The director of ‘Dead by Daylight’ says he has always been a “wuss”.
Despite creating the nightmarish horror game, Mathieu Côté says he even used to get spooked by Jabba the Hutt.
He told NME: “I’ve famously always been a wuss. I used to have nightmares about Jabba the Hutt.”
Competitive multiplayer game ‘Dead by Daylight’ pits four people – dubbed “Survivors” – against a fifth player, “The Killer”, who must catch and slaughter them all.
It includes some of the biggest names in horror such as Chucky, Ghost Face, and Freddy Krueger, and since its launch in 2016, the game has become one of the biggest console horrors and is played by over 60 million people.
Villains from ‘Alien’, ‘Stranger Things’ and ‘Saw’ have also been added, which Mathieu says have helped “legitimise” the game’s longevity.
He added: “The world of ‘Dead by Daylight’ is strong enough that it manages to make sense of the fact that you have the Demogorgon chasing (‘Halloween’ movie heroine) Laurie Strode through the school where Freddy Krueger lives in the basement.
“At the same time, we’ve managed to create iconic characters that can stand proudly next to those legends of horror.”
Mathieu has struggled to persuade owners of the horror characters to let him use them in his game, and said: “We don’t do things because they’re easy – we do them because we thought they were going to be easy.”
The game gas spawned dating sim spin-off ‘Hooked on You’ and announced a tie-in psychological horror game called ‘The Casting of Frank Stone’, while a film adaptation with Insidious production studio Blumhouse is in the works.
Mathieu was a bartender, sex shop manager and game animator before making it big with ‘Dead by Daylight’.
After its release in June 2016 the slasher had sold more than one million copies by August.
