What's that you say? Renowned comics (and arcade book foreword) writer Warren Ellis worked on Dead Space? Wow, that's great! Oh...what's that you say? He worked on it over two years ago and now there's barely anything, if at all, of what he did left? Wow, that...sucks. Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield:
So, ah, with all due respect to Warren... Warren came at the very beginning of the game; we figured we needed a writer and Warren came in and we had our direction, our ideas. We knew we wanted a religion running through it and we knew we wanted psychological terror as well as grotesque terror. Warren is more of sci-fi writer; how many of these ideas are leftovers from what he wrote, I don't know – I'd have to go back a reread all his work. But he's just a good guy... we tried a bunch of writers. The one thing he really helped us out with was, when we first started to do the comic book, we asked Warren. He hit deadlines for us, he did everything right – but he came on two and-a-half years ago and some of the ideas filter out.
I think Warren also helped out on some of the back-story of the characters, the naming of them – because he was good at that. But what he did was he also introduced us to Anthony Johnson who became our writer for the comic series. Then Anthony eventually wrote most of the dialogue for the game. As a comic book writer, he mostly wrote in short sentences, which is what we need.
Ah well. Kinda sucks for Warren. Then again, we're sure he got paid either way. In cigarettes. Cartons and cartons of Silk Cut cigarettes.
Dead Space AU Interview [IGN] [Image]