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Years active. 1999–present. Employer. Half Mermaid. Notable work. Her Story. Immortality. Sam Barlow is a British video game designer, best known as the writer and designer of Her Story, the two British Silent Hill games Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and Immortality.
- Half Mermaid
- 1999–present
- Video game designer
- University of Bristol
- Games can be and frequently are much more than making little dudes run around, and Barlow hopes the AAA space one day reflects that.
- Sam Barlow Games
- Immortality Screens
By Rebekah Valentine
Updated: Jan 15, 2023 11:25 pm
Posted: Jan 12, 2023 5:00 pm
“Occasionally boggles my mind and martian postcards me that 90% of the games that are the critical and popular mainstays of our medium revolve around remote controlling a little toy person about like a human scalextric.”
That’s a tweet from Sam Barlow, founder of Half Mermaid and director of Immortality, posted in late November of last year just a few weeks after The Game Awards nominees were announced. Immortality itself was up for recognition in three categories: best game direction, best performance (Manon Gage as Marissa Marcel) and best narrative. While it deserved nominations for all three, Immortality is a curious contender: even a glance at its fellow nominees in any of the three categories immediately threw into sharp relief just how different Immortality was from any of the competition.
Bluntly: every other game it was up against (and the vast majority of all the other award nominees) is about “remote controlling a little toy person about.” Immortality is, well, not.
Here are all the games/interactive story projects the British game designer has worked on so far.
And yet, Barlow has been actively pushing against that “type” with his own work for the majority of his career. Even when he was working on character-driven 3D games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, his goal was to buck convention in whatever way he could.
But that gave us this little rationale of having this huge new audience that is normal people that don't know that a horror game has to be exactly like this, because they haven't played Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark and everything else.
“So we slightly tried to push ourselves in everything, like if we were a Martian and we landed on Earth and we watched all the horror movies and read all the horror books and then someone said, ‘Now go make a video game of this.’”
In fact, for all he pushes against it, Barlow also loves dozens of games about piloting little guys. Who doesn’t? He tells me of his early development inspirations, specifically a 1984 game called Deus Ex Machina where players move through the cycle of life, from being a single cell to a very old man, and where all the game’s sound is separated onto an audio cassette to be played alongside it.
He’s long been obsessed with immersive sims, and he fondly recalls the ways in which moving around a space felt incredible in games like Gone Home and, on an open-world scale, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. He loves Dishonored. And, of course, he worked on franchises like Silent Hill and Legacy of Kain, both games involving moving little guys around.
“Walking a character around a space is really involved, just naturally it's fun and immersive and involving,” he says. “It's very atmospheric. But how much of the storytelling is actually coming out of this? And to what extent is this just an atmospheric effect?”
Walking a character around a space is naturally fun and immersive...But how much storytelling is actually coming out of this?
- Rebekah Valentine
Jun 24, 2020 · On Her Story's 5th birthday, Sam Barlow looks back at his breakout game—and talks about what's next. Features. By Andy Kelly. published 24 June 2020. How the Silent Hill series, and a cancelled...
Mar 23, 2023 · Immortality. Speaking at GDC 2023, Immortality co-creator Sam Barlow breaks down his storytelling pillars and reveals the acclaimed project owes its success, in part, to the existence of Pokemon Snap. Chris Kerr, News Editor. March 23, 2023. 6 Min Read.
Sep 16, 2022 · By Darryn King. September 16, 2022 at 9:00 a.m. EDT. (Washington Post illustration; Half Mermaid) 7 min. In “Her Story” and “Telling Lies,” game designer Sam Barlow uses filmed performances of...
Nov 30, 2022 · ‘Immortality’ Creator Sam Barlow on How His Interactive Video Game Critiques the Film Industry’s Darker Sides. Newly available on Netflix Games, the detective thriller, which includes three...
Immortality is a 2022 interactive film video game developed by Sam Barlow and published by Half Mermaid Productions. It was released for Windows and Xbox Series X/S in August, while Android and iOS versions were released via Netflix in November 2022. A macOS version was released in April 2023.
