While characters typically don’t talk in Dead by Daylight, Williams’ campy quips were too beloved to leave on the cutting floor. They introduced the unforgettable Laurie Strode alongside Myers and, shortly afterward, she paved the way for other exalted characters like The Evil Dead’s Ash Williams. With Halloween under their belts, the Dead by Daylight team realized they could also utilize iconic protagonists as survivors in their game. “But he had me try the prototype and sure enough, I’m trying to fix a generator when suddenly I see Michael Myers on a hill, just watching, totally still, and it was the creepiest thing I had ever seen. “Dave presented his idea as, ‘OK, so Michael Myers? He’s just going to watch you …’ It didn’t sound exciting, so I told him he was an idiot,” laughs Côté. Richard famously invented Myers’ unique killer trait-a stalking skill that laid the groundwork for future killers to boast inventive murder methods. Many credit the creative director as being the mastermind behind every chapter in Dead by Daylight, in part because he designed the game mechanics back then. In the early days, it was up to Richard to translate those nightmares into seamless gameplay. That swell in popularity impacted the company itself, too, with Behaviour’s Dead by Daylight team growing from 30 people in its first year to over 300 people today. Dead by Daylight currently sees more than 1.5 million people playing every day, Behaviour tells WIRED. The game spread with each expansion from PC to PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and eventually mobile. As an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game where one player takes the role of a ruthless killer and four others play as survivors desperate to escape, it breaks from traditionally linear horror gameplay to put equal pressure on all five players and the split decisions they make. Since launching in 2016, Dead by Daylight has become one of the most popular online indies across platforms. Now, it’s a hard-earned reality for the folks at Behaviour Interactive. Five years ago, the thought of getting these trademarked legends in the game felt like a pipe dream. Most recently, it scooped up Pinhead from Hellraiser, who was long considered to be the team’s white whale. Half a decade later, Dead by Daylight’s character screen looks like a museum of horror icons: Ghost Face from Scream, Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Amanda Young from Saw, Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Halloween’s iconic slasher was the first license the game scored he was far from the last. “Of all the different icons we could have, Myers is, I think, probably the biggest one to get, to feel validated in the horror world,” says Richard. In fact, the whole office lost their minds. It was 2016 and Richard, creative director for the Canadian video game studio Behaviour Interactive, was only just beginning to crank out the game mechanics for what would eventually become Dead by Daylight, the now iconic indie horror game. Dave Richard still remembers the day he caught Michael Myers.
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