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The Thing was, and remains, a potentially enthralling, if hazardous, video game license. The movie harnessing a fascinating collection of themes (fear of the unknown, fear of disease and an exploration of man's basic distrust of man) and merging them with a grizzled, yet realistic collection of characters and some suitably nauseating special effects. And it may well have been a box-office flop, but there's no doubting that John Carpenter's film has one of the best cinematic endings ever: exhausted and emotionally drained, the remaining characters, MacCready and Childs, sit within the burning ruins of their Antarctic research station, almost too shot to care whether the other turns into the eponymous creature or not. "Why don't we just... wait here for a little while... see what happens?" mutters MacCready slowly, resigned to whatever fate is in store for him. Viewers were left to draw their own conclusions, the downbeat denouement suiting the film perfectly. Some 20 years later, with Universal looking to resurrect some of its back-catalogue in order to explore potential videogame adaptations, a more defined answer as to what happened next began to take shape.
British developer Computer Artworks was formed in 1993 by artist William Latham. Joining the company in 1999, specifically to work on the bold mutation-based Evolva, was artist and game designer Andrew Curtis. When Universal began searching for companies to develop their idea of a game based on the cult horror movie, Evolva unsurprisingly caught its eye. "They approached us and asked if we'd like to pitch for the licence," says Curtis, "so we started re-skinning a level of Evolva into an Antarctic base with a freaky thing-beast at the centre. There wasn't much more to it, but it was enough to get the job."
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