GAME · 2015
Until Dawn
- Publisher
- Sony Interactive Entertainment
29 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Sep 2026
All facts (29)
- #001
Until Dawn was developed by the British studio Supermassive Games.
- #002
Supermassive Games began developing Until Dawn from an idea for a PlayStation 3 game for the PlayStation Move accessory, with a stronger narrative focus than its earlier titles such as Start the Party!.
- #003
The proposed Until Dawn was conceived as a horror game resembling a slasher film, aimed at a younger audience that publisher Sony Computer Entertainment had courted with the Move.
- #004
Supermassive Games hired American horror film writers Larry Fessenden and Graham Reznick to script Until Dawn, feeling that the studio's British writers wrote in a "parochial" way unsuited to horror.
- #005
Until Dawn was initially exclusive to PlayStation Move, requiring players to buy the Move controller to play it functionally. In that version, navigation and progression depended on moving the motion controller, which guided the characters' flashlight from a first-person perspective and could also be used to interact with objects and solve puzzles.
- #006
An early version of Until Dawn supported two-player cooperative multiplayer, with the studio targeting young couples in their twenties. A segment shown at Gamescom 2012 drew positive comments, but the most common complaint was the game's Move exclusivity, as most people did not want to purchase a controller for it.
- #007
While Until Dawn was at the alpha development stage, Byles experimented with the game's debug camera and saw the potential of switching to a third-person perspective, which would turn it from a first-person adventure into a more cinematic experience. The game also moved from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 and expanded its scope to include more mature content aimed at an older demographic.
- #008
Until Dawn's graphics were changed using the Decima engine created by Guerrilla Games, and the lighting system had to be reworked. Particle effects and volumetric lighting were also used extensively to light the game's environments.
- #009
Despite its third-person perspective, Until Dawn adopted a static camera angle similar to early Resident Evil games. The development team initially resisted this approach because the designers considered the camera "archaic".
- #010
Byles and production designer Lee Robinson drew storyboards for Until Dawn to ensure each camera angle had narrative motivations and to prove their placements were not random.
- #011
Inspired by Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, Supermassive turned Until Dawn into an interactive movie and devised a "butterfly effect" system in which player choices shape the story and lead to different endings.
- #012
According to Byles, every character in Until Dawn can live or die in any order and in many ways, and no two players will have the same experience because some scenes are locked away by different choices, encouraging replay.
- #013
Until Dawn's strict auto-save system was designed to be "imperative" rather than "punitive". According to Byles, a character's death would not end the story before it reached the ending, and some characters may not have died despite their deaths being hinted at.
- #014
Some of Until Dawn's plot points were designed to be indirect and vague so that the narrative would gradually unfold. Byles acknowledged this design choice as "risky" and said it might disappoint mainstream players, though he felt it enhanced the game's "horror" elements.
- #015
Until Dawn's pacing was inspired by Resident Evil and Silent Hill, which feature quiet moments without enemy encounters that help enhance tension.
- #016
Until Dawn was inspired by several classic horror films, including Psycho, The Haunting, The Exorcist, Halloween, Poltergeist, Evil Dead II and The Conjuring. The developers studied horror tropes and clichés so they could subvert them in the game.
- #017
Fessenden and Reznick wrote a script for Until Dawn that ran to nearly 10,000 pages.
- #018
Until Dawn's playable characters were built as typical horror movie archetypes, but the writers had them reveal more nuanced qualities as the narrative progressed. The writers believed games, unlike films, could use quieter moments for characters to express inner feelings.
- #019
Until Dawn's story was written in a non-linear fashion, with chapter 8 completed first, which led to some inconsistencies in the story. The dialogue was cut back significantly once the team adopted motion capture technology, which the team said facilitates storytelling through acting.
- #020
The Until Dawn development team aimed to instill fear in players and sought a balance of terror, horror and disgust. Supermassive leaned most heavily on terror, which Byles defined as the dread of an unseen threat.
- #021
To gauge whether Until Dawn was frightening enough, the team measured playtesters' fear levels using a galvanic skin response test.
- #022
Byles described Until Dawn as taking horror back to its roots, noting that it prioritized tension over action in contrast to many competing titles.
- #023
Jason Graves started composing the music for Until Dawn in 2011, and the scoring process spanned three orchestra recording sessions over the course of a year.
- #024
Before writing the score, Jason Graves held a three-hour conversation with Barney Pratt, Until Dawn's audio director, to clarify the soundtrack's intended direction.
- #025
Jason Graves composed Until Dawn's main theme first, believing it captured the team's goals, and submitted it to Supermassive Games as the demo pitch.
- #026
For Until Dawn, Jason Graves blended melodic and atonal sounds, drew on Krzysztof Penderecki and Jerry Goldsmith, and wrote tonally vague themes to match the game's mysterious storyline; the music grew louder as the player character neared a threat.
- #027
Until Dawn's mountainous setting led Graves to use a "goat-hoof shaker" for the mountain theme and many key tracks, and he also leaned heavily on synthesizers as a homage to John Carpenter's work.
- #028
Only 30 minutes of Until Dawn themes with melody and chord progression were recorded across three orchestral sessions, because most recording time went to 8–10 hours of atmospheric music and sounds that Graves later combined to evoke different emotions in different scenes.
- #029
Until Dawn's Decima game engine was programmed to determine how the music was layered based on players' choices, and the game's soundtracks ran nearly 15 hours, with "O Death" performed by Amy Van Roekel as the theme song.
Sources & editorial notes
Sources for the entries on this page
- Wikipedia Until Dawn — Wikipedia
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