'Suffering' City

A new video game uses a nightmarish vision of Baltimore as its backdrop.

By Abigail Tucker
Sun Staff

May 17, 2005

So you're strolling the Inner Harbor, enjoying some mint chocolate-chip ice cream and minding your own business, when a toxic syringe whizzes past your ear. Mainliners! The bald, blue-veined villains rise out of puddles of blood, their bodies bristling with used drug needles.

Welcome to Charm City post-apocalypse, a metropolis ravaged by monsters real and imagined, and the setting for "The Suffering: Ties That Bind," a new video game being unveiled this week in Los Angeles at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a major industry conference.

The 3-D horror fest, which hits stores this fall, is the first video game to be set on the streets of Baltimore, its creators and others in the industry say.

"There's a hell of a lot of New York games, Los Angeles, the obligatory Miami games, and some people do Chicago for a Mafia game, but no one's done anything with Baltimore," said Noah Heller, the game's producer.

Yet when his creative team contemplated settings for their gory new release, Baltimore leapt out at them like a giant, bullet-ridden arachnid, one of the creatures that patrols the digitized downtown.

In Baltimore, "we knew there was a lot of interesting stuff that would fit into a horror game," said Richard Rouse III, a design director and writer for Surreal Software, the Seattle-based company behind the release. "The real environment is horrible, on some level."

"The Suffering: Ties that Bind" tells the story of Torque, a sociopathic product of Maryland's group home system. Convicted of murdering his family, this native son has been doing time in Abbott State Penitentiary, a fictional island prison in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. His adventures there were the subject of "The Suffering," a 2004 release that sold about 500,000 copies, enough to prompt an immediate sequel.

Now, though, thanks to legions of teenage boys laboring over their Xboxes, PlayStations and PCs, Torque is free and headed this way on a Coast Guard cutter.

He nearly docked somewhere else.

"Very early on we looked at Annapolis," Rouse said, "but it was too cheery and nice. Torque wouldn't be from there."

So Torque will come ashore on an unidentified pier in one of the grittier parts of the Baltimore Harbor. According to confidential "State of Maryland Department of Corrections" documents obtained by The Sun (we looked inside the pamphlet that came with the first game), the suspect is 5 feet 10 inches with brown eyes and dark hair. He weighs only 180 pounds but resembles a Ravens first-round draft pick, with rippling muscles and a crewcut. He's the kind of guy who would have a lot of tricks up his sleeve, if he had a sleeve. But Torque favors tank tops. He wields a homemade knife and, occasionally, a rocket launcher.

Welcome, Torque. Your task is to survive this city, which has been swarmed by monsters after a devastating earthquake.

Yet many of these monsters have been here all along, at least in the game designers' dark assesment of Baltimore. Most of them embody urban plagues - Mainliners, for instance, personify drug abuse, and The Gorger, a beast with a distended belly and huge mouth, represents hunger - that trouble this and other large municipalities.

"We wanted to contain things that people could recognize from real life," Rouse explained, "to make the horror more profound."

Authentic evil apparently abounds on the East Coast, which is why many video game companies - including Surreal, safely entrenched out West - stage some of their scariest games here, Rouse said. It's nothing personal: Older Eastern cities, he said, have just had longer to degenerate.

In the first "Suffering," the prison island is populated with specters from historical atrocities ranging from colonial witch trials to unsavory World War II military operations; in the sequel, Baltimore is similarly thronged. A slave hunter named Copperfield shows up, flanked by Maulers, which, Rouse explained, "are pretty normal dogs with human skulls and some blades attached." Also lurking is Dr. Killjoy, the keeper of an old-school mental asylum who cultivates an exaggerated taste for 1930s-era vaudeville.

Dr. Killjoy doesn't practice at Johns Hopkins, but several members of the 40-person Surreal creative team cased the East Baltimore hospital and the surrounding neighborhoods last year as part of a short research trip. For inspiration they also toured Fells Point, Druid Hill Park, Little Italy and Mount Vernon. They photographed public housing complexes, including Latrobe Homes, a city prison and the Senator and Hippodrome theaters, and likenesses - although not exact replicas - of some of these will appear in the finished product. "We were looking for archetypal Baltimore," said Mark Bullock, the project's lead environmental artist, who in the 1990s lived in Baltimore for a year - long enough to get a feel for the place.

"I mean, when I was living there I had a great time," he said, but "there was always the helicopter and the spotlight chasing some guy."

Bullock helped organize the research trip after it became clear that the Surreal-ists - who dreamed up creatures like Festers, bloated corpses that incubate packs of rats in their chest cavities - were having difficulty picturing the city's signature form of housing.

"Until we had that trip to Baltimore, I don't think people got the rowhouse concept," Bullock said. "They couldn't believe such structures existed."

The creators also studied HBO's The Wire to invent "dialogue that has a bit of the Baltimore twang," Heller said. They took advantage, too, of the city's legacy of general creepiness, particularly the contributions of Edgar Allan Poe.

Local video game enthusiasts are looking forward to the fruits of their efforts. They're sick of kids from other cities having the competitive advantage, as Californians do in "True Crime," a game that involves real-life Los Angeles maps.

Ryan Lokey, a sales clerk at Power Gamer in Owings Mills Mall who called the original "The Suffering" "one of the scariest games I've ever played," plans to milk his knowledge of Baltimore landmarks to conquer the sequel. "I mean, if I'm going to the Belvedere, I'm not going to go the long way," the 22-year-old said.

But Charles Wang, the 27-year-old president of the Towson-based Video Gaming Association, said that while the Baltimore connection is "pretty cool," "what gamers focus on is the game play, graphics, whether it lives up to the hype."

If it does, Torque's likely to linger even after the game ends.

"He has an attachment to his hometown," Rouse said. "I don't think he's leaving any time soon."

Copyright © 2005, The Baltimore Sun