The 2013 survival horror game Outlast from a Montreal-based indie studio, Red Barrels, often ranks high in horror game ratings and is often named among the scariest games. In a talk with GameSpot, Red Barrels' co-founder Phillipe Morin recalled how he and co-founders David Chateauneuf and Hugo Dallaire decided on the horror genre, went on to self-publish, and remembered how one playtester ran out of the studio to cry.

Morin explained that the gore came from the team's preference and not from a deliberate attempt to echo horror movie trends: "We didn't start like, 'Oh, we've got to make the goriest game out there.' It was just, 'We're making a horror game, so obviously we'll make it gory.' I remember even the scriptwriter early on was saying, 'There's never too much blood.'"

The team struggled with finding a publisher. "We thought at first that we'd come up with the pitch within three or four months and shop it around to a few publishers, and we'd find out pretty quickly if it works or not," he said. The search took about 18 months. When no publisher came on board, the work continued, and the team eventually felt it could finish the game without outside help, so Red Barrels published it itself. Morin said the team had experience in game development but "didn't know much" about publishing, marketing, and sales, so it "had to learn on the fly." After launch, Morin shared that Thomas Grip, co-founder of Frictional Games, the studio behind another horror series, Amnesia, explained to them "the dynamic of Steam."

Years later, Red Barrels' co-op spin-off The Outlast Trials took about six years to go from concept to its 2023 early access launch, with the team growing to 45 people and building many prototypes.

GameSpot's Mark Delaney notes that the series' level of violence could have kept it niche, but it became one of its biggest selling points. The content was hard to take even for people close to the project. Morin recalled that one playtester ran out of the studio to cry after a couple of hours and never returned. He added that the studio makes sure job candidates know what they will work on: one employee resigned on their fourth day because of the religious content, despite knowing about the gore and violence.

If you like learning more about the development of earlier games, read how Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser recalled creating GTA 3, Bully, and Max Payne 3.

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