Interview | Martin Filipp (Cursed Mountain)

The Nintendo Wii, made popular by its catering to family-oriented social play, isn’t exactly the most obvious venue for a new survival horror release.

But Austrian developers Deep Silver are confident that the console has a fairly large player base who continue to wish for something more intense and grown-up.  Cursed Mountain, set for release at the end of next week, is their attempt to fill this gap.

We spoke to Deep Silver’s Martin Filipp about the game, the importance of art design, developing for the Wii and the seemingly fading survival horror genre.

Resolution: First and foremost, why the Wii?  What attracted you to it as a platform?  Cursed Mountain is not exactly typical of its general output.

Martin Filipp: Initially, we had this appealing idea of how cool it could be to have a game take place in the Tibetan region: the loneliness, the environment, the religious buildings and practices. When we were developing the concept we felt that we really wanted to offer a different fight experience – not too far away from what people know, but with some very special elements. All the stories about the real background and rituals combined with the rise of the Wii with its motion control features led to the decision to create it for Wii. It was the designed gameplay that drove that. And we believe that there’s a huge audience out there who are constantly dumped with casual entertainment and we want to give them something they really don’t get every day.

R: How have you found working with the Wii’s technology?  In certain ways, it’s less powerful than other current-gen machines.  Has this meant less flexibility in design and development?

MF: Personally I think that is a completely wrong approach. The Wii has no less or more limitations than any other console. Basically, every limitation creates new ideas and requires new approaches that push the team as well as the hardware to its limits. And to be very honest, game development is all about being flexible – other than that a game would not see the shelves. The Wii has its own charm to develop for, so to say.

R: The game covers topics such as Buddhism and Tibetan folklore – rather unusual in games.  What drew you to these?

We truly believe that content is most important and crucial for a successful and interesting game. So we always spend a lot of time in pre-production finding an original and rich setting that offers the player a new and unique game experience. The first idea for Cursed Mountain was based on ancient Asian religions. We simply got hooked by the literally endless gameplay possibilities and the beautiful environments of the Himalayas: religious architecture, daily prayer routines, the landscapes, and fighting against the elements.

Our design director, responsible for the concept of Cursed Mountain is a big fan of Japanese and Asian games in general. So we started our research in Katmandu and Tibet, which became actually the internal code name for Cursed Mountain – KTM. KTM stands for Katmandu. We want to tell a story about a Western guy that is confronted with a mythology and an ancient world he doesn’t understand. He learns to deal with it though and accepts all the weird stuff that is happening to him, because his main goal is to find his younger brother Frank – hopefully alive.

R: It seems like the environment is key in Cursed Mountain – not just in terms of atmosphere, but also as a very real part of the game.  It seems to be about the vastness of the perceived play area, and about battling the elements within it.  How important do you think this sort of environmental design is in games?

MF: We think an authentic and rich setting is vital for the individual perception of a game. It was most important for us to convey the openness and beautiful mountain scenery of the Himalayas. Standing on the top of the world overseeing all those 26,000 feet high mountains is very impressive but also frightening while fighting against the elements. And that feeling is a vital part of mountaineering. In Cursed Mountain we used real-world satellite data to create the levels and the mountain itself, so the dimensions are approximately those of real Himalayan terrain.

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