Headstrong Games’ Grindhouse-style reinvention of the classic House of the Dead series finally hits Wii today with all guns blazing. We chat to the development team about how The House of the Dead was changed to suit a western audience and what they think about being rated higher than a certain other PS3 game…

Overkill is the first game in the House of the Dead series to be developed exclusively for a home console. Does that affect how you go about developing a game in a genre typically intended for an arcade audience?
Neil McEwan (Lead Producer): Definitely. We looked at the original game and the Wii remakes and went to the arcades to play House of the Dead 3 & 4 exclusively for hours at a time. We made notes and dissected what those games are all about – we were referencing 2 & 3 all the time – so we had a good basis on what was cool about these games, what was fun about shooting zombies and expanded on that from there.

Jonathan Burroughs (Lead Writer): One of the things about arcade games is that they can be quite punishing, that maybe they’re designed to relieve you of your money. Boss fights in particular can spring on you unexpectedly and involve new mechanics meaning you’re not quite sure what to do initially. So, I think the most obvious way we accommodated the home player is through the separation of the story mode and the Director’s Cut. The story mode is quite lenient, you’ve got infinite continues, although the punishment of losing points means you can’t upgrade your weapons quite so quick. And then the Director’s Cut is more like the arcade experience, it’s a bit more hardcore and you have a limited number of lives, so I think that split is the main thing we’ve integrated for a home audience.

Neil: Yeah, adding the combo counter as well which leads to rewards, upgrades etc. gives further replayability. And because it’s not trying to get people to put another 50p in it all the time, we can add moments in levels that are frantic, and then a bit of downtime, so the pacing is very different to a typical light gun shooter. We had lots of debate over the length of the levels before deciding on the 10-15 minute mark. That’s quite long for a level in this genre, but we thought that felt right.

House of the Dead already has a huge fanbase behind it, but the Grindhouse/Tarantino vibe is a very different approach and one that may upset a few fans. Why did you decide to mix it up for Overkill?
Neil: Overkill is the first time House of the Dead has been developed outside of SEGA Japan, so we wanted to make it relevant to what was going on today and make it more contemporary. I think the Tarantino and Rodriguez movies made that pastiche, zombie-thing cool again, and it was a good starting point for us. We played around with a lot of different themes, but the pulp, Grindhouse stuff was a great well of reference that we could draw from; the music, types of characters, locations, the boss types and the gore, all that was ideal.

Jonathan: And I think as a westerner, playing House of the Dead has always come across as slightly weird, slightly cheesy – maybe intentionally so – but it’s always felt a bit lost in translation. With the Grindhouse theme we can be cheesy but self-knowingly so, and so I don’t think we’re changing the franchise, but making it quite relevant.

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