Glen Schofield is feeling relaxed. It’s been, you sense, a whirlwind few weeks for the Dead Space creator, his new team having finally put out the first glimpse at its stylish, slick and incredibly gory space horror Calisto Protocol at Geoff Keighley’s Summer Games Fest – a reveal that marks a significant milestone in a project spun up some three years ago alongside new studio Striking Distance.
“It feels like freedom,” Schofield says as we chat in the sun in an annex to Summer Games Fest’s LA venue. “It always feels that way, but somehow this one was more cooped up for longer. I’m kind of used to it because Call of Duty always made you keep your mouth shut, but this one felt longer.”
Put some of that down, perhaps, to the challenges of working through the pandemic – challenges that Striking Distance had to adapt to just as it was spinning up development. “We were about 50 people or so when we moved into our brand new spot,” Schofield says of the studio’s headquarters in California’s San Ramon valley. “We’d been working on it for six months: designers, artists, architects, you know, everybody. Nine days later we got kicked out.”
