David Mervik
Appearances
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Hmm. That's a good question. Um, did you guys have any like specific, not what we're doing now? Um, I think I can't wait to hear a lot about that. A big influence on those games was like the Ghibli, the Ghibli style and very specifically spirited away. Um, it's the best one.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And you, you kind of see that balance there as well with, you know, between this kind of horrifying, uh, imagery and this very kind of charming, hopeful, yeah. Whimsical that you say, um,
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
aspect you know and it's that balance that kids bring when putting these these uh very very alien places and it was just something that worked for that world we were creating and it's not something we slavishly stick to it it's always at the needs of the game dictate um and the way we felt with little nightmares was i think one of our pillars was um it's a child's perspective.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I thought you were introducing someone else, then. I thought so.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Always think about it in terms of a child's perspective and very much in terms of like rememberings, if you like, you know, like I remember I used to, the best way I could describe it was like if a kid wakes up from a dream or a nightmare and you can't, you say, what was it about? Everything's writ large, everything's more exaggerated.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Or even if, you know, they've been to the doctors in real life and you come back, it's like, yeah, but he had like really big hands. Because that's how they felt. They felt like these hands were so big. And so that felt really kind of pivotal to us as to like, let's reflect that in the world. That this is how kids feel in a world that wasn't made for them, you know.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And I think that's where that balance comes from in those games.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Yeah, it was a really useful way of looking at the game all over, really, with the way the puzzles were designed. We always come back to this when we talk about the core of how we design puzzles for those games. It's the door, the simplest thing that you do in that game is quite early on where you can't get through a door, you can't get to a handle. So that becomes a little challenge in itself.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And I see that with my kids now. They can't do the most basic stuff. So they have to build this assault course to get up to do the most work. I'm just like, I take no joy in getting my toothbrush down from the cupboard. Whereas they've been like Indiana Jones trying to get theirs down from the shelf. So it's a whole different way of looking at the world when you think about it in that way.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And I think that's something that made it... Not easy, I wouldn't at all say it was easy to design levels for those games, but it always gave you something to fall back on. How do we approach this? What's the core of it? Is things out of your reach at all times? What's a ladder? It's not a ladder, it's a bookcase. It's those kind of things that made it very playful.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I wasn't actually narrative director on those games. I only became narrative director for Re-Animal. But I did, I was one of the creators of the IP in the beginning. It just came about as part of like, you know, something we were talking about and, and, you know, I was the only story guy still on. Um, yes.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I'm doing okay, considering I haven't slept in the last four nights. But yeah, I'm going to try and string some sentences together. What's keeping you up, dude? Oh, that's my delightful young boy, Vincent. Oh, boy. Yeah, they make you work for it, these kids.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I mean, we didn't really. I mean, it was just a thing that... It felt in the water anyway. We were kind of... As much as you love making something, we were always... Driven by creating new stuff. Creating new worlds. Figuring new things out. It's one of those. A bit like it was back in the day. With LittleBigPlanet. Do we step away from LittleBigPlanet. Which is just lovely. We know what it is.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
We know how to make those games. Or do we do what we love doing. Which is creating new stuff. We made that decision to do new stuff. We were thinking similarly again.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
um nothing nothing solid at all we had a great relationship with Bandai and you know and all this and so it was a great a great setup just like it was with Sony but then we were acquired by uh Embracer and then that decision was kind of out of our hands it was just like you know um Bandai owned the IP um and Embracer didn't so
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
it wasn't really a thing that we could do anymore simple as that so and again it was kind of like it took the pressure off that decision because you would have agonized over it for a lot longer like oh we really want to do something new but oh And all this, and so it's like, right, no, we have to do something new. And they wanted that for us. It sounds freeing in a way, yeah.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
That's what I was going to say. In a way, yeah. We probably would have procrastinated for a lot longer.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Um, don't really see it as competing i would say is my main feeling because there's not enough representation well let's say it's competing okay you you can say it's competing if that makes you happy it does yeah it does no but i mean it's not it's not out there enough you know i i and i am a massive 3d platformer fiend and
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
i want as many of them out there as possible and and and for those people that were back in the day like when res evil came out and then you got silent hill comes out you're like you know it's all you're getting what you need and that's for me it's like i think it's great that there's a little nightmares coming and that there's a real animal coming and i hope
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
that just leads to more of those kind of games coming out as long as we're always the best one i don't mind nobody ever minds having a whole bunch of great games to play that's that's no exactly i just think you know there's there's so much content out there it's like with the movies and tv shows on stream and you're like how do you sift through
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
That sounds nice.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Oh, I love it. No, I mean, one of the things that we do is we try to, well, we don't try, we do. We always focus on quality over quantity. I almost said it wrong then. That's just a product of sleep.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
deprivation um there's like it's quality over quantity all the time god that would have been an absolute yeah Tasha is quantity over quality that's official that's me on the unemployment no it's like making these kind of really shorter more focused experiences because you don't want
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
things to feel like filler you don't want people to start losing just going yeah all right then and and they're like some of my favorite experiences as well like that oh i played this for a few days i loved it for those few days and it did what it did and it's done but when i look at a game it's sort of like ah between 80 and 100 hours i'm like oh really
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And one new TV show, the first season is 24 episodes. I don't know if you've got that good a story that you've got 24 episodes worth.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I mean, I only show them that stuff every other day, you know, just like once the tears stop, then we can show it them again. You know, you've got to just like drip feed the scars. I think.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Right. It's like, you know what? I love a 90-minute movie. That's like putting my slippers on. When I watch a 90-minute movie, I'm like, go on!
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Yeah. In this case, yes. It's not like we just keep going that way. You know, it's always, you're always at the will of the game. And that sounds quite hippie, but you know, like it was once we'd, A little bit. Yeah, sorry. I don't feel good having said that.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Once you've settled on a world that you're interested in and a theme that you're interested in and the kind of story you want to tell, then you start getting a feeling for what feels right and what feels wrong. The stuff that started to feel right was that this is a bit grittier. It should be a little bit more hard-edged.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And I just, I probably said the word violence more than anyone healthy ever should, you know, but that's been from the very beginning, even when I'm like kind of looking at, yeah, even the way things were illustrated, like, I think if there's a bit, felt a bit more violent, you know, I think it would feel a bit more fitting.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And so it, that, that follows with the, the atmosphere of the game as well is like hope really has to earn its place. I think here, or it would feel weird. it would feel like, I don't know if Ghibli belongs here as much. Maybe it's a bit more great with the Fireflies. But even that, there's a lot of beauty there that isn't here. But you know what I mean? There's other influences at play there.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
It's still made by us. We've still got a lot of people from the early days here. But yeah, we just kind of had a feeling that this game needs, if we did it one way, that wouldn't be how to execute this story to the best of its ability.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Yeah. I mean, you know, we were probably guilty of the other way that we were worrying that like, oh, this is feeling like we're treading old ground here, you know? And it was kind of making us lose sight of how to judge things correctly. We should have been judging it like what belongs in the game because we illustrate things a certain way. That's the way it is.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But the way, like the stuff that we bring to the way we illustrate still needs to evolve to suit the game that you're making. But we were still kind of like, oh, does it feel a bit too much like this? And then we had to check ourselves a little bit saying like, forget about that stuff.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
forget judging it against our past games we need to judge it against does it belong in this game and not you know not worry about whether we're emulating ourselves which is a very strange thing to um to accuse ourselves of, if you know what I mean?
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I think you phrased it that way.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Re-Animal is about a group of five friends, orphans, and you place two of them and they used to live in a nicer world at least it looked nicer and then something happens that changes how this world is changes the world around them and really what you're doing as the two players is finding your friends in the remnants of the place that you grew up and
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And trying as much as possible to get a sense of what it is that has happened and where you might be headed. And that's the coy elevator pitch, because I'm really, really worried at this point of kind of saying too much.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Oh, um, I mean, we do, I, I'm not an artist. If, uh, if you saw anything I did, uh, you would, you wouldn't need to be told that, but, um, I, as a lay person and as a gamer myself, I think we have one of the best teams in the world from what I've seen. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Or very few teams doing it like they can do it.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And that's not, I'm not kind of taking that credit at all, but like, I am just in awe. Sounds like you are. Well, I am a little bit, yeah. It's all down to me. I taught them how to do drawing. I just think they're phenomenal. We do record this, Murph. Just pretend I swear. No, they're great. Again, it's what drew so many of us to the company. It's like, again, this imaginative world, but
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
That's very cool. Thanks very much.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
you see even back in the day with metronome like who's doing that who comes up with that kind of idea for a character or a monster you know and so they just keep getting better the people who were here for so long but then we you get obviously you want to keep getting new blood in and like people are drawn to this company because they want to i know that's three times now
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Just maybe just put it up as a subtitle. Right, yeah, just so we're going to have a pun count here. That's also what a narrative director does, all right? So, like, when you do kind of establish your own house style, people look at that and kind of go, oh, do you know what? I want to be part of that. I think I belong there, you know?
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And one of our most recent concept artists, Constantine, is a perfect example of that, you know? is he came to us because of what he's seen. And it was, you know, like showed it to Pella, the art director. I was like, yeah, yeah. Get, talk to him, talk to him, you know, and it's super amazing that, that you kind of, it's so, how do you find people?
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
You know, you, it's just a, an absolute ocean out there, isn't it?
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Yeah. And that's what, I think that's where we find ourselves now. is that we've got a bit of a bigger megaphone, at least. We're nowhere in the grand scheme of things. There's so many bigger companies still, but when you can stand up and be heard at all, I think then people can hear you a bit.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Oh, there's a lot to unpick in that. I'll probably forget a lot of what you said. One minute. Go! It was something we wrestled with, but it's interesting you say that about Resident Evil, because I was the same. That's how I experienced those games before. mainly out of necessity because I was just too scared to play them alone.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Yeah, I've been with them for, what are we on now? Oh, I feel like Reese and Terminator.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But there's something about that that really resonated with us when we were thinking about whether to go co-op this time, you know, because we knew people were wanting it from our stuff or, you know, people were doing it anyway.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
They were just sitting there playing it together and communicating, oh, no, no, don't do it, you know, and there's something really kind of that's kind of shared enjoyment through what we've done. And we started thinking about, like, you know, how would that affect the kind of worlds we like to create?
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And like you say yourself, these personal experiences, would it kind of, the people who like to just mess about, you know, would they spoil anything? There's so much that you kind of, there's a risk to the atmosphere in that way. But then at the same time, maybe that's a challenge in itself where you kind of, you need,
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
15 years now.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
to create experiences where people aren't thinking about doing that really, you know, you're, you're more concerned with like just getting through it and like, you know, soaking up the atmosphere.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Um, it just felt like the way to go with, we thought of it very much in terms of movies, like watching horror movies together, particularly at the cinema, but kind of cathartic experience when scare comes and everyone, first of all, they jump in and you hear the laughter and, when everyone's just trying to calm down and get their ego back in check, you know, all that stuff.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And that felt a nice balance because we knew we weren't going to be, we were going to be losing a lot of the whimsy from the past, but we still like that balance. And I think this kind of addressed that balance then, where it was, you were sharing the horror, you were sharing this experience a bit more.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
So it informed the story about being scared together and going through something together as a group of friends. But then also in terms of the players' experience as well, being scared together and how do those two jive. It's a different feeling, isn't it, when you're players playing together as these characters who are obviously having a worse time.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But all of it just felt really interesting to us. In terms of the camera though, that was the final piece of the puzzle for, for presenting this in the way that we were. Right.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
No, we, we talked about that very, very early on and we kicked it to death very early on as well. We like, I think we maybe even did a test. We tried it and it was just sort of like, oh no, that's not the point. We're not going through this together anymore. Even though it presented more opportunities probably for fun gameplay, you know, I'll go this way and you go that way.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
The minute you split apart, it's not the same experience anymore. So we felt like we needed to nail that camera. And so we had someone do a test for this shared directed camera, which would
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
you know, it could pull out when we needed to, pull in when we needed it to, it could go wherever we wanted it to, to serve the scene that we were creating while always keeping the players on screen at all times. And when we got that test back, we were like, we've got it, that's it now, that's the game. And so that was like a real, real pivotal moment.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Yeah, I grew up in the 80s, so it's just lodged in there like a fishbone. Yeah, I mean, I came over in 2010, yeah, to work on the LittleBigPlanet game on the Vita. And so it's been just kind of with them ever since, you know. And I'd even seen back then, you know, what these people were capable of when I saw the, well, the unmade game, City of Metronome.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
The gameplay itself, you know, you've got to be really careful in terms of like, co-op gameplay when you're creating horror. It's not because we played in the early days. We, we, it takes two came out, you know, and we all played that, you know, with big fans of Joseph Farris stuff in Sweden.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And then it was great, but it was also, it would have been almost the antithesis of what we're doing because, um, that so much fun doesn't belong in this kind of... Exactly.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
So it becomes about just going through this together. There are obviously things that you have to do to progress forwards, co-op stuff. But it's not this kind of novelty, you know, I've got a bow, you've got an arrow. I've got this, you've got that. Because again, it becomes very gamey. And I love those kind of games. But for this, it was more about like, right, we're in a boat. I'll steer it.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
You look at what's coming, you know, look out for the danger with the lights. It's kind of more about that kind of cooperating to just stay alive, really. So that was kind of where we focused in on.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Yeah, I mean, audio always has to trail. It puts a lot of pressure on them. I mean, we don't get nothing. Because there's some stuff that you know, like how footsteps are going to sound and your effort sounds are going to sound and all that sort of stuff. So you get the basics, like, oh, when the door opens, it's going to sound like this. So you get a feeling for where you are.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But because we change so much and tweak that experience... Even if they do something late on, which they always have to, the thing has to exist first, and then they do sound design on it and compose music for it. They will do that, but it's...
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
It's probably an insufferable part of a composer and a sound designer's job where you're like, hey, we made these changes, by the way, because the game wasn't playing well enough or people weren't scared enough. Here you go. So now you've got to change everything. And I laugh about it. I don't take it that lightly, but it is like that.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And from my point of view as well, you look at what you've got and you're like, but this can be better.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
and we have to be that way until they drag it out the door so you know yeah Tobias is right audio does trail by necessity not completely you know if there's something that you have to prove and it's very much wound up with audio then you would probably just get something tempish to get it in to get that feeling but the actual final audio pass the whole thing has to exist first you know and
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
It's painful, but we have to make this the best it can be before it gets taken off us and given to you.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Kind of like, whoa, I want to be part of that, what they want to do, you know. So, I mean...
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Twin Peaks Fire Walk with me. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. Interesting. Nothing leaves me more shaken. I mean, it's probably another five I could list, but that one, 100%, so good.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I did, yeah. But the thing I liked most about that was the soundtrack. I had high hopes for that film, and it just didn't do it for me enough. Oh, my. Wow. I'm surprised to hear that. I'm with you on that one, Murph.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Midsommar. You guys are breaking my heart right now. The opening 20 minutes of Midsommar was fantastic. Oh, yes. All right.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
i joined as a designer then i became a narrative designer and then you know you kind of you remain the only one and then you stay there for so long like i actually want to be a director um can you explain what the difference is between a designer and a narrative designer well design i mean i was uh i used to work in the lego games when i lived in england like so like a level designer you know um and so i for the first seven months i was uh
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Reese's shotgun. I've got Reese on my brain now. Reese's shotgun under that overcoat. The coolest thing. I did that so much when I was a kid. Just going around with a coat on and a toy shotgun under it.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Oh, you had that in the trunk, didn't you? You know.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Reese has always got a shotgun. All right, that's fair. And if not, he can make plastic out of simple household items.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
That's true.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Resident Evil. Silent Hill 2 was a very close second, but that first Resident Evil game Me and my friend Studsy, we used to play that every night, and it was just phenomenal. When that came out, it was like nothing had ever played. Fantastic. On the first PlayStation?
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
This is going to be a knee-jerk reaction. All right. Right. Love. This is going to sound so scandalous, right? You know when someone's looking in the mirror and then they close that mirror and you know someone's going to be stood there American werewolf in London is like closing the mirror. And there's someone stood there looking at you. Hi, David. Yeah. Every time.
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REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Cause you know, they're going to be there. Yeah.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
You've seen it a gajillion times and you're still, it doesn't help that my wife like makes me jump every night. She's just somewhere where I'm not expecting to be. So like when I closed the mirror, she's generally there anyway, still gets me.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Go downstairs like we did in Blair Witch.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But no, I would say the one I hate most, I complain about the most, is if you watch things like Human Centipede, which you shouldn't, is when people are faced with clearly this is a psychopath and they invite you in and they just go in. You're like, what are you doing, man? That guy who opens the door to the girls at the start of Human Centipede is like that. Yes, I was just doing something.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
something's evil come in why don't you why are you doing i mean this is like the most okay yeah the most stereotypical evil guy in the world and it no no no no you know you know that's actually something that really bothered me about the walking dead too did you did you watch that series at all i i i did i i stopped in the end i just yeah
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REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
making stuff for the little big planet game you know um but i wasn't as good as the people that they got out of the community let's face it you know but they they knew even from my interview days that i really really wanted to be a writer and i'd done some of that stuff already for like lego rock band had done some stuff for them you know all of the writing on that and um so they knew
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
So much about that show ended up annoying me. What was it where they stopped at this lovely place and started picking strawberries and I'm like, it's a zombie apocalypse, man. We don't need this melodrama. Oh, and lo and behold, someone important got bitten and now they're dead. Yeah, that was me too.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really, really fun to talk to both of you. Thanks very much for having me. Bye, guys.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
re-animal um on the usual spots uh twitter i think we we even do instagram uh if i remember rightly andreas is terrible at tiktok so probably don't expect too much from that you can join our discord where we've got a very active discord server actually um so it's always nice to see new people on there and me and andreas do tend to uh
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
hide in the shadows there and jump in and chat to people now and again, even though it's very scary for a kid born in the seventies like me.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I was really jonesing to kind of move into that area. And they gave me a shot on Little Big Planet Vita, you know, so I ended up doing all of the script and the character stuff for that. And it's just been that way ever since, really, just trying to get better at what I do. And I think that as far as what a director does, it's kind of the same as what I've always done.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
It's anything wordy, except now I've got no one else to kind of go, yeah, but you told me to do it. It's like my fault now. You know, if anything's rubbish, then...
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
it's on me you know so I've got that extra bit of kind of mandate to decide how we do things narratively and how we tell a story how we end all that sort of stuff so it's really mainly just about more responsibility and making those final calls which you know particularly when you meet people like you John who is kind of like super excited about it I'm just feeling that oh I'm not that excited now like oh god what if it's rubbish
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I'm just the panic sets in like, yeah, it's on me. It's on me. So yeah, that's, that's just what you get the extra sleepless nights.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But, I mean, we'd always wanted to do our own stuff. And, you know... They were about nine people back in the day when Metronome was a thing and it just couldn't get done. The ambition was too big. The scope was too large. They couldn't do it. But what they did do is they got noticed by Sony.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And so they started doing stuff on LittleBigPlanet and they were doing costumes and all that business, you know. And when I joined, they actually, they weren't allowed to tell me until I signed my contract with them. They said, hey, listen, by the way, we're making the new LittleBigPlanet game and I'm I'm like you with Little Nightmares. I was a huge Little Big Planet fan at the time.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I love those games too. But even then, I went through several iterations of the story for Little Big Planet and it wasn't right until it started to get a little bit darker, a little bit sadder. There's an element of tragedy in that which doesn't belong in a Little Big Planet game. And then you look at some of the character designs
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
the curators in that game you could see like that was Jonas Berlin who did those as I remember and he's still with us now and you can see his style already then and it was you could you could feel the studio almost kind of wriggling around trying to push themselves out there not in a way that kind of was disrespectful to that to the idiom of Little Big Planet but still it was like they've got something in them that needs to come out in a more concentrated form you know something and
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
When we ended up moving away from LittleBigPlanet, we didn't even think how much we should have been panicking at that time. We departed ways very amicably. So you just channeled all that panic into your nightmares. I mean, I've been doing this since 2001, so I should have been a little bit more battle-scarred, but I was just like, that'll be fine. We'll make our own IP. Come on, let's just do it.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
How hard can it be? You know, and so we weren't worrying about like what people would think or anything. We just kept applying for money and then we started getting it. Um, and it was like, oh, we're gonna have to make a game now. You know, we got some money from creative Europe.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
We got some money from Nordic game and they were like, well, what we need for you to get this money is, uh, like a design document. And we're like, well, we just got an idea at the moment. It's about a kid.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
and in a bad place you know and now we had to figure out what that meant and so we were just brain poor everything was coming out of us you know like oh what are these these sketches are cool this camera's cool and i'm like oh what can it be about uh you know and all this and then suddenly things started to coalesce and so it was always there even in in those days and but the thing that was cool that we got from little big planet was that physicality that really had a
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
I found influence on the way Little Nightmares played, the interactivity, the tactility. Tactile was the watchword throughout the germination of that first game. and how everything felt very physical. It was really important.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
Let's just keep going. We'll do this for another 40 minutes and see how people go.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
More after this break.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
No, no. No, I mean, once we'd done the design documents, we did two. We did one that needed... It was about... We did, like, a one-pager to get them interested and then a ten-pager to get some money. And then this other foundation needed, like, a 35-page design document. So when you're forced to do that, you're forced to kind of solidify your ideas.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But, yeah, in the very beginning, it was kind of like... I... I was still desperate to make Metronome. I was just in love with what Metronome was in my head. And I think for each person in Tarsier who was around then, their idea of what Metronome is is probably a bit different. It's very personal. What is Metronome? It's very much in your head.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But I've been already toying around with that in my free time. What could it be if we turn it into something now, all these years later? So I had some ideas already and that's where the name Six had come in because I had created these characters and I was like, oh, I love this. That's a nice name, you know, because it was so androgynous. It was so mysterious and all of this.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
And so that just, I think it was a boy in the beginning and then it became a girl and then it became kind of irrelevant whether it was a boy or a girl because it was more interesting that she was Raincoat and who is this person, you know. So it was all the way back then. So when these things need to be done, I'm like, oh, I've got this stuff that I've been working on. That could be quite nice.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
But where can it take place? Oh, well, we've got this sketch of something which looks like a big kind of maggot that walks the sea. What do you think about that? All right, yeah. You know, and it is literally that. And so we didn't have a big plan. But what we always have is ideas. And it might be an idea that we'd had ages ago. Hang on, that might be nice here.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
You know, we just bring it in and it's just... I like working that way. It's nice not having to... It's stressful.
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
core draw and experience and you probably just added elements to it until you had this more crystalline sort of concept of of little nightmares come out of it yeah it could like uh dennis the guy i work with he he he put the word on it perfectly it was just quite chaotic in that way you know and it's like you just have to embrace it in the end and just go yeah that's the way we make stuff we kind of feel it out you know you play a segment and then you go
Video Gamers Podcast
REANIMAL & the Art of Fear – Interview w/ David Mervik (Tarsier Studios) - Gaming Podcast
missing something what do we need you know and it's like that you kind of taste in the soup all the time instead of going no this is it which is how we used to work on the lego games it was all pre-approved and we would make it to spec so you you know you have to really kind of beg to kind of change things when they've been pre-approved whereas here it's like you just keep tasting it then i sometimes it's too much and sometimes it's not enough and you just have to wait until you get the right