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[IbizaPocholo]

Denis Dyack, the director of the Nintendo-published psychological horror game Eternal Darkness, appeared on the latest episode of IGN Unfiltered. Dyack reflected on the GameCube title during a lengthy segment of the show.

Dyack discussed Nintendo’s interest in Silicon Knights after seeing the studio’s camera tech, moving the project from the N64 to the GameCube, working with Nintendo, and more. One interesting story came about when he was asked if any Sanity Effects were cut from the final game. Everything made it in, but not without some effort. Dyack actually spoke directly with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto about the one memorable Sanity Effect in which Eternal Darkness would make it seem as though your save file was being deleted.

Dyack recounted the story during the podcast, mentioning:

“There were some ones that almost got cut, and we again sat down – literally sat down – with Miyamoto and many of the crew at NCL and that made it in. That made me so happy… what it showed to me was how much Nintendo cares about their consumers. As game developers, I think we work for gamers. That is rule number one. The particular Sanity Effect that I’m referencing here is the one where it starts deleting your memory card really slowly. That was my personal favorite. I sat down and made sure that sort of meter went really slow enough for people to start screaming.

So Mr. Miyamoto sat down with a bunch of engineers and said, ‘Denis, what if someone looks at that, gets really angry, and throws their GameCube against the wall because they think it’s bugged out?’ And he goes, ‘Is that our fault?’ It caught me. I was like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ And he goes, ‘Well, what do we have to do for customer service for that? Have you thought of that?’ I was like, ‘I haven’t.’ He goes, ‘Have you ever seen anything like this before?’ I was like ‘No.’ And he goes, ‘Well what do you think?’ And I said, ‘I think because you’re saying have we ever seen this before, that we should do it, because I don’t think anyone has done this before.’ And he sat back, and everyone looked around, and they’re like, ‘We think this is really risky, but we’ll do it.’ And that’s what I remember most.

With Eternal Darkness, we pushed a lot of barriers. Eternal Darkness was not a typical Nintendo game. And when you look at the whole lovecraftian mythos, it doesn’t appear in any other Nintendo franchises, right? The whole idea that they would walk down that road with us and think about it… that is not a typical game that comes out of Nintendo, and they were on board, so far to even with that example. I had never considered that possibility. There’s a lot of good will that went into that, and they just believe in gamers. I said to them, ‘I think that experience will be something that gamers will remember forever.'”

 

[Deleted member 738976]

For

 

[Antoon]

I wish theyd port Eternal Darkness to Switch

 

[TeamGhobad]

I hate that we hated on Denis for so long, but we were young. lets not do that again.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Sorry Neogaf but your hate for Dyack was childish, misplaced and out of line. for shame the members, respectively, that drove him off the boards. That includes the rest of the media at large as well.

Reading Teamxbox review of Too Human made me realise then that journalists are nothing but hacks and hasbeens. They knocked two points off of the review because the character looked stupid during cutscenes because your armour changes carried through to the cut scene!

Too Human, while flawed, was the action/RPG we needed. LoK and Soul Reaver are the old series' which we need remakes/remasters/sequels of.

Come back to gaming Dennis. We miss you and tbh, your were like the least nuts of all the nutjobs we deal with day in, day out that don't give us quality games.

 

[plushyp]

It's sad that he burnt all his bridges given how both kickstarters for the spiritual sequel to ED got cancelled.

 

[Shifty]

Sorry Neogaf but your hate for Dyack was childish, misplaced and out of line. for shame the members, respectively, that drove him off the boards. That includes the rest of the media at large as well.

Reading Teamxbox review of Too Human made me realise then that journalists are nothing but hacks and hasbeens. They knocked two points off of the review because the character looked stupid during cutscenes because your armour changes carried through to the cut scene!

Too Human, while flawed, was the action/RPG we needed. LoK and Soul Reaver are the old series' which we need remakes/remasters/sequels of.

Come back to gaming Dennis. We miss you and tbh, your were like the least nuts of all the nutjobs we deal with day in, day out that don't give us quality games.

Good job lecturing a forum that, between atmosphere and userbase, has almost entirely changed since those days

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Good job lecturing a forum that, between atmosphere and userbase, has almost entirely changed since those days

Yeah, good point

 

[Bonfires Down]

Looks like he’s working on a mediocre looking F2P action game named Deadhaus Sonata now. Too bad, his focus should be on the story.

 

[royox]

Motherfuckers I turned off my Game Cube in full panic when I read the "Erasing Data" line.

 

[UltimaKilo]

One of my favorite games of all time. It deserves not only a remaster, but a full blown sequel. I don’t mean Shadow of the Eternals, but a full blown, Nintendo funded ED2. I have been waiting YEARS for this!

 

[CJY]

Now there's a name I haven't heard in a while.

 

[CJY]

Eternal darkness. My GOAT gaming pickup. Sealed copy for €1.50 at a flea market.

 

[Berserking Guts]

Still feel bad the way the former community treated this guy

 

[EviLore]

Sorry Neogaf but your hate for Dyack was childish, misplaced and out of line. for shame the members, respectively, that drove him off the boards. That includes the rest of the media at large as well.

Reading Teamxbox review of Too Human made me realise then that journalists are nothing but hacks and hasbeens. They knocked two points off of the review because the character looked stupid during cutscenes because your armour changes carried through to the cut scene!

Too Human, while flawed, was the action/RPG we needed. LoK and Soul Reaver are the old series' which we need remakes/remasters/sequels of.

Come back to gaming Dennis. We miss you and tbh, your were like the least nuts of all the nutjobs we deal with day in, day out that don't give us quality games.

He wanted to censor negative opinions about Too Human here, and he was in the wrong. He tried suing Epic after his game sucked, and he was in the wrong. The courts ordered unsold copies of Too Human to be pulled from store shelves and destroyed.

He has made good games, too, and he doesn't seem like a bad guy overall. He was pleasant when I met him. The revisionist history isn't necessary.

 

[Aintitcool]

I hate that we hated on Denis for so long, but we were young. lets not do that again.

Rants like a crazy guy on 1upyours that microsoft and sony need to unify architectures on next gen consoles because PS3 dev so bad.

Sony actually shares architecture with xboxone alot to improve development. As both use AMD GPU's and CPU's from same cut.

We called him a madman, but he turned out to be right about PS4 in like 2008.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

He wanted to censor negative opinions about Too Human here, and he was in the wrong. He tried suing Epic after his game sucked, and he was in the wrong. The courts ordered unsold copies of Too Human to be pulled from store shelves and destroyed.

He has made good games, too, and he doesn't seem like a bad guy overall. He was pleasant when I met him. The revisionist history isn't necessary.

He did throw a hissy fit when negative feedback was received for the demo of Too Human and that was wrong of him, he should have known better than to over-react to posts on the internet. The witch hunt by the gaming media was just as wrong, they shouldn't have vilified him for acting like a child. Both sides went toe to toe which soon snowballed out of control. Like the other poster said though; this isn't the same Neogaf.

 

[chase]

Dyack always seemed like a good dude to me. As someone who can't DMC, Too Human was an action game for me. I enjoyed it, despite the gif of an early cutscene where the hero performs a poorly-animated block of an attack, which seemed the be a major focus of the haters at the time. In hindsight, I feel it came out at an awkward time where things were changing toward people wanting to show their skill more and more over just having a pretty cool game to play. You can see this in streaming, where (all else being equal) watching the best is more important than most other things. I'm probably in the minority again where I don't find watching the best very interesting after a few hours.

It's pretty amazing that this is still going on.

 

[IYAOYAS2019]

He wanted to censor negative opinions about Too Human here, and he was in the wrong. He tried suing Epic after his game sucked, and he was in the wrong. The courts ordered unsold copies of Too Human to be pulled from store shelves and destroyed.

He has made good games, too, and he doesn't seem like a bad guy overall. He was pleasant when I met him. The revisionist history isn't necessary.

Sounds like he fit right in with the old Neogaf before the purge happened and everybody left to that "other site".

 

[Silver Wattle]

I may be thinking of someone else but doesn't he talk shit often?

 

[Chittagong]

Eternal Darkness was such a masterpiece. The plot, the ambiance, the sanity effects, the structure of the game, the polish, it was a phenomenal achievement. Along with MGS, Silicon Knights was a top studio. It was sad that they ended up doing a generic, hollow game with Too Human.

While his hissy fit was silly, I do like Denis. It’s good to keep in mind that GAF was very different when everything with him went down. It certainly wasn’t the cozy, grown up place it is today.