One Of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Scariest Parts Is Easily Overlooked
In my The Texas Chain Saw Massacre review, I called it one of the scariest games I’ve ever played. I’ve since put over 100 hours into the game, and that remains true to this day. A horror game can rarely be affecting for that long. Usually, exposure should desensitize you to even the genre’s all-time greats. But the unpredictable nature of the PvP game makes each round feel like a new horror story unfolding around me.
Beyond the famous family and their taunting dialogue, the maps arranged like dizzying death traps, and the final girl (or guy) music that pulsates like an encroaching cacophony of violence, there’s another layer that adds to the haunting atmosphere of the game–but it’s easily missed. At the start of each round, brief excerpts of radio broadcasts can be heard. These range from seemingly innocuous baseball recaps to reports of murder and mayhem alluding to the game’s playable cabal of killers. GameSpot recently spoke to Gun Media creative director Ronnie Hobbs about why and how the Texas Chain Saw Massacre news feed came to be, and how giving the game a sense of place creates a terrifying reality for the players.
“I think there was one point in development where we wanted the initial radio broadcast, the one talking about Maria Flores, to play. So for a while, that’s the only one we had.” Hobbs told me. “It talks about her disappearance, just to set the tone for the match as you load in. And even though you only hear like 10 seconds of it, it grounded the game in reality. And then when we heard it, we were like, ‘Wow, okay, this is actually really cool.’ And we’re like, ‘This is so cool that we should fill it in with other things.’ We just didn’t know what those were. So that was really how it got started. Myself and designer Rob Fox wrote these. Once we figured out that we wanted more of those, he and I started down the journey of doing that.”