team, and Hugo’s concept was too cool to pass up.

A few months later, David Chateauneuf joined the team.  David and I had worked together in 1998 on a Donald Duck game and later on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time as well as the first Assassin’s Creed.

We were all confident the project would kick ass, but EA’s management felt differently. EA was undergoing many changes at the time and after a year or so, the project was cancelled. We still believe it was a great project, but we were doing it in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

We were asked to join a team on another game already in production. I didn’t have much confidence in the success of that project and, with a new year ahead and perhaps too much frigid air in my brain, I decided to quit my job in January 2011. So did Hugo and David.

We eventually met and realized we shared the same ambitions; to start our own company. 

There may be a fine line between courage and naivety, and while I think success requires both, I believe I had more of the latter.

A good illustration of this, and an indication of things to come, would be in our estimation of the immediate work ahead. I figured it would take us a couple of months to work out a pitch and produce a trailer. Then another two months to get a publishing deal. In the end it took us 18 months.

And that was just the beginning.

(Pictured left to right: Morin, Dallaire, Chateauneuf)

The birth of Outlast

So, what are we going to make? The first thing we needed to agree on was the game genre. We made a list of ideas, and of course most of them sucked, for that is the nature of idea lists. In a short time though, making a horror game became the most attractive choice.

David is a real fan, even a connoisseur of horror. In 2008, he and I had tried to convince Ubisoft Montreal to let us make a horror game, but we were told that they didn’t feel that there was a large enough market for it.  We reasoned that since we were going to make Outlast with a small team and a small budget, we wouldn’t have to worry about making revenues like Assassin’s Creed in order to be profitable.

Hugo suggested we use Rubber Johnny as a reference for our game. We immediately agreed it would be a very good starting point for a horror game.

Just like that, it was settled. The first project of our new studio would be a horror game. Starting from scratch with our own studio would allow us to use the expertise we had gained on past projects and execute according to our own priorities. We were excited and eager to meet the challenge. 

Immediately the design questions rolled in.

What’s the core gameplay?

Who’s the protagonist?

What justifies the night vision and overall artistic direction?

What’s the journey?

All these questions and many others needed answers, and since we had decided that the team would be no larger than 10 people, those answers had to be realistic for a team of that size.

Out first debate was about the core gameplay. We wavered between a Resident Evil-style approach to guns, but with very limited ammo, and a no-combat-at-all, Amnesia-style approach. We decided to go with no combat because it would allow us to build a more focused experience. We continued to consider having “weapon sections,” but feedback from players at PAX East would later prove to us that we didn’t need those sections. 

Having decided that we would use “night vision,” we needed a protagonist that required it. We considered a member of some kind of SWAT team with night vision gear, but we wanted to sell the “no combat” concept, so we dropped any kind of law enforcement characters. At the time, a lot of movies were using the found footage concept, so we thought, “why not games?” Camcorders also have night vision, so it fit nicely.

So, “who’s using the camcorder?” we asked ourselves. The answer came while we were brainstorming about the hero’s journey. 

We’d always liked the simplicity of the first part of Half Life. The shit just hits the fan and you immediately have to escape. 

We had to find one location from which the player would try to escape and as always, it needed to be doable by a small team. Creativity often comes from such constraints, and once more, we made a list and one option stood out… an asylum. Like camcorders, asylums have been used a lot in movies, but not that often in games, and certainly not in a realistic setting. We felt an asylum offered an opportunity to create really unique and compelling characters that the player would meet along his journey.

A camcorder with night vision, an asylum and no combat -- it was a good start. After more brainstorming, we hit on the idea of a reporter. A reporter doesn’t usually have combat skills, and has a good reason to be carrying a camcorder, particularly if he’s in the course of doing an investigation.

The reporter’s role of investigation was solid on its own, but we had a hard time finding how to mix it with the horror experience. The question was always the same: “How do we motivate the player to record events, when all he might want to do is escape?” We decided on a pure narrative approach that left it to the player himself to decide how much investigation he wants to do, without any game mechanics to re-enforce it. Since I’ve never read anything negative about this aspect of the game, I feel like it was the right choice.

The last thing we wanted to nail before work began on our trailer was the look of the patients; they needed to be frightening. What makes a character scary can be very subjective. For some, it’s the visuals, for others it’s their psychology, their actions, etc. We decided to make use of the profiles of the criminally insane patients you find in asylums. That meant focusing on personalities conveyed through dialogue, like meeting Hannibal Lecter in a closed environment. Still, we were concerned normal-looking humans wouldn’t scare some players. 

We did some research into the MKUltra program and other experiments conducted in prisons and asylums up until the 1970s.  You can find some examples here.

In this age of health care privatization, we figured it wouldn’t be a stretch to invent a corporation using a private asylum for the criminally insane to perform experiments on patients. In our story, those experiments would create mutations and horrible side effects. We felt, however, that viruses have been done to death, so we wanted to do something different. 

We worked on this with our scriptwriter, JT Petty, and came up with the idea that the experimentation would involve morphogenesis, dream therapy and biotechnologies to create nano-bots. We included the work of Alan Turing because he was one of the primary architects of the 20th century. Turing was also key in the theory of morphogenesis, which we only have a layman's understanding of, but is essentially a mathematical definition of how cells differentiate when dividing, and how the same cells can create all our different organs, species, etc.

A lot of the themes in Outlast concern the crimes of the 20th century, especially in the way technology outpaces our ability to grasp it, and our tendency to project monsters onto things we don't understand.

We had all of our main ingredients. The next step was to figure out the best way to sell our concept.

Since Hugo is a real MacGyver with Unreal, we decided to create a fake gameplay trailer, which is basically an in-game cinematic that feels like somebody is playing. David did the layout and the first draft of the cinematic, Hugo worked on the visuals and I focused on the narrative packaging and the music. 

We engaged some contractors to help us complete the trailer. One did a character model of the patient, another did some animations and a third added the sound effects.

Finally, in June 2011, after three months of work, it was done. Armed with our completed trailer, a PowerPoint presentation and some design docs, we were ready to hit the road and find the money.

Show me the money

Our first thought was that our best bet was to find a publisher to back us. We spent the entire summer doing meetings. The meetings themselves were usually quick, but arranging them and then waiting for feedback took weeks, even months. Most publishers were interested in the project and/or the team, but nobody was willing to put money on the table. We could have gotten a distribution deal from Valve, but they were not financing projects and we didn’t sign it right away in case we later found a publisher that wanted an exclusivity deal.

I believe a lot of the people we met weren’t sure what to think of our format, which I call a "AAA Garage Game." Outlast wasn’t a mobile game that could be done on a very low budget. We estimated that we needed roughly $1.5 million in order to hire the best developers available. 

A few private investors made us offers, but the details suggested that they would own us so we turned them all down. 

By September 2011, we still didn’t have a publishing deal, but we were not out of options. While working on our trailer, we learned of the existence of the Canada Media Fund (CMF). The program might give us up to $1 million as a recoupable investment. It meant a lot of paperwork, but for $1 million, we thought it was worth it. The CMF accepts submissions twice a year and the next round would be at the end of that September. There was one problem… one of the CMF’s requirements was to have a distribution deal. Without one we’d lose points and other projects with better scores would get the money.