As a game developer, few things are more anxiety-inducing than the review embargo. It’s standard practice for a select number of games media outlets and influencers to get early access to the biggest new releases, and then they’re given an embargo – a set time and date where they can start talking about the game and their impressions. This is when games get scored, and sites like Metacritic fill up with impressions.
“I haven’t slept because the game comes out on the 15th, but the embargo lifts today, so everybody’s crazed,” The Outsiders director David Goldfarb tells GLHF on the morning of September 12. Metal: Hellsinger is just days away from launch, and the review impressions just might decide whether or not thousands of people play the game, making this a nerve-racking moment.
“You just never know, and I haven’t shipped a game in like nine years, so I’ve forgotten what it feels like,” Goldfarb says, referring to his director role on PayDay 2. Before that, Goldfarb worked on EA’s flagship Battlefield series and the PlayStation-exclusive Killzone 2. Clearly, it never gets much easier. “I think it’s just nine years of build-up where you’re like; ‘oh, let’s just get it out of the way’.”
Metal: Hellsinger is a brand new rhythm shooter which sees you blasting down demonic monsters in time to the original soundtrack. Each stage is coupled with a unique song, and you can compete for high scores in online leaderboards. Best of all is that Hellsinger’s soundtrack features vocal tracks from renowned metal musicians, including System of a Down’s Serj Tankian, Trivium’s Matt Heafy, Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe, and more.
“The way it started was, I was playing Doom (2016), and I happened to have the music turned down, and I was listening to Meshuggah in the background. And I decided to start doing stuff to the beat,” Goldfarb says, explaining the moment he came up with Hellsinger’s concept. “I thought there could be a game there; there’s this flow overlap that happens when you’re listening to music and shooting on the beat. Then I came up with playing as a demon, and fighting your way out of hell. And then I forgot about it. A few years passed, and Funcom asked me if there was a game I wanted to make.”
The fact that well-known artists have collaborated on the soundtrack for Metal: Hellsinger has been fantastic for marketing, and the Metal: Hellsinger concert at Gamescom 2022 probably wouldn’t have been viable if it weren’t for famous names being present. As a big metal fan, Goldfarb knew exactly who he wanted to collaborate with.
“But that didn’t mean we could get them,” he says. “Two Feathers are the composers and sound designers. We talked and we didn’t know who we could convince yet, because we didn’t have anything to show, we just had a prototype.”
“Nicklas’ (Hjertberg, one half of Two Feathers) mother knew the girlfriend of Mikael Stanne, the singer for Dark Tranquility,” Goldfarb says as he outlines the series of coincidences that solidified the direction for Hellsinger.
“So Stanne was who we reached out to first, and then when he laid down the track, we did a bunch of iterations and heard it, we were like, ‘OK, yeah, that’s gonna work.’ Then it became a snowball effect where every time we signed one person, we suddenly had a widening circle of people willing to work with us.”
The Gamescom 2022 Metal: Hellsinger concert felt like one of the biggest moments of the event, and cemented Gamescom’s return to in-person events. Goldfarb says it was organized in less than four months.
“Thank God I wasn’t doing the organization. It was a lot of planning and coordinating because we weren’t even on location,” Goldfarb says. “The other thing is, all of these artists were touring. So we had a super narrow window of opportunity to make it happen. It was unbelievable that we were able to pull it off. Our team, I don’t know how they did it.”
Tensions are high on the run-up to a big launch, as is clear when Goldfarb tells me how much sleep he’s had: “Probably like, four hours in three days, or something.” But even with that kind of stress and anxiety mounting, he only had one regret to share in our whole chat. “If we just could have had like, more people in the pit. I had actually f***ed up my foot; I really wanted to be in there but, no.”
Written by Dave Aubrey on behalf of GLHF.
