‘Dead By Daylight’ directors on eight years of terror: “We rolled the dice”
Mathieu Côté, the director of eclectic horror game Dead By Daylight, has something to admit. “I’ve famously always been a wuss,” he tells NME, grinning sheepishly over Zoom. “I used to have nightmares about Jabba the Hutt.” Creative director Dave Richard, who’s also on the call, laughs mercilessly at Côté. It’s a surprising confession, given he works on one of the biggest horror games in the world.
A competitive multiplayer game, Dead By Daylight pits four people (called survivors) against a fifth player (the killer) who must catch and slaughter them all. Its characters are a mix of original heroes and villains, and some of the biggest names in horror – think Chucky, Ghost Face, and Freddy Krueger – are included. Since launching in 2016, Dead By Daylight has found success after success, and is now played by over 60 million people.
Keeping a game alive for eight years is no small feat, but its Canadian developer, Behaviour Interactive, hasn’t stopped there. It’s since released dating sim spin-off Hooked On You and announced a tie-in psychological horror game called The Casting Of Frank Stone, while a film adaptation with Insidious production studio Blumhouse is in the works.
If managing all of this keeps Côté and Richard up at night, it doesn’t show. The pair are jovial, and often make each other laugh with cryptic inside jokes. Richard has worked at Behaviour for his entire career, while Côté was a bartender, sex shop manager and finally game animator before joining the Montreal studio in 2011. They’re an entertaining duo, but not necessarily the people you’d expect to find running one of the world’s biggest horror games.
The origins of Dead By Daylight are just as unlikely. “We had this horror setting with very complex AI,” says Richard. He’s referencing Naughty Bear, Behaviour’s 2010 action-adventure game about a murderous teddy bear. “At some point in [developing] Naughty Bear, our publisher 505 Games requested that we add a multiplayer mode. So we added four. One of them, Jelly Wars, was a game in which four players would play normal bears, and their goal was to find jellies and bring them into a giant mixer. Another person would play the Naughty Bear, trying to kill them.”
“That’s the really basic, first iteration of what Dead By Daylight is,” Richard adds while Côté giggles at the mention of Jelly Wars. Still, the development team saw something special in it, and began working on a slasher game based on the premise. It started with a rough prototype – a barebones game of hide and seek because the killer couldn’t yet kill – but quickly took on a life of its own.
At the time, Côté remembers having to answer “big questions” about the game’s direction. Should it be a tropey slasher, complete with stoner and jock characters? Is it going to be casual or ultra-competitive? Will there be a story?
As the team grappled with these questions, another multiplayer game – 2015’s Evolve – was released by another developer, Turtle Rock Studios. Like Dead By Daylight, Evolve was an asymmetrical title that pitted one monster against four hunters. “We were like, ‘oh shit’,” says Côté. Things looked even bleaker when Evolve rapidly tanked due to its repetitive formula, shaky game balance, and controversial paid downloadable content. Instead of being dissuaded, Behaviour examined what went wrong and applied these learnings to Dead By Daylight. The goal was to create a core formula that worked, then build upward. “We had the courage to make very intense cuts,” says Côté. “Stuff you wouldn’t consider cutting today.”
On the other hand, crucial additions such as tutorials and character progression trees (called the Bloodweb) were added just two months before launch. The approach paid off: Dead By Daylight was released in June 2016 and sold more than 1 million copies by August.
The success took Behaviour by surprise – by Richard’s admission, the launch was “kind of rough” and driven by a small yet passionate team. As two of the team’s faces alongside then-creative director Ash Pannell (who moved onto other Behaviour projects after launch), Richard and Côté quickly became celebrities within the game’s fast-growing fandom. “When we started we didn’t even know what a community manager was,” says Richard. “It was just a team of 20-30 people and we were doing it all.”
Yet the team proved capable enough to keep up with Dead By Daylight’s growing popularity. Behaviour hired fans to manage its fast-growing community (“Are you fucking kidding me?” asked one of these disbelieving hires, who’s still with the company today), while Côté and Richard continued the studio’s transparent approach to development. “I wouldn’t change anything,” says Côté, reflecting on the chaotic first years on Dead By Daylight. “We made a lot of mistakes, but we learned from them.”
Fast forward to today, and Dead By Daylight now has more than 60 million players. Besides benefiting from passionate fans, the game has stayed fresh with regular updates in the form of Chapters, which add new killers, survivors and maps every three months. “The first chapter was The Last Breath, and it was released for free because we could,” says Côté. “We were so surprised at the success we were having.”
In subsequent Chapters, Behaviour started adding some of the biggest names in horror to its game. It started with slasher icon Mike Myers in the second Chapter, but since then villains from Alien, Stranger Things, Leatherface and Saw have all been added. Mixing in these familiar terrors with Behaviour’s original material helped “legitimise” the game’s longevity, says Côté, who handles these crossovers as Behaviour’s head of partnerships.
“The world of Dead By Daylight is strong enough that it manages to make sense of the fact that you have the Demogorgon chasing Laurie Strode through the school where Freddy Krueger lives in the basement,” he adds. “At the same time, we’ve managed to create iconic characters that can stand proudly next to those legends of horror.”
Côté’s job isn’t simple, and some IP owners take more convincing than others. “We don’t do things because they’re easy – we do them because we thought they were going to be easy,” he says, which sends Richard into a hysterical laughing fit. It was “challenging” to get Japanese developer Konami to sign off on adding Silent Hill monster Pyramid Head to the game, for example, and there’s one specific crossover that he is currently trying to extricate from a “legal quagmire”. Côté can’t say what it is, but suggests we do the math: “You can count on your hands how many of the big, big, big horror characters we don’t have in the game right now.”
Yet the game’s biggest wildcard addition remains Nicolas Cage, who was added in 2023 and plays himself as a survivor brought to the world of Dead By Daylight through a film set ritual. “There are people in his very, very close circle that are big fans,” says Côté, who is limited in what he can say for legal reasons. “For him, it was a way to be closer to those people [and] he’d never been in a video game before, so [he] thought it was a super fun thing.”
As Dead By Daylight has grown, so too have Behaviour’s ambitions for it. The game’s deliberately vague premise – the mysterious Entity plucks killers and survivors from their respective worlds to partake in an endless hunt between realms – lends itself well to spin-off tales and adaptations including the upcoming Blumhouse collaboration. Given the patchwork nature of Dead By Daylight, we might have expected the studio’s first adaptation to be an old school anthology series rather than the planned film.
However, it’s not happening just yet. “We trust the experts at Blumhouse,” he explains. “They tell us right now that a movie is more possible and much easier. Dealing with streamers, whether it’s Netflix, Amazon, or whoever else, automatically comes with less control over the final product. So for us it was an easy choice – let’s make a movie, make our Iron Man 1, then we’ll have another 27 movies, four TV shows, and then we’ll talk about it.”
He’s only half-joking. Dead By Daylight has just celebrated its eighth birthday, and when we ask the pair to envisage another eight years, both mention further spin-offs. It’s a far cry from the game’s hectic early years – and with layoffs, AI concerns and tight-fisted publishers all rife nowadays, neither are sure if Dead By Daylight would succeed if it was launched in 2024.
“Would it be more difficult today? Yeah, I think so,” says Richard. Côté is even more pessimistic. “It’s such a roll of the dice, releasing a game any time, right? You may have the best game, put it out there, and anything – the smallest thing – could play a role in how it’s received,” he says. “The exact same recipe done exactly the same way, but with a different context, could have failed. There’s a huge amount of luck in how this thing panned out. We had a lot of great things done, had a great bonus to our roll when we rolled the dice, but still – we rolled the dice. You never know what will happen.”
And yet, Dead By Daylight is still thriving. To say the journey has changed the pair’s lives would be an understatement. “Yesterday we had our anniversary party with the team,” says Richard. “We were in a large venue, because there’s a lot of people on the team now. I was in the corner of that room, looking at all of the people that can live off this project. Then I thought back to how it started. Being able to build this legacy… I’m pretty proud of that.”
“Beautiful,” Côté interjects, quietly. His own defining memory is of preparing to step on stage at Tokyo Game Show, where a large crowd had gathered to see him. At this moment, his mum called on FaceTime. “I showed her the crowd of people,” he recalls. “I don’t think my mother knows exactly what I do for a living, she’s just very proud of me no matter what, but that was a beautiful moment to be able to share.”
Still, one pressing question remains: has eight years of masterminding horror’s thrills and spills made either of them braver? Richard says yes, but Côté isn’t quite there yet. “That’s why I play killer all the time,” he admits. “I don’t like to be scared.”
Dead By Daylight is available to play on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation.
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Andy Brown
NME
