Dead Space is one of the most highly beloved survival horror games of all time, and for good reason; the title took the genre to new heights with its unique setting and thrilling, ‘kill by dismemberment’ gameplay, the latter of which kept the franchise feeling fresh all the way through Dead Space 3. While there are many memorable moments from the original game (yes, including that jump scare at the end), one such moment managed to nearly break the entire game.

In a recent interview with Ars Technica, Dead Space creator and director Glen Schofield revealed that the scene in which our beloved engineering protagonist Isaac gets dragged around and down a corridor by a massive tentacle almost broke the game, and required the team at Visceral Games to think outside the box in order to reliably bring the scene to life.

According to Schofield, one of the primary rules the Dead Space team adhered to was interactivity, and as such all the epic moments within the game still kept you in control of Isaac. Naturally, the team also wanted to keep players in control of him during the drag tentacle scene, though attempting to do this caused a significant amount of trouble for the developers. Per Schofield, the team eventually had to change things up by instead animating each part of the scene separately, in “layers,” which meant that they had to redo animations for each and every weapon Isaac could’ve potentially had available to him at that point.

This ultimately lead to the team changing how the entire scene is shot as well, which sounds pretty ridiculous for a sequence that lasts all of 40 seconds. That said, this level of hard work and dedication is what made Dead Space what it is, and it is likely that the original team wouldn’t have wanted to have it any other way.

So, thoughts on all the work it took to bring the scene to life? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow DFTG on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!