IllFonic has spent much of the past decade refining its approach to asymmetrical multiplayer through games including Friday the 13th: The Game, Predator: Hunting Grounds, and Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed. Halloween: The Game applies those lessons to one of horror’s most influential films, but its recreation of Haddonfield involves considerably more than placing Michael Myers inside another familiar multiplayer formula.

Released on September 8 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, the game combines a standalone single-player story with 1v4 multiplayer matches set across a town populated by reactive NPCs. Civilian players must protect Haddonfield’s residents, arm them, and alert the police, while Michael uses darkness, stealth, and supernatural abilities to hunt them.

Unlike the empty competitive arenas found in many asymmetrical games, its maps are intended to feel like functioning neighborhoods disrupted by the arrival of The Shape. We spoke with IllFonic Chief Creative Officer Jared Gerritzen about translating the original film’s lenses, camera movement, lighting, clothing, and distinctly 1970s suburban aesthetic into an interactive space.

Check out the game's website for more info about it.

Halloween: The Game is based specifically on the original 1978 film. From an art and production standpoint, how did the team approach translating that film’s visual language into a playable horror sandbox?

Jared Gerritzen, IllFonic COO: The best part was we had such a great place to start with the movie, from the clothing and hairstyles down to the camera styles, including the lenses, and the steadicam movement was all so well documented. What was not expected was teaching the team what the 70s looked like.

Some of them had not been born yet, haha. I’m lucky I was born during this aesthetic period, so I grew up in that era. I never thought I would have to talk so much about my childhood decor and memories. Something as funny as telling the devs about lawn darts, and how to play with us kids throwing them straight in the air and running. If you walk through the game locations, you will see the team did a great job, taking the look and feel from the film, my childhood descriptions, and online searches, applying all to the final product really well.

Haddonfield is such an ordinary-looking place on screen, which is part of what makes the film frightening. How did you design environments that feel suburban, familiar, and grounded while still supporting stealth, pursuit, exploration, and multiplayer readability?

Jared Gerritzen: I mean, we really needed to make everything feel like it could happen in any town; that is what Haddonfield needs to be. It was a really good test of self-control to make everything so normal. The art and design team really did an amazing job of making it feel like so many places in America. It could be anywhere that anyone has been before. I can point to some parts of the map that feel like where any of our company offices are located.

The game is powered by Unreal Engine 5, highlighting realistic visuals, cinema-quality lighting, lifelike NPCs, and dynamic gameplay systems. What did UE5 enable for this project, especially in terms of lighting, atmosphere, materials, animation, and performance?

Jared Gerritzen: The dynamic lighting in UE5 was the biggest evolution that I think was so great to work with. For years we’ve been using baked lighting that cannot change mid-match. Getting dynamic lighting that we can ship with was amazing.

Now we can finally have the game change its lighting, affect large areas with power boxes, and do really cool new lighting for the Shapejump world Michael moves through.

Michael Myers has a very specific screen presence: slow, deliberate, almost emotionless, but still terrifying. How did the animation team capture that physicality while making him feel responsive and readable as a playable character?

Jared Gerritzen: We lucked out and got to work with Nick Castle from the start; we even got him in a mocap suit to get his actual movements. The animation team also got to speak with him and the IP holders about his movement and how he might kill.

Also, this team really gave a lot of feedback, and we watched all the movies a lot.

What do you think specifically sets this game apart from the likes of Dead by Daylight and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or the upcoming Saw game? Or even your own previous games like Friday the 13th and Predator?

Jared Gerritzen: It’s the NPC and AI interaction in the world; in all the other games, you only need to worry about yourself.

In Halloween: The Game, we wanted to take the Hero and let you truly be the hero of the town. You need to try to save people and do a lot more than run routes over and over. Cops coming into the maps that the killed players can take control over to help pressure a bloodthirsty Michael at the end also really changes things up throughout the matches.

Can you walk us through the production pipeline for one key character or environment, from film reference and concept work to modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, lighting, VFX, and final implementation?

Jared Gerritzen: Oh, you mean the hard part of the game. I’ve worked on a lot of titles but Halloween has some of the biggest fans so we knew we had to get this right.

We would concept a character, get that approved and/or iterate based on feedback, then build the model in 3D, get that approved, then texture, get that approved, and then build the hair. This is me overly simplifying it all. A lot of work went into the Michaels and heroes, but they needed to be perfect and capture the era and do right by a truly epic film.

Asymmetrical horror games depend heavily on sound, sightlines, pacing, and player uncertainty. How do the design, audio, art, and level teams work together to create tension without making matches feel unfair or confusing?

Jared Gerritzen: A lot of playtesting is key to what drives development. IllFonic is always doing playtests, giving feedback, and capturing data. But this is also our fifth asymmetrical game, and we have a lot of theories and lessons we follow.

We have figured these out over the last decade. We really are not a huge studio that is slow-moving. We circle up all the time with the right people to get systems figured out fast and test them to make sure it is right, as much as we can. It’s what lets us also keep working post-launch to do patches and add more content pretty quickly.

The game includes both a standalone single-player story and dynamic asymmetrical multiplayer matches. How do you build maps, NPC behavior, and systems that can support both authored horror moments and unpredictable multiplayer encounters?

Jared Gerritzen: When we first talked about Halloween: The Game being made, the first thing we all decided was you needed to be the Hero. The player needed to save NPCs, and that helped us reinforce the idea of adding a single-player component.

We also have experience in past games, learning the need for NPCs to give the game more random moments to experience. We add as much as we can to make the game dynamic and have uncommon moments that players do not get in every match. I love watching gamers clip insane moments and having a blast. The NPCs are key and also really help other skill sets of players that might not be hyper-multiplayer skilled.

IllFonic has a long history with asymmetrical multiplayer horror. What lessons from previous projects most directly shaped Halloween: The Game, and where did this IP force the team to rethink its usual approach?

Jared Gerritzen: Really, the biggest lesson we have learned, and it got even more reinforced with this project, is we need to continue to choose IPs that we really are fans of ourselves. We also know we cannot make a great game without a solid idea from day one of what it will be. We have been offered a lot of IPs, and we’ve toyed with the idea of doing huge IPs, but if we cannot see a game in it, we won’t touch it.

The short answer is doing what we know to be a core building block for us as a company and keep doing it better each time.

Jared Gerritzen, IllFonic COO