Ever wondered how a streamer's fear of being stuck in the mud sparked an entire game idea? 🤔
Journalist Brian Crecente sat down with Saber Interactive's Tim Willits, Chief Creative Officer, and Nikolai Egorikhin, Lead Producer, to dive into the origins, chaos, and creative vision behind John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando. 🧟💥
It started with a spark of an idea: What if you mashed up an off-road trucking simulator with the dread of a lurking evil? Then came the prototyping and mud. Finally, John Carpenter signed on, bringing with him his horror film pedigree, storytelling prowess, synth music compositions, love of video games, and—of course—his name.
John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is a four-player co-op first-person shooter, swarming with the infected and created as a new IP that echoes Carpenter's broad portfolio. It lands March 12 on console and computer.
Getting to this point, though, was a fascinating journey from a player’s offhand remark, through seemingly endless prototyping and play sessions, to the final delivery of a game that has you winching a stuck vehicle out of the mud as your teammates gun down hordes of infected.
It’s nighttime, I’m stuck, and it’s scary
As the story goes, Saber Interactive CEO Matt Karch was watching a streamer playing SnowRunner when the idea popped up.
“It was at night, and the guy got stuck in the mud,” said Tim Willits, chief creative officer at Saber. “And the streamer was like, ‘Ah, this is really scary. It’s nighttime, and I’m stuck in the mud.’
“Of course, nothing’s going to happen to you in SnowRunner, but that kind of sparked an idea that we had great success with World War Z—we just passed 30 million players—and we had great success with SnowRunner. It was this spark of an idea that blended the two together.
“Why don’t we take them and make larger environments that you can navigate with vehicles, but lean in toward the zombie shooters? You would need to use the vehicles to survive and use them to get around the infected. And the infected would attack you when you’re using those vehicles. It would create much more emergent gameplay throughout the entire experience.”
Taking that spark and nurturing it into something that was both playable and engaging ended up being a bit more complicated than they first suspected, said Saber Interactive Lead Producer Nikolai Egorikhin.
The heart of this emerging game would be driven by the physics and mud simulator of the MudRunner series and the swarm technology of the developer’s World War Z game.
Both bits of tech have evolved since their introduction. Willits said the swarm tech introduced in World War Z was perfected in Space Marine 2, but that they still “blew it up” for Toxic Commando. The terrain deformation tech, which was called Husky in SnowRunner, has also grown to become an inherent part of the studio’s game engine.
To mash the two technologies together, the team decided to take more of a sandbox approach to early design. Foregoing the need to jot things down on paper, the team would just throw the ideas into a build and experiment.
“We were aiming to quickly get through the paper phase because the concept itself was cool,” Willits said. “You can imagine it. Just close your eyes and imagine getting stuck in the mud and zombies approaching you and the swarms and all of that.”
Those early prototypes focused on building vehicles and enemies as well as playing around with controls.
“We quickly understood that to implement this fantasy, we needed some features that were not yet implemented in our other games,” he said. “So, for example, the World War Z zombies can form into some sort of pyramids on top of each other to climb on environmental blockages. But climbing on a dynamically moving vehicle is quite another challenge.”
It turned out that figuring out a way for the throngs of infected to pile on and cling to a moving vehicle was a daunting task.
“It results in tons of different animations because each enemy type needs to be able to climb on all of the types of vehicles,” he said. “It was a bit of a pain in the ass to implement all of this, and we ended up with thousands of different animations.
“But in the end, it was clearly worth it because it’s a unique feeling when you quickly understand that the vehicle is not a safe place.”
The game features multiple types of vehicles, each with its own special abilities and handling, but, as Egorikhin pointed out, you can’t just ram your way through the game’s uneven terrain. The infected won’t let you.
“They climb on the vehicles, they start slamming on the doors, they break the windows, they break the doors,” he said. “There are even some enemies that can pull you out of the vehicle.”
Not Destiny, but not Left 4 Dead either
Once the team had locked in the basics of the game—the vehicles, on-foot movement, the infected—they started prototyping different iterations of the game.
At one point, for instance, Toxic Commando was an open-world shooter, where a player dropped into a location, and it was up to them to decide what to do next.
“Do you want to investigate the entire map? Do you want to find this objective and complete it right away? Or do you want to drive around and find where all the objectives are on the map first?” Egorikhin said. “But through playtests, we found that it was a different sort of game, more like Destiny or some other MMORPG-style game.”
On the other hand, the team was wary of gameplay becoming too linear, something that they felt Left 4 Dead leaned a bit too much into.
“One of our main references was Left 4 Dead, but it was super linear,” he said. “It’s mostly indoors. It’s mostly kind of corridor levels, design-wise. So we wanted to step away from that.”
Once the team felt they had the feel of the vehicles and the infected locked down, they started playing around with the size of the maps.
Almost all of Toxic Commando takes place outside, in the vastness of rugged terrain, rolling hills, swampy marshes, and scattered woods. But they knew that they needed to get the size of these environments right to lock in the playtime they were aiming for.
“We knew that this should be a session-based game, and we can’t just allow ourselves to make one session that is three hours long or endless,” Egorikhin said.
Ultimately, the studio locked in a map size and objective design that typically leads to play sessions that are 15 to 40 minutes long.
With size sorted, they started working on the terrain of the maps, including how much variety in elevation they wanted to incorporate and how that would impact the moment-to-moment play of the game.
“It’s fun to have some elevation differences because it impacts the way you drive your vehicle, but it’s not always fun to fall into a pit, drive out, and then fall into a pit and drive out again,” he said. “There was a lot of interaction on the environment.”
The team also made sure to add in tantalizing points of interest and secondary objectives that move around the map between sessions, Willits added.
“There’s a lot of randomness to where objectives are, items are, vehicles are,” he said. “Even encounters can shift. But there are still those story beats. You know when you play the church level that there’s going to be a swarm invasion around the church because that’s kind of where the goal is, and things happen.
“There’s much more flexibility and much more choice and agency than in like a World War Z game.”
Ultimately, the developers fell into a pattern of experiment, iterate, focus test, and reiterate until they got something playable, fun, and understandable for the typical player.
“This project was really different in that way,” Willits said.
80% WWZ and 20% MudRunner, or the other way round?
Mashing together the best bits of a zombie shooter and an off-road driving sim wasn’t the biggest challenge the studio faced; it was striking the right balance between the two.
“When you say it’s World War Z plus MudRunner, you don’t care about, like, in what percentage,” Egorikhin said. “Should it be 80 percent World War Z and 20 percent MudRunner or vice versa?
“It was really, really hard to get that right.”
The right combination is also dependent on the sort of player that the studio is aiming for. In the case of Toxic Commando, Saber was focused on players who do not expect a lot of vehicle gameplay because they’re fans of games like World War Z, Darktide, or Left 4 Dead.
“So we had to kind of lean towards this side more than the MudRunner series fans,” he said.
Once that was decided, the team did a ton of focus testing both internally and externally.
“Getting the balance right took almost the entire time we were working on the game,” Egorikhin said. “I’d say three out of the four years we were working on this balance stuff until we were kind of satisfied.”
Early in the testing, players liked the addition of the vehicles and the new sorts of challenges and features they brought with them—running out of gas, getting stuck, using the winch, using a turret, etc.—but they also weren’t sure why they needed to use the vehicles to begin with.
To address that, the team added things like vaults peppered around the map that had to be winched open with a vehicle. They also decided to give each of the vehicles unique active abilities.
For instance, the police car can attract the infected and then explode 15 seconds later in a gigantic mushroom cloud. Other vehicles can carry unlimited ammo, heal you, or have a mounted turret.
The vehicles are also spawned around the map randomly during each play session. So you never know which or how many vehicles you’re going to get. Once you snag one, you have to worry about your vehicle's gas and damage to make sure it remains usable.
The tweaks worked, and soon players weren’t just using the vehicles—they were making sure everyone had one in a run, if possible.
“Once we saw players driving three vehicles simultaneously, we got to this picture that we wanted, a playground where it’s up to them to figure out how to do things,” Egorikhin said. “Without all of these small additions, the formula didn’t work.”
While the main thrust of the design was aimed at players unaccustomed to using vehicles in their games, that doesn’t mean that the team ignored shooters with vehicles for inspiration. They looked at games like Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Delta Force to see how different elements of vehicular combat and driving mechanics worked.
The biggest takeaway for the team, though, was that they shouldn’t get too hung up on the notion of realism.
“There was a way of thinking that we should make the mud and stuff as real as possible, and that is the way to get the tension for the players,” he said. “But in the end, we understood that we didn’t need to be so realistic, and that we needed to get this idea into the plaster as well, that they shouldn’t expect that it’s something close to MudRunner. It’s an over-the-top, insane shooter.”
This directly impacted design choices like how you repair the vehicle during a session, as well as mechanics like changing the look of a vehicle using a skin. Not everything has to be explained or super realistic.
“They kind of inspired us in the shifting of this idea from it’s a realistic kind of horror movie to it’s a Carpenter movie. We can do what we want. The only limitation is that it’s understood by the players and it's fun," Egorikhin said.
Blasting infected with John Carpenter
Carpenter wasn’t brought into Toxic Commando until the studio was deep into the design of the game’s gestation.
“A few years ago, we went through some changes in the design, which is how we ended up working with John Carpenter,” Willits said. “We wanted to tap into that late ‘80s, early ‘90s action feeling.”
The team was discussing which movies and directors captured this vibe, and Carpenter’s name popped up.
It's not surprising given his illustrious career, which includes directing not just chilling horror flicks like Halloween, The Thing, and Prince of Darkness, but also fun action films like Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China.
“We gave him a call, and he was like, ‘Yeah, you know, that sounds really cool,'” Willits said. “So it kind of evolved from a spark of an idea using experiences and games that we have to a style of game, which then led to the partnership with John Carpenter.”
The pitch to Carpenter involved explaining the basic premise and gameplay of Toxic Commando, that the team wanted to have zombie mutant-type infected running amok in an exclusion zone while the rest of the world carries on business as usual. They also had the actors signed on and aimed to have an over-the-top, cheeky action approach.
“So we had those ingredients, and he was like, ‘Alright, this is cool.’”
He suggested bringing in some other elements to the story and also composed the music for the game.
If you’re familiar with Carpenter’s work, it’s hard to miss the iconic, synth-driven sound of his music. It elicits a very specific reaction from people who grew up watching his movies. The dialogue for the game is also very much a product of his voice.
To ensure Carpenter’s feedback on the game would be timely, Saber sent a producer to his house to set up the game so he could play builds as they were developed.
Egorikhin was one of the developers who regularly joined Carpenter’s play sessions. He said instead of quizzing him about his thoughts on the mechanics, they would take in his natural feedback as he played.
“I think that natural feedback is the most valuable kind,” Egorikhin said. “Sometimes you don’t even need to hear them talking about it, you can just look into their eyes and kind of understand whether they like it or what they think.
“When someone has time to digest everything, you can get into this sort of shit sandwich, where they will find something good and something bad to say. But if you’re getting their straight reaction, you’ll know exactly what they think.”
One of the first big takeaways the team received from those play sessions was that the game’s complexity—with all of the vehicle features and requirements layered onto a zombie shooter—could be too challenging for some.
“We were saving him and pulling him from an incapacitated state time and time again,” Egorikhin said. “So then we were like, ‘Okay, this isn’t normal.’”
He said one of the other things he took away from the experience was the sheer joy of being able to play a video game with the John Carpenter.
“In such moments, you don’t believe they’re happening,” he said. “I was thinking to myself, ‘Am I lying to myself? Is it not really happening? Yeah, it’s true.'”
He said that Carpenter was very open, very friendly, and very into it.
“There wasn’t a lot of small talk,” he said. “He was like, 'Okay, enough of the small talk, let’s play the game.'”
While Carpenter’s work with the game’s story and soundtrack was instrumental, perhaps the biggest impact he had on the game’s design was on its tone.
“We knew this franchise is no longer just some new IP, it’s a John Carpenter IP,” Egorikhin said. “It removed this block of we need to be super serious, we need to be realistic. We got this understanding that we can go over the top with everything, with the sounds that we’re doing, with the VFX. So basically, it affected all of the decisions that were made since then.”
Carpenter super fans
A game with John Carpenter’s name has to have a compelling story, but delivering one in a cooperative, session-based game can be a challenge.
“You don’t have much control over the players, like even where they’re looking at certain points,” Egorikhin said.
Of course, in a single-player game, it’s easy to direct an individual player’s attention to one point, or even take over the camera and show them a short cinematic. But Toxic Commando has up to four players who don’t necessarily have to be doing the same thing or even be remotely close to one another on the massive map. Players also may not be in the same place in the game's narrative when they join forces for a session.
“We had a goal of pushing the story further than it was in World War Z, where it was more about the characters,” he said. “It worked for World War Z because that was also the structure of the book. But we wanted to take a step forward with this.”
The solution was to lean heavily on the dialogue between the game’s four characters. There are set-piece cutscenes, but much of the story comes through the jocular back-and-forth between the characters as you fight your way through a mission.
Whenever you play a session, all four characters are present—either controlled by other players or by the computer. So the dialogue is rarely impacted by the absence of one.
And the writing for those lines feels pulled straight from a Carpenter movie.
“You can thank our narrative department for that,” Egorikhin said. Craig Sherman, “our chief narrative officer, is a big fan of Carpenter’s movies. So he’s added a lot of small Easter eggs and dialogue in the style of specific scenes from specific movies.”
Painting the world with mud
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the last things to be added to John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando is one of the major features that helps the game stand out: the mud.
In the game’s opening mission, I find myself in a heavily armored and heavily armed Humvee; two of my teammates are poking their weapons out windows while a third rides in a turret, swivelling right and left as they peer past the fat coils of razor wire that frame the vehicle’s roof.
I’m focused on driving up a narrow tunnel. In front of me, the incline looks approachable, but I worry about the deep ruts formed in the thick mud that coats the path. The Humvee bucks and wallows a bit as I approach the hill, then the tires take hold, and we effortlessly trudge up the path. As we top the first hill, the Humvee dips down into an unseen gully, its tires sinking deep into a thick pool of mud. As hard as I try, the best I can do is to get the vehicle to glide a bit to the left to right, mud splattering out behind its spinning tires.
The road seems impassible, the Humvee hopelessly stuck, but then a yellow icon pops up that notes a spot where I can fire my winch line. Holding the left mouse button, I aim and then press down on the right mouse button to fire. A harpoon spirals out of the front of the vehicle with a tow line attached. It thuds into the concrete barrier at the top of the hill, and I hold the left mouse button to winch myself out of the mud. Once free, I tap the right mouse button, freeing the line, and turn toward a mob of ambling infected; my passengers immediately open fire as we trudge forward.
It’s a hand-holding taste of what’s to come as you get past this opening tutorial level and plunge deep into the game’s rugged maps and treacherous roads.
Mud was what first caught my attention about this game. Implementing it and the terrain deforming tech behind it was a surprisingly delicate operation, Egorikhin said.
“It’s a rather heavy tech piece that required a lot of time to get it from one game to another, even though they’re both in the same engine,” he said. “We started the process of migrating the technology right after the first prototype, but once we’d done that, we had a lot of interactions trying to understand how much we needed the technology.”
That’s because MudRunner, where the tech was created, is a game that is essentially all about the terrain deformation and mud technology. Those designers didn’t have to worry about the action pacing of a zombie shooter.
“The players of those games are a completely different sort of player profile,” he said. “They like the slow pace.”
But getting constantly stuck in the mud or having to battle your vehicle up difficult roads doesn’t really mesh well with the sort of game they were developing with Toxic Commando.
To fix the problem, the studio had to figure out a way to keep the spirit of the mud technology but make it much more casual. So Toxic Commando’s mud is a lot less aggressive than it is in a game like MudRunner.
The studio also had to take a much more hands-on approach to how and where the mud is used in Toxic Commando. In both MudRunner and Toxic Commando, a designer uses a special brush to paint in the mud for a level. The depth of the mud dictates the experience and how easily you will get stuck or free yourself.
With Toxic Commando, though, the studio decided that they wanted to use mud more judiciously, as a way to help create cinematic moments.
“Maybe there’s a narrow area, and we can spawn enemies from the sides, and we increase the role of the mud in such a place to direct this sort of culmination,” Egorikhin said. “It’s not guaranteed that everyone will go through that area, but we push players to these scenarios, and maybe 90 percent of the players get stuck or slowed down, and that’s when the enemies spawn.”
The result is a game that uses essentially the same technology in a more casual and directed way.
Coated in mud and blood
When the tires meet the mud and the swarms push in on you, synth music pulsing, sky crackling with menace, Toxic Commando comes into full focus.
The story kicks off after a scientist digs a bit too deep into the Earth, releasing what could become a global apocalypse. Fortunately, though, the government is able to lock down what comes crawling out of the hole by creating a containment zone.
Leon Dorsey, the acerbic scientist who kicked the planet to the edge of collapse, calls in a team of mercenaries to deliver a solution to the verging cataclysm. That’s you and your three teammates. Unfortunately, you fail—at least initially—but Dorsey is there to save you and provide the steps to taking another stab at world salvation.
As a result of your first run-in, you and your team are all infected, but you wear Dorsey-designed vests that prevent you from becoming a mindless zombie while still granting you the same powers they possess.
In practice, those powers manifest as four different upgradeable classes.
The Strike class can fire kinetic projectiles that look like blue fireballs, which can damage enemies.
The Operator can weaponize a drone to attack enemies in the area on its own.
The Medic can create a healing aura that will heal herself and nearby players.
The Defender can create a fixed dome shield that blocks incoming projectiles and damages any enemies standing inside it.
After the initial conflict, the game opens up in a camp where you can upgrade your characters’ class abilities, swap out gear, chat with Dorsey, and select your next mission.
Each outing starts with you on foot, walking around the map to see what the world has in store for you. Due to the semi-random nature of the game, a vehicle or vehicles may be waiting for you outside the gates. Or maybe you’ll come across them during your travels.
There are half a dozen vehicles in the game, each with specific abilities. The ambulance, for instance, restores health as you and your team ride in it and can create a healing buff around it for a short time. The Maverick is an off-roader with an EMP, a winch, and a mounted heavy machine gun.
While vehicles can provide a lot of support in a mission, they also require repairs and gas, both of which may mean you end up abandoning them at some point along the way to complete your mission goals.
In one mission, I'm asked to defend a church. Playing alone, I spent the early stage of the mission roaming the rambling, muck-filled roadways in search of parts, ammo, and vehicles.
Once I was loaded up and the computer-controlled team packed into a Maverick, we made our way to the church, where we spent some pre-attack time repairing coils of barbed wire, mounting machine guns, and setting up electrified pads. When the attack came, the infected stormed all sides of the compound, flooding in almost like surges of water. Mixed among the infected were bigger monstrosities that exploded or fired off balls of energy. One towering enemy got close enough to pluck me from atop a makeshift wall, where I was firing away with a mounted gun. It tossed me around until a computer-controlled character came to my rescue.
I found myself coated in mud and blood as I waded over to the parked vehicle and set off an EMP blast that cleared a radius of nearby enemies.
We survived the attack, but just barely.
When we talked about playing the game later, Willits was bummed to learn I was on my own. It’s best enjoyed, he told me, with a group of friends. That’s when the sandbox really opens up and starts to shine.
“Sometimes when I play with three other people, and we have multiple vehicles, we will caravan,” he said. “And then maybe one person drives off, and they start an entire swarm battle, and you have to drive over and save them.”
In one gameplay session with another journalist, Willits said the team of four ended up with four vehicles, and the driver of the Humvee was hooking up to smaller vehicles and dragging them around the map.
“It’s definitely always fun,” he said.
Snow, cities, Mars?
There’s a lot that comes with bringing John Carpenter into a new video game IP. There’s the tone, the writing, the music, and—it turns out—where the game can go post-launch.
“Looking at the filmography of John Carpenter, there could be literally anything from Mars to skyscrapers added to the game,” Egorikhin said. “We definitely want to expand the game to mountains and forests, and all of that stuff. At some point, there will be snow, maybe cities or closer to a town setting, maybe some more fantastic things.
“Post-launch, every new mission will be in a different setting. That’s a big opportunity for us.”
While Toxic Commando does have a complete story, Willits added, there are a lot of “dangling threads that can be pulled in different directions.”
Willits points to games like 2024’s Space Marine 2 and World War Z, which came out in 2019, as examples of how Saber supports games post-launch. Both titles continue to receive new content and updates even now, years after launch.
“If a game is successful, we will support,” he said. “I promise you, you will get your money's worth with Toxic because it's going to be a hell of a good time for you and your friends."
By Brian Crecente