The Dark Pictures tackles various subgenres of horror

The Dark Pictures is a new anthology series from Supermassive Games (the minds who made Until Dawn) that's due to kick off next year with Man of Medan, and at Gamescom we got to talk with CEO Pete Samuels about where the idea for this format came from.

"Well, when we were talking about what to do from about two, two-and-a-half years ago, about how to move forward in that genre of kind of immersive, interactive horror in a cinematic style, we actually had a lot of feedback from the players of our games and some of the suggestions there were actually around an anthological approach," he explained.

"Now we know horror in anthology format has a really long history, around 200-year history in literature, you know it's almost a hundred-year history in radio, film, and TV following, so it's not an uncommon way of delivering horror, and the thing it does for us is it allows us to attack different subgenres of horror. We've identified 39 subgenres of horror, so there's a lot of material there, and people who know our previous work know that we like to play on typical horror movie tropes across the different decades, and we have fun with that, so that what we do is recognisable to horror fans."

"So that's kind of the ambition and the vision for it, that every game is different and is noticeably different. Different characters, different setting, different subgenres of horror, and that's kind of the vision we're going for."

"Right now we're committed absolutely to the first four. The first three are actually in work, so there's two others in work as well as Man of Medan, but yeah if we can do 39 that'd be great [laughs]."

Do you like the idea of an anthology series like this?