Dead Space Team Studied the Dead for Inspiration

You think your job is hard? You have it easy compared to the guys working over at EA Redwood Shores.

Writing for EDGE Online, Glen Schofield, the Executive Producer on Dead Space, explains how his team got the mutilated corpses in Dead Space just right. Where most developers would watch Aliens or something lame like that, the hardworking staff over at EA Redwood Shores studied car crash and war victims. Yes, they poured over images of people with all sorts of body parts strewn all over the place. Yeah...

"We knew this would be difficult to portray, because sometimes gore in games looks cheap and unrealistic. Sure enough, the first few corpses that we did, just weren't convincing enough. I rejected them.

"This sounds horrible, but we had to go look at pictures of car accidents and war scenes and things like that because we had to get it right; we had to portray scenes of terrible carnage and realism. It's a big part of making that experience convincing." -- EDGE

Is it wrong to imagine some guy eating Cheetos while making notes on how intestines look when they're outside the body? I know we've all stumbled upon the dark corners of the Internet that have this kind of stuff, but can you imagine having to study them and then recreate them? I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.