Genre terms like "Soulslike," "Roguelite," and "Metroidvania" let us trace most new video games back a few decades if necessary, so I feel I should add John Carpenter's 1982 science fiction film The Thing to the list of family names. How else could I explain recent and upcoming game releases like Bloober's Cronos: The New Dawn and Supermassive's Directive 8020?
Both these Thinglike/Thingish/Thingian video games – along with many other titles from the past few years, including Among Us, Still Wakes the Deep, and the 2024 remaster of PS2 shooter The Thing, obviously – brazenly worship Carpenter's film, which was unpopular at its release but now enjoys a reputation as one of the best horror movies. It may be less common for a suite of video games to take inspiration from a film rather than another game, but it makes sense in the case of The Thing, since its monster offers the putty-like elasticity required by a dynamic gaming experience.
Monster mash
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It helps that The Thing's "monster" is a two-fold situation – there's the alien thing first described in 1938 sci-fi novella Who Goes There? and originally depicted in 1951 film The Thing from Another World, and then there's the paranoia.
The latter is what keeps The Thing relevant, winter after winter, storm after storm. Carpenter himself acknowledged this when he told The Guardian that, "The film was about the end of the world. Its bleakness was the reason it wasn't a success at the time, but I think also why it has endured."
It's an especially gray film, set on an Antarctic research base made up of walls that match the floors, surrounded by snow that matches its inhabitants' eyeballs. That's until the red comes in, dripping. Without knowing, the researchers have allowed a shapeshifting alien creature capable of flawlessly impersonating other living things to infiltrate their base.
So the researchers lose it, and they become quick to accuse each other of being phonies while their beards start freezing in the cold. But no matter who they tie up or threaten, the Thing skitters on, bursting out of their chests, dancing on the ceiling, and exuding Carbopol polymer slime, whose existence presumably contributed to the fact that special effects artist Rob Bottin was hospitalized for exhaustion.
Fear factory
"HAVE HORROR FILMS GONE TOO FAR?" The New York Times asked in an article days before The Thing came out in theaters.
"As the audiences' tolerance threshold for chills and thrills went up," film critic Elliott Stein wrote about the olden times of black-and-white horror in the shadows, "horror films have come to rely more and more on sheer, explicit representations of the ugly and the terrible – and less on psychological fable, artful suggestion and the filmgoer's imagination."
While the ensuing years of torture porn, grindhouse, and body horror makes that statement hard to refute in film, games have always been in the unique position of terrorizing you psychologically and physically – because they both show you what they're about and make you execute their stories with your hands.
Even the Atari game Haunted House, which was released in the same year as The Thing, demonstrates this in a way that most movies can't. Its ghosts consist of only a few bleached, pixel squares, but they can harm your player character, and this makes them infinitely more real than your average Freddy Krueger.
But, while it is a movie, The Thing also demonstrates the two dimensional horror found in games like Haunted House. Its monster is both physical and psychological – a mess of shapeshifting Carbopol, and the anxiety it spawns. This is what makes it, more than any other film, worthwhile video game material.
A new kind of Thing
In the last few years, during which things like global politics, inflation, and a reactionary attitude of indifference have made daily life as unpleasant as The Thing's Antarctic chill, some game developers seem to be coping by perfecting their Thingian formula.
That's clear in the visually impressive and psychically destructive Cronos: The New Dawn, which – as co-director Jacek Zięba mentioned to me in July – only has zombies that merge into super-abominations because of The Thing. Trapped with these highly suspicious monsters like one of the movie's researchers, I quickly became nervous as I played the survival horror game ahead of my Cronos: The New Dawn review.
The game's enemies slurped each other up while they were sleeping or dead, until they looked like the Polish version of the Palmer-Thing (its arms are ropes and its flesh is raspberry jelly). After this evolution occurred, they tried killing me with more enthusiasm, so I trained my eyes to be irritated and darting like Kurt Russell's. I started burning zombies' bodies with my torch fuel, even when they'd given me no sign they'd attack. In these ways, Cronos is a worthy and distinctive iteration of The Thing.
Next, some time in 2026 after delaying its October release date, Supermassive Games will release its own unofficial interpretation of The Thing in another one of its signature, interactive drama survival horror games – Directive 8020.
"We were very much initially inspired by the movie The Thing, in terms of a creature that can morph its body and warp itself to look like anyone from your crew," creative director Will Doyle told GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2024, but, "We've taken it further." Isn't that great? There are so many opportunities to let The Thing consume you.
