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British video game designer
- Sam Barlow is a British video game designer, best known as the writer and designer of Her Story, the two British Silent Hill games Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and Immortality. He previously worked as a game director at Climax Studios, before leaving in 2014 to become an indie game developer.
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Years active. 1999–present. Employer. Half Mermaid. Notable work. Her Story. Immortality. Sam Barlow is a British video game designer, best known as the writer and designer of Her Story, the two British Silent Hill games Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and Immortality.
- Games can be and frequently are much more than making little dudes run around, and Barlow hopes the AAA space one day reflects that.
- Sam Barlow Games
- Immortality Screens
By Rebekah Valentine
Updated: Jan 15, 2023 11:25 pm
Posted: Jan 12, 2023 5:00 pm
“Occasionally boggles my mind and martian postcards me that 90% of the games that are the critical and popular mainstays of our medium revolve around remote controlling a little toy person about like a human scalextric.”
That’s a tweet from Sam Barlow, founder of Half Mermaid and director of Immortality, posted in late November of last year just a few weeks after The Game Awards nominees were announced. Immortality itself was up for recognition in three categories: best game direction, best performance (Manon Gage as Marissa Marcel) and best narrative. While it deserved nominations for all three, Immortality is a curious contender: even a glance at its fellow nominees in any of the three categories immediately threw into sharp relief just how different Immortality was from any of the competition.
Bluntly: every other game it was up against (and the vast majority of all the other award nominees) is about “remote controlling a little toy person about.” Immortality is, well, not.
Here are all the games/interactive story projects the British game designer has worked on so far.
And yet, Barlow has been actively pushing against that “type” with his own work for the majority of his career. Even when he was working on character-driven 3D games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, his goal was to buck convention in whatever way he could.
But that gave us this little rationale of having this huge new audience that is normal people that don't know that a horror game has to be exactly like this, because they haven't played Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark and everything else.
“So we slightly tried to push ourselves in everything, like if we were a Martian and we landed on Earth and we watched all the horror movies and read all the horror books and then someone said, ‘Now go make a video game of this.’”
In fact, for all he pushes against it, Barlow also loves dozens of games about piloting little guys. Who doesn’t? He tells me of his early development inspirations, specifically a 1984 game called Deus Ex Machina where players move through the cycle of life, from being a single cell to a very old man, and where all the game’s sound is separated onto an audio cassette to be played alongside it.
He’s long been obsessed with immersive sims, and he fondly recalls the ways in which moving around a space felt incredible in games like Gone Home and, on an open-world scale, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. He loves Dishonored. And, of course, he worked on franchises like Silent Hill and Legacy of Kain, both games involving moving little guys around.
“Walking a character around a space is really involved, just naturally it's fun and immersive and involving,” he says. “It's very atmospheric. But how much of the storytelling is actually coming out of this? And to what extent is this just an atmospheric effect?”
Walking a character around a space is naturally fun and immersive...But how much storytelling is actually coming out of this?
- Rebekah Valentine
Jun 24, 2020 · Games. Adventure. Her Story. On Her Story's 5th birthday, Sam Barlow looks back at his breakout game—and talks about what's next. Features. By Andy Kelly. published 24 June 2020. How the Silent...
Jun 6, 2023 · In a recent chat on Game Developer Talks, (a webinar series coordinated by Game Developer and our colleagues at sibling organization GDC) Barlow went out of his way to break down the origins of his creative process—and how they fed into one of his most key ideas about game design: that "witnessing" can be as powerful a verb for game design as ...
- Bryant Francis
Sep 26, 2023 · Immortality’s Sam Barlow discusses his new game, and the modern creative machine. The Immortality director talks about returning to 3D, character-driven games and his unconventional game development process. 26 Sep 2023. Edmond Tran. Game Development. Image provided.
Sep 16, 2022 · 7 min. In “Her Story” and “Telling Lies,” game designer Sam Barlow uses filmed performances of live actors to tell deeply involved and involving stories — just don’t call them “interactive...
Mar 23, 2023 · Sam Barlow breaks down the 'pillars of interactivity' behind Immortality. Read the Game Developer team's GDC 2023 coverage here, including Talk writeups and interviews from the show, as well as our favorite GDC Vault videos covering 2023 Talks. Speaking at GDC 2023, Immortality co-creator Sam Barlow breaks down his storytelling pillars and ...
