Which may not involve the Spookhouse at all, is what you're saying.

Smith: Maybe not in a direct method, but more on the fringe. Like we're going to use Doc Holliday, a main Spookhouse character for us, to be the hero of the game. Well you should see other Spookhouse operatives, but I'll leave that to the game and not reveal the whole thing to you. Because there's some gameplay elements there. You take lead of Doc, you've got a whole different set of things to worry about because in Nocturne, the Stranger was a pretty pimp, buff, badass character who was known for giving very little time to anybody. He was like, shut up, get out of my way, or I'm gonna kill you.

Yeah, follow me or die.

An early 3D render of Doc, the star of the BWP game from TRI (28k).

Smith: Yeah he had a lot of stamina, and he could wield different weapons and things like that. Where, Doc is of course, she's not going to be treated like Lara Croft on steroids. The world that has been revealed to the players of the Nocturne trilogy, and you don't have to own Nocturne to enjoy any one of these Blair Witch stories. These are stories themselves. At least ours is not going to be as large as our full release. They're not like mini-episodes or add-on packs, they're stand-alone games. Nocturne, when we first had the engine, before we even started working on Nocturne the game, this was back when the engine itself was called Demon. And there was a trademark conflict there so nocturne the engine became the name. This is like making a movie! That's where the heavy cinematic camera angles in Nocturne was used on purpose. It's because that's what we really wanted to create a dual-reality, a dual-experience for the palyer to be able to participate in a visually rich, cinematic feeling, type game. The kind that kept you on the edge of your seat. And also, never kept you bored, visually or even with surround sound which you could take audio clues and get chills and spills. So we didn't make Nocturne to be like Brrr Scary! But it was eerie. <LAUGHS>

It was pretty scary too.

Smith: It had some scary stuff but for the most part while you played through it, it was always kind of a itchy nature that anybody would consider happy or fun like Ha ha ha. So I'm trying to give yo uthe really broad overview while leaving some of the specifics to question, as far as what the gameplay is going to be, but I'm going to let Mills really get you more into that.

And as far as any questions goes about the support of Haxan, or even Artisan, or anybody like that, it's been very very positive. I'll kind of start from the beginning: they have some key individuals outside of Haxan who are the keepers of the mythology and they're the authors of various documents that involve Blair Witch and the Blair Witch universe. As far back as it goes and it far as it might go in the future and yadda yadda. And we've got a scriptwriter at Gathering named Billy Haskins. Now Jeff Mills for our story had already written and implemented the majority of the script but Billy will be way more actively involved with Human Head and Ritual with going back and cleaning things up, making sure continuity is there with our script and everything that will follow. All the stories will have very close ties and we want people to play through.

Doc concept artwork (79k).

We want people to get all 3 of them. Because things in Human Head's Blair Witch will maybe answer some questions, or cover some ground that wasn't covered in our Blair Witch. So there are advantages to playing through all 3 of the different titles. You don't have to, each one of them is going to be cool, fun, exciting, and captivating. It's going to make for 10's of hours of gameplay, no doubt about it just to even finish it. Haxan, they've been looking over our shoulder, we send them all sorts of design documents, our script, everything, so that we can get the actual creator's eyes on it even though they are not trying to micromanage the deal, they love everything we give them, but they also give us 100% freedom to take their intellectual property in Blair Witch, this amazing thing they've created, and run with it and make a game. They acknowledged right from the beginning: we make games, they make movies. And the two don't necessarily have a very sweet marriage if you try to do 50/50.