Friday the 13th Is Gruesome, Cringeworthy, and Scary Exciting
Friday the 13th: The Game is alive and kicking. It’s also screaming and shouting as the 7v1 competitive co-op game is now available for pre-order. We caught up with Executive Director Randy Greenback at PAX East to talk about the game, the Cinderella story behind it, and how gruesomely awesome the new trailer is.
“The game didn’t actually start out as a Friday the 13th game,” Greenback said. “We announced it as Slasher Vol 1: Summer Camp, and it was an homage to Friday the 13th. We started getting covered by everyone, which was a surprise to us.” And about then is where the magic started to happen. The developer team, Gun Media, was approached by the owners of the Friday the 13th franchise and were offered a licensing deal. Essentially, they were handed the license on a silver platter, and Greenback was both grateful and blown away.
“This sort of thing doesn’t happen,” Greenback noted. “It was a huge Cinderella story.”
But with a name like Friday the 13th comes expectations. Gun Media launched a wildly successful kickstarter simultaneously with announcing that they’d acquired the license. Slasher was on the path to being more than just a cult hit game. “There’s no expectations for Summer Camp,” Greenback said. “People are going to expect a much bigger and better experience with Friday the 13th. They’d already given us the license. They weren’t going to give us bags of cash. There was a gap between what was expected and what we could afford.” That didn’t deter the team at Gun Media at all. In fact, they couldn’t be more excited by the explosion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWF3N7vUeLI
PAX East Panel with Co-creator Ronnie Hobbs, executive producer Randy Greenback and junior producer/community lead Ben Strauss
Friday the 13th is a franchise with a long legacy, and Gun Media is holding true to their expectations. Their contribution to the franchise is important and could be a remarkable addition to anyone’s game library. It’s the kind of experience that is always different, and Greenback talked about how varied the gameplay was. “There’s so many ways the game can end. Every game has a story to tell. The person who plays Jason is ramped up in power over the course of the match. The gameplay comes down to if Jason lives long enough, he can easily kill everyone. The counselors goals are more nuanced. They can do different things to win the game.”
Check out the trailer Gun Media debuted at PAX, and be prepared to squirm, cringe, and scream your way into preordering for Xbox One, Playstation 4 and Steam.
