Toxic Commando: Fusing blood, mud, and John Carpenter

Ever wondered how a streamer's fear of being stuck in the mud sparked an entire game idea? 🤔 Journalist Brian Crecente sat down with Saber Interactive's Tim Willits, Chief Creative Officer, and Nikolai Egorikhin, Lead Producer, to dive into the origins, chaos, and creative vision behind John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando. 🧟💥

It started with a spark of an idea: What if you mashed up an off-road trucking simulator with the dread of a lurking evil? Then came the prototyping and mud. Finally, John Carpenter signed on, bringing with him his horror film pedigree, storytelling prowess, synth music compositions, love of video games, and—of course—his name.

John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is a four-player co-op first-person shooter, swarming with the infected and created as a new IP that echoes Carpenter's broad portfolio. It lands March 12 on console and computer. Getting to this point, though, was a fascinating journey from a player’s offhand remark, through seemingly endless prototyping and play sessions, to the final delivery of a game that has you winching a stuck vehicle out of the mud as your teammates gun down hordes of infected.

It’s nighttime, I’m stuck, and it’s scary

As the story goes, Saber Interactive CEO Matt Karch was watching a streamer playing SnowRunner when the idea popped up. “It was at night, and the guy got stuck in the mud,” said Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber. “And the streamer was like, ‘Ah, this is really scary. It’s nighttime, and I’m stuck in the mud.’ “Of course, nothing’s going to happen to you in SnowRunner, but that kind of sparked an idea that we had great success with World War Z —we just passed 30 million players—and we had great success with SnowRunner. It was this spark of an idea that blended the two together. “Why don’t we take them and make larger environments that you can navigate with vehicles, but lean in toward the zombie shooters? You would need to use the vehicles to survive and use them to get around the infected. And the infected would attack you when you’re using those vehicles. It would create much more emergent gameplay throughout the entire experience.” Taking that spark and nurturing it into something that was both playable and engaging ended up being a bit more complicated than they first suspected, said Saber Interactive Lead Producer Nikolai Egorikhin. The heart of this emerging game would be driven by the physics and mud simulator of the MudRunner series and the swarm technology of the developer’s World War Z game. Both bits of tech have evolved since their introduction. Willits said the swarm tech introduced in World War Z was perfected in Space Marine 2, but that they still “blew it up” for Toxic Commando. The terrain deformation tech, which was called Husky in SnowRunner, has also grown to become an inherent part of the studio’s game engine. To mash the two technologies together, the team decided to take more of a sandbox approach to early design. Foregoing the need to jot things down on paper, the team would just throw the ideas into a build and experiment. “We were aiming to quickly get through the paper phase because the concept itself was cool,” Willits said. “You can imagine it. Just close your eyes and imagine getting stuck in the mud and zombies approaching you and the swarms and all of that.” Those early prototypes focused on building vehicles and enemies as well as playing around with controls. “We