In 2013 the first playable demo of Outlast ran at the PAX East show, in small curtained booths away from the lights of the show floor. Edge reported that one player “took the concept of a jump scare a little too literally and crashed through the booth’s makeshift wall”. The game gave the player nothing to fight with. Its hero, a journalist, carried a video camera whose night-vision mode was the only way to see in the dark, and whose batteries were, in Edge’s words, “the game’s most vital resource”.
Outlast was the first game from Red Barrels, a studio of about ten people in Montreal started by three developers who had worked on some of the best-known action games of the 2000s. It has made nothing but Outlast games since, and has published all of them itself.
Fast facts
- Founded: 2011, in Montreal, Canada.
- Founders: Philippe Morin, David Chateauneuf and Hugo Dallaire.
- Before Red Barrels: Morin worked on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Assassin’s Creed and, at Naughty Dog, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune; Chateauneuf was a lead level designer on The Sands of Time, Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell: Conviction; Dallaire was art director on Splinter Cell and Army of Two.
- Games: Outlast (2013), its add-on Outlast: Whistleblower (2014), Outlast 2 (2017) and The Outlast Trials (2024).
- Engine: Unreal Engine 3 for Outlast.
Leaving the big studios
All three founders came out of Ubisoft Montreal. Edge’s 2012 history of Assassin’s Creed singled out David Chateauneuf, its lead level designer, who had to make sure “almost everything was climbable” in the game’s cities. Edge added that he had since gone on “to cofound Montreal based indie startup Red Barrels”.
Philippe Morin told the studio’s story himself in 2015, in an article for Game Developer. After shipping Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune at Naughty Dog in 2007, he went back to Ubisoft Montreal as a creative director, and then joined EA Montreal, where Dallaire had been art director on Army of Two, “to work on a new IP based on an original concept by Hugo Dallaire”. “EA was undergoing many changes at the time and after a year or so, the project was cancelled.” In January 2011 all three quit.
They decided early that “the team would be no larger than 10 people”, and that the first game would be horror. With no money coming in, they spent three months making a fake gameplay trailer in Unreal Engine (“Hugo is a real MacGyver with Unreal,” Morin wrote) and finished it in June 2011. Most of the money came from the Canada Media Fund, but only once the founders had raised some of their own: “We managed to find $360,000, which was enough to ask for $1,000,000 from the CMF.” The trailer went public at Halloween 2012.
Outlast
Outlast came out for Windows on 4 September 2013. The player is Miles Upshur, an investigative journalist who drives up at night to Mount Massive, a remote Colorado asylum run by the Murkoff corporation, after a tip from an insider. The patients have got loose. Upshur cannot fight them. He can run, hide in lockers or under beds, lean round corners and, while running, look back over his shoulder.
Morin explained the choice: “We decided to go with no combat because it would allow us to build a more focused experience.” The camera followed from Upshur’s job, and “camcorders also have night vision, so it fit nicely”. In practice night vision drains the battery quickly, and most of the asylum is pitch black, so the player keeps scavenging for spares. Edge’s review found the moments when the battery ran out “so nerve-shreddingly enjoyable” that it wished batteries were scarcer.
Edge noted that the game “owes much to Amnesia: The Dark Descent”, including “Amnesia’s door trick” of opening a door slowly with the mouse to peek through. It also credited the team’s past. Getting into the asylum means climbing scaffolding to an open window, in a manner “more reminiscent of Mirror’s Edge’s Faith than, say, Gordon Freeman”, and the review closed by praising “the benefits of the diverse experience of its highly talented development team”. It thought Red Barrels had done “for modern horror what Visceral did for sci-fi with Dead Space”. The game could be finished in four to five hours.
A PlayStation 4 version followed early in 2014, through what Morin called “a special deal with Sony to allow PS+ gamers to download the game for free”. The add-on Outlast: Whistleblower came out on 6 May 2014 for PC and PS4. By January 2015, Morin wrote, “about 3 million units of Outlast and Whistleblower have been downloaded on all platforms”, a count that includes the free PlayStation Plus copies.
Later games
Outlast 2 (25 April 2017) moved the series to Temple Gate, a hidden town in the Arizona desert. The player is Blake Langermann, a cameraman and investigative journalist working with his wife, Lynn. They are investigating the murder of a pregnant woman and are led into the desert, to the followers of a man called Sullivan Knoth.
The Outlast Trials went co-operative. Set in the Cold War, it has players, alone or in teams of up to four, “involuntarily recruited by the good folks at the Murkoff Corporation” to test brainwashing and mind control. It opened in early access on 18 May 2023 and was fully released on 5 March 2024. Red Barrels describes all its games as “independently funded, developed and published”.
Sources
- Edge issue 244, September 2012, p. 125: the making of Assassin’s Creed; David Chateauneuf as lead level designer, “who went on to cofound Montreal based indie startup Red Barrels”.
- Edge issue 256, August 2013, p. 43: Outlast preview; a team of “former Ubisoft and Naughty Dog staff with credits on Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time, Assassin’s Creed and the first Uncharted”; the camera and its batteries; the PAX East booths.
- Edge issue 259, November 2013, pp. 96–97: Outlast review (PC tested, PS4 due in 2014); the studio “founded by former Prince Of Persia: Sands Of Time, Uncharted and Splinter Cell developers”; Mount Massive, Miles Upshur and Murkoff; hiding, leaning and looking back; the batteries; Amnesia and the door trick; Mirror’s Edge; four to five hours.
- Philippe Morin, “Horror in the Making: How Red Barrels Outlasted Outlast”, Game Developer, 29 January 2015 (web, secondary): leaving Naughty Dog, Ubisoft and EA Montreal; the cancelled project; quitting in January 2011; the ten-person limit; the trailer; the Canada Media Fund; no combat and the camcorder; release on 4 September 2013; the PlayStation Plus deal; Whistleblower on 6 May 2014; “about 3 million units”. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/horror-in-the-making-how-red-barrels-outlasted-i-outlast-i-
- Red Barrels, “About” page (web): founded in 2011 in Montreal; the founders and their credits; “independently funded, developed and published”. https://redbarrelsgames.com/about/
- Steam store pages for Outlast 2 (release 25 April 2017; Temple Gate, Blake and Lynn Langermann, Sullivan Knoth) and The Outlast Trials (release 5 March 2024; the Cold War setting and teams of two to four) (web). https://store.steampowered.com/app/414700/Outlast_2/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/1304930/The_Outlast_Trials/
- Wikipedia, “Outlast” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): later platforms (Xbox One 2014; macOS and Linux 2015; Nintendo Switch 2018) and The Outlast Trials in early access from 18 May 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlast