Alexis Di Stefano has been banned from consuming horror content. Anything bloody was forbidden. He remembers his parents keeping him and his siblings in a “glass box”. Her first exposure to video games was through a neighbor who invited her to play on his PlayStation. He was around eight or ten years old, he recalls, when he experienced the survival horror title Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within. “From that moment on, my head exploded,” he says, telling himself, “I want to know more about it.” He was able to experience for the first time what it’s like to be afraid on purpose, to feel the adrenaline rush, the fear, the nervousness and get goosebumps of pleasure because of this type of entertainment.
From then on it was a path of no return. He started playing every PlayStation horror video game “forever and ever.” His head was fed by classic sagas of the genre like Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, Silent Hill, Clock Tower to name a few, which later led him to develop a love for the genre in different formats. Ever since he was a boy he started thinking about what it would be like to design a horror video game without knowing the processes required to make that dream come true. 17 years later, at the age of 27, Di Stefano not only realized this boy’s dreams, he surpassed them.
A moment of video game ‘gameplay’. Bloodious Games
Di Stefano from Buenos Aires is the owner of Bloodius Games, the studio responsible for the development of MADiSON, a video game voted by various specialized portals as the best survival horror title of 2022 and as the “most terrifying of all time”. was classified “.”, according to a study by the British project Science of Scare.
“I remember going to university and saying, ‘Well, my dream right now would be to create a table or a chair or a weapon that could be used in any Resident Evil that comes out. Life has shown me that this is not my limit and that a few years later the same actors from the Resident Evil adaptation would present MADiSON at an event in Germany, it’s crazy,” he told EL PAÍS.
Since 2020, Science of Scare has been dedicated to the classification and measurement of various horror content through an established methodology. For the classification of horror video games, they considered a sample of 200 people playing a list of 45 selected titles from the last 30 years, available on consoles of different generations of PlayStation, Xbox and on computers. In each case, users were subjected to heart rate monitoring. In this monitoring, the average resting load was measured at 65 beats per minute compared to the highest peak.
Ranking of the video games that were among the most terrifying, prepared by Science of Scare.Broadband Choices
MADiSON kept players at a heart rate of 97 beats per minute, which is equivalent to a steady, moderate jog. At their highest peak, during severe anxiety, people hit 131 beats per minute. The game takes place in a large house where the user takes control of Luca, a 16-year-old boy who receives an instant camera for his birthday. Said object belonged to a serial killer 30 years ago, and through it the protagonist is contacted to put an end to a macabre ritual.
Di Stefano studied Game Design and Programming and enrolled in 2014. His bachelor thesis was a prototype for what MADiSON would become. It wasn’t until 2018 that they started working on the final version together with David Lovera, his college friend and game programmer, which saw the light of day in 2022.
“I grew up collecting horror video games and today there are people who collect my video game. During those five or so years of development he was afraid to say is all this work worth it? In an economy like Argentina, will I be able to make a living from it? To be honest, I never thought the game could come to PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo Switch. ‘ says Di Stefano in disbelief.
Di Stefano scripted the story of MADiSON, inspired – apart from the video games of his childhood – by films like Insidious or The Conjuring (both directed by James Wan), with a lot of narrative charge to make it feel like a horror movie, so realistic and cinematic as possible. “I wanted to scare and point to a type of terror that sparked a lot of feelings in me when I was little, like being scared in an environment where we feel protected, like our homes, but which is also the setting their worst is nightmares,” says the director of Bloodious Games.
Funding for the development of MADiSON came from Di Stefano’s savings while working on various projects related to the video game industry, from his work as a radio technician, and from people who believed in the project through patronage campaigns. . Word of mouth has been one of the best marketing tools for the title, including interest from famous streamers and youtubers who have experienced the game, including AuronPlay, El Rubius, and Ibai Llanos to name a few.
Even within the gaming community, comparisons weren’t needed, and MADiSON was the spiritual successor to PT, a playable video game preview helmed and created by acclaimed designer Hideo Kojima and acclaimed director Guillermo del Toro – distributed by Japanese giant Konami – which terrified users eight years ago and became a cult object. “The comparison is very crazy and rewarding. We introduce Konami with a big budget, Kojima and Del Toro, two guys who were 21 or 22 when we started rowing from Argentina, which means we’re not far from the top of the big companies says DiStefano.
While we’ve had our best commercial year and we’re all raving about it, MADiSON and Bloodious Games’ work isn’t over yet. It was recently announced via the US video game specialist IGN medium that Di Stefano’s creation will venture into virtual reality via the PlayStation platform. Though in the form of a survival horror nightmare, this terrified kid’s dream still flies high.
Subscribe to the EL PAÍS America newsletter here and receive all the latest news from the region.
All the culture that suits you awaits you here.
subscribe to
Babelia
The literary novelties analyzed by our best critics in our weekly bulletin
GET IT