wanted something to play while listening to dan olson talk about techbros making questionable financial decisions but because ffxiv is on maintenance right now i'm putting some time in with my comfort series
oh boy i get to tell a funny story
flash back with me real real quick to the distant year of early 2010. i'm in the process of watching and livetweeting about the animated Dante's Inferno movie, where i make an observation that Visceral Games' two major releases up to that point, Dead Space and Dante's Inferno, both feature a dude getting stabbed in the eye pretty prominently. in Dead Space it's Captain Mathius, while in Dante's Inferno it's Alighieri, Dante's father.
i take to ye olde twittere, making a joke about how i think it would be hilarious if this became a recurring bit in games from the studio, that every game features someone getting stabbed in the eye. suddenly, i receive a reply:
Ian Milham, these days, is notable as a Visual Production Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic, a VFX studio. Back in 2010, however, he held the position of Art Director at Visceral Games, most notable on the Dead Space series.
An incredibly charitable and optimistic reading of this is that I, through making a joke about an animated adaptation of the video game adaptation of an epic poem from the early 14th century, influenced the direction of Dead Space two via the inclusion of either the loss of Ellie's eye or the infamous drill scene. Most realistically, this was less than a year out from DS2's release and all the voice lines for these were probably already recorded, so this was probably him doing a bit of cheeky social media foreshadowing.
but lemme tell you, when i played that game and found out it had two goddamn eye stabbings in it, 21-year-old me was fucking ELATED.