THE MAKING OF: THE SUFFERING 1 & 2
IN THE KNOW
» PUBLISHER: MIDWAY GAMES
» DEVELOPER: SURREAL SOFTWARE
» RELEASED: 2004, 2005
» PLATFORM: PS2, XBOX, PC
» GENRE: ACTION HORROR
Prison is hell. This was an idea taken literally in The Suffering series, a pair of games released in the early Noughties for Windows, PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Following the story of convicted death-row inmate Torque, these horror shooters saw players pitted against a horde of twisted creatures as they attempted to escape a cursed prison island and then a monster-infested city.
The games were developed by Surreal Software, a Seattle-based company founded in 1995. Surreal’s first title was Drakan: Order Of The Flame, a third-person fantasy action adventure released in 1999 for Windows. This was followed by a sequel, The Ancients’ Gates, for the PlayStation 2 in 2002. As development on The Ancients’ Gates was wrapping up, Surreal had begun pitching to Midway Games, developers of the Mortal Kombat franchise, for funding on its next project. Surreal had floated the possibility of doing a horror title; lacking an entry in the genre, Midway had embraced the idea and given the project the go-ahead.
The first was set inside Abbot State Penitentiary, an Alcatraz-like institution located off the coast of Maryland on the fictional Carnate Island. Carnate is an island with a dark and sordid history, on whose blood-soaked soil many an atrocity has been committed throughout the long centuries. The island is hit by a mysterious supernatural
