Released last week, 2K and Supermassive Games’ The Quarry has quickly become one the new benchmarks for interactive movie-like experiences. As per our full review, “The Quarry delivers on its interactive horror movie premise, the characters are all wonderfully realised, the violence, terror and scares are all here. Meaningful choices, multiple endings and memorial set-pieces sit alongside stellar performances, excellent cinematography and cutting edge visuals.”

With performance capture and a choice-driven story that lets you shape the outcome - or simply bear witness to the horror - it’s a fascinating blend of horror gaming, movies, and even longform TV like Netflix’s Stranger Things. Sitting down with writer, director, and Supermassive Games head Will Byles, days before launch, we got to discuss the process of creating The Quarry in detail.

We talked about a potential canonical ending and how that might lead to a sequel, through to how COVID meant actors had to kiss mid-air with their scene partners doing the same the following day. Which was weirdness on top of them being in skin-tight suits with reflector balls on them.

It’s a fascinating look at creating a game like this, what parts are like making a movie, and what it means to be a classic horror experience where you’re in control.

Let’s dig in.

A Follow Up to Until Dawn, and a Homage to Classic Horror from the ‘80s, The Beginnings of The Quarry Take Shape

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Will Byles: “Until Dawn [PS4] was classic and to be honest, cliche horror. Bear in mind, I was the director of that as well and cliche is good for horror. It's expected stuff. So it was more, let's do that again but let's go mental. Everything that we can think of that's teen horror, let's really go to town. That's why we landed at the summer camp, it's classic and very Friday the 13th.

Then there's the kind ‘killbilly’ nature of things. I love that expression, ‘hick flick’ or ‘killbilly’. And we've kind of put them in the 1950s. Everything's slightly baked light, or kind of enamel, there’s old phones with the [circular] things on the end. And that's done on purpose, so it doesn’t feel like it’s set within a certain time. I was consciously trying to get rid of the dating, because everytime you put something in, it dates it.”

The Quarry is Classic Horror in a Modern Setting with a Timeless Feel

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“When you’re talking about the 1980s and modern stuff, there's an anachronistic note. And actually that's indicative of contemporary horror, with Fear Street and Stranger Things. The ‘80s was a really good time for horror because there were no mobile phones. As soon as you put a mobile phone into horror, just call the police. You can just look stuff up, it's having a computer all the time where you can access anybody in the world so you can't get as isolated. So obviously, we knock out the cell towers, we just make it super bad reception in the middle of nowhere. And by doing that, it's sort of ‘80s, but it isn't really ‘80s.

Related: Our Full The Quarry Review

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And then there’s having fun with all that. Coming from the ‘80s, everyone knows what's going on with horror so there’s the element of that taking that to its extreme. Scream was the first thing that said it out loud, everyone knows what's going on. We know all the cliches, we know all the rules. Don't open the trap door that's banging away, because you can guess what's going to happen. And we use things like that to give players a fighting chance, whilst still having fun.”

As a Fully Playable Horror Movie, and One with Roots in Classics from the 1980s, It Still Begins with a Script

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“When we start the very first thing I do is write a screenplay, a 90-minute screenplay that's kind of the golden thread idea. It's very concise, and it's not a very detailed screenplay because I am aware that it's going to become much, much bigger. But it does need to be a compelling story, so I need to do that to test it on people. I need people to read it, and if they're kind of dropping it halfway through then I've done it wrong. As long as it's compelling and people are engaged, then it's like, ‘let's take that further’.”

As a 10-Hour Game With Multiple Playable Characters That Can Die, The Size and Scope Expands

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“This is super important for the way we do stuff because it's not a single threaded narrative where there’s a single protagonist. If that person dies, it's game over. We have nine playable characters and they're like spokes of a wheel coming in. Each one of their stories has an entire arc from the beginning to the end of the game. And, that can be stopped because all of them can be killed at various stages. It’s like 8 to 12 times along the way, for each individual character, which means if you kill them there the structure of the story still carries on.

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"We have nine playable characters and they're like spokes of a wheel coming in. Each one of their stories has an entire arc from the beginning to the end of the game. And, that can be stopped because all of them can be killed at various stages. It’s like 8 to 12 times along the way, for each individual character."

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Let’s say Emma's dead, all the scenes with Emma in them from there onwards won’t have her there and when there's scenes where it's just Emma, they're gone entirely. Structurally, it's a very, very different thing to a movie or even TV.

We kind of stole a little bit from Steven King, because the way he writes a lot of stuff comes from lots of different points of view and he kind of goes back and you have a journey of one person and then you there's this journey of this other person. In The Quarry we have that, but depending again on who's being killed along the way, where they end up is going to be different. And the whole story can end with this full 100% entire history of what went on here and all the things that happened, or you can get a very horror film style of end. It's definitely a challenge and it's definitely one we've been working on very hard to try and make sure it works.”

Everyone Surviving Makes For a Bad Horror Movie, Even Though That’s Still in the Game

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“Officially, you can see it as a win in just terms of ‘I got everyone to survive’. And people like that, and that's one of the reasons we made sure that that could happen. As far as the story's concerned, that's the worst horror film I've ever seen. Everyone got through? You want some degree of carnage, that's what makes it a horror.

Also, deaths of people that you really became fond of - that’s something. As a group of characters ours are not the most likeable in the world, but as you play through you start to get to know them a bit better and even shape their overall character. You feel guilt, which in storytelling is a really hard thing to do. It's not a normal thing either, in every other medium storytelling is effectively passive, but this is doing it yourself. And then it’s like, ‘oh right, I just killed that person’. Losing people along the way creates quite a lot of first-person emotion, you do something and someone dies, and it's guilt.”

Designing Gameplay Elements and Creating Collectibles That Solve a Horror Genre Problem

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“I'm terrible about rules, when I first played Grand Theft Auto I kept stopping at the traffic lights. And there's just something about horror movies, where mayhem has happened and then the police turn up, it’s like ‘why aren't these kids getting arrested?’ There's a load of dead bodies around! Oh, it was a monster. Really?

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"You feel guilt, which in storytelling is a really hard thing to do. It's not a normal thing either, in every other medium storytelling is effectively passive, but this is doing it yourself. And then it’s like, ‘oh right, I just killed that person’."

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Watching horror I always felt this dread about the police turning up, so we have this whole thing at the end, almost banner headlines like ‘Mass Destruction at Hackett’s Quarry: One Lone Teenager Says It Was A Monster’. That's not gonna go down well unless they’ve got evidence so it’s like ‘here's the photo’, or here's the bit of whatever. And with the podcasts we have in the game, after the credits have rolled they come back and dig into the evidence that you found as a player.”

Shooting The Quarry Was All About Filming Scenes with Real Actors and Creating Both Digital and Real Sets

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“It's kind of weird. On set, we're there, and it’s all motion captured. There’s like a big white set with a grid and there's infrared cameras around and the actors have all the dots on their suits, these little reflective nipple things [laughs]. And there’s a camera on their head and stuff like that. And we do build a set, because it is performance capture, but it’s skeletal. So doors are kind of just the frames of doors with handles so the infrared can go through.

When we capture them, they can see themselves on a TV, in full costume, all lit, all the effects are in there too. There's a fire, it’s roaring, and there's the moonlight coming down, all the trees are there. They can literally see themselves walk around. And I have a special stick that’s basically just a stick with some reflectors on it and on the display it's a light, so I can shine lights around and show them where to look. It’s super bizarre. They all freak out at first, and really just behave like children dancing away in front of the screen like, “look at me”.”

COVID Made an Impact, But You Wouldn’t Notice

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“Usually each one of those things we capture in its entirety with everybody, but here we were having to do it separately because we couldn't have everyone due to COVID. Big scenes, like the fire pit scene, the super awkward fire pit. We split that up and had to shoot that across five different days because we couldn't get all the actors together. When Emma kissed the guy, he wasn't even there. She was like floating in mid air and squatting pretending to kiss. And then he was there doing it on a separate day.”

Facial Animation Comes Later, With The Help From AI

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“After the shoot all that stuff goes into the engine pretty much straight away. Then the director of photography takes those scenes and we start to look at an edit and tighten them up, because they're always a little bit loose. And then about eight weeks later the facial animation comes in because that has to go through a whole bunch of machine learning.

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"Usually each one of those things we capture in its entirety with everybody, but here we were having to do it separately because we couldn't have everyone due to COVID. Big scenes, like the fire pit scene, the super awkward fire pit. We split that up and had to shoot that across five different days because we couldn't get all the actors together."

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It's all captured in 3D, but that's not done by our animators. Machine learning does facial animation, and the AI process has to go through iterations - like five or six. The first one that comes out, it's like, ‘oh, no’.”

Post Production is a Long Process of Editing and Fine Tuning Effects with the Ability to Explore Each Scene in Full 3D

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“So it's about eight weeks between the shoot and getting to a stage where it's kind of presentable, but that's the first pass. And then we do another pass, and that's really more about lighting. Even though the lighting was there on the day, it's not the final lighting. And we just keep going and keep going and keep going. To be honest, we finished filming, middle of last year and we've just finished the last edits [prior to launch]. The day zero patch had the very final edits on it. It's always up to the wire, and that’s one of those things with CG. A little bit tighter on the edits, a little bit better on the lighting. Because the cameras are fixed cameras, if somebody's talking and we see a great reaction, we can look over and see what that is.”

The Quarry 2 is Possible With the ‘Right Ending’ and Potential DLC

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“The first thing I wrote was that original story. But as a rule we always say now it's completely up to everybody else and about how they play through it. And with that there's so many different versions of the story, but I like the idea of a canonical route. Although we haven't quite set this up yet, we've done it internally though, we want to have a canonical route that’s an exact play-through - our version. It might be a DLC we'll do in the future. Especially if we wanted to try and do a sequel, then there is one version that’s canon.

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"I like the idea of a canonical route. Although we haven't quite set this up yet, we've done it internally though, we want to have a canonical route that’s an exact play-through - our version. It might be a DLC we'll do in the future. Especially if we wanted to try and do a sequel."

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Ultimately though, it's always about the story that you make and the stories that you remake. Hopefully, by the time you go through it and get to the end you go, ‘oh, shit, I know what I did wrong there’.”

The Quarry is Available Now on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.