No Publisher Wanted Outlast. 60 Million Players Later, The Horror Juggernaut Is Doing Just Fine.

Let's play Family Feud. Poll 100 people on the scariest game they've ever played. What's on the board? Surely a Silent Hill, and a Resident Evil, too. Alien Isolation seems likely. One of the Fatal Frames has a good shot. Those who know ball may call out a deeper cut like Siren, Sylvio, or Visage. One name I'm certain makes it on the board--to the tune of my family cheering me on with "Good answer! Good answer!"--is Outlast. The horror game from Montreal-based indie studio Red Barrels was released in 2013 as the debut effort from what was then a 10-person team. The studio was founded by developers with an origin story we hear about a lot in the games industry: They left roles at big-budget studios like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Naughty Dog to pursue something they could call their own. On an hour-long call with Red Barrels' Phillipe Morin, he told me how he and his co-founders, David Chateauneuf and Hugo Dallaire, established Red Barrels as a fully independent game studio and built what has become a tentpole horror series. Content warning: This article contains descriptions of extreme violence. "After our project got canceled at EA, we were having a hard time picking up on whe…

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