‘Pacific Drive’ takes players on supernatural adventure in the Pacific Northwest

Last year, Seattle-based company Ironwood Studios released its debut game, “Pacific Drive.” The game is set in the Olympic Peninsula and players drive around in a station wagon, exploring supernatural happenings. The production company Atomic Monster has acquired the rights to turn the award-nominated game into a TV series. Cassandra Dracott is the CEO and creative director for Ironwood Studios and also grew up in Portland. She joins us to share how growing up in the Pacific Northwest influenced the making of the game and more.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the video game “Pacific Drive.” It is the debut game by the independent Seattle-based company, Ironwood Studios. It came out last year to some rave reviews. It’s set in the Olympic Peninsula in the recent past. Players drive around the spooky Northwest woods, exploring supernatural happenings and fixing a station wagon that has a habit of breaking down in weird ways.

Cassandra Dracott, who grew up in Portland, is the CEO and creative director of Ironwood Studios. She joins us now. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Cassandra Dracott: Great, thank you so much for having me.

Miller: What inspired this game, personally?

Dracott: That’s a good question. I have a huge love of the Northwest. I grew up in the area and took a lot of trips, camping with my family, even some driving jobs. And I think that, plus a long, tailored love of surrealism in fiction and stories – whether it’s “The X Files” or different games – culminated to something along the lines of the “Pacific Drive” that we have today.

Miller: There are so many books, movies and now some video games set in the Pacific Northwest that tap into this vein of horror, or supernatural, or a sort of creepy weirdness. What do you think it is about the Northwest that makes this work?

Dracott: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think we have this amazingly diverse, wonderful landscape, but there’s a lot of hills, there’s a lot of trees, and occasionally there’s a good chunk of rainy weather and fog. I think that comes to a clash between two emotions. You have the sense of being humbled by the scale around you, being humbled by all these mountains and by all of these massive vistas, but at the same time, it’s mysterious because you can’t see very far. You can’t see around that next turn. You can’t see very far into the fog. You can’t see far in the rain. And I think those two combined to make being humbled by something mysterious, which can easily translate to fear of the unknown. I think it’s a perfect setting for something like that.

Miller: There was an article on the site GameStop back in the spring that had a lot of praise for your game, essentially saying – I think this is even in the headline – that it is “unnervingly spooky and relaxingly chill at the same time.” How do you achieve that? They seem like they would go in opposite directions, that spookiness and then the relaxingly chill.

Dracott: It’s a funny thing, it really comes down to contrast. Like, if everything is at a 10 all the time, then nothing’s at a 10. So you wanna have those peaceful moments with the stressful moments. And in fact, early on in production when we were prototyping the game and figuring out what it would be, we weren’t actually planning to have the garage the way it exists.

In the game, you go out on these trips out into the zone and that’s where all the spookiness happens. But then you come back and you have this garage where you can work on your car, you can fix the problems with it and prepare for that next trip. And I think the second we hook that up, we’re like, oh yeah, this is it, this is the thing that helps sell that difference of mood, both out in the car and then out in the world.

Miller: Let me play a little bit from the game. This is in one of the parts where you, as a player, as the driver, you’re getting some directions from this woman named Oppy – who, if I understand correctly, once was a scientist, an inventor in the area before things went very wrong. So let’s have a listen to part of what she tells you as a player at one point.

[Recording from “Pacific Drive” playing]

Oppy [game character]: I’m sending you to visit Colossal Cappy. If that old anomaly doesn’t induce electromagnetic resonance in your car, then we’re free from Tobias’s fever dreams and we can get you out of here. With that antenna fixed, you can now detect stabilized road junctions in the outer zone. You’ve got a stable route heading straight to Cappy’s front door, but the energy readings are off the roof. I advise you not to take the zone lightly. You better gear up or you may not survive the trip. Which would make my life easier, so … your call.

[Recording ends]

Miller: So, what is the backstory here? What are players driving through?

Dracott: Oppy is one of the couple of main voiced NPCs [non-player character] in the game, and she’s been in the zone a long time. Like you mentioned, she’s got this past being directly connected to the history of the zone, its founding and the science that happened. But since then, she’s effectively become embittered by everything that’s happened. But, you’re here, you’re messing around in her garage and she’s begrudgingly helping you navigate.

One of the things that is unique about the zone is it’s full of what we call “instability” where, as you try to get around in it, it’s constantly shifting. And that reflects a gameplay mechanic where no trip going out into the zone is the same as the last one – things change, we randomly and procedurally generate different aspects of it. Narratively, we explain it with instability. And she’s guiding you on how to take these trips, how to navigate this instability and then come back safely to your garage.

Miller: The Polygon site’s review of the game included these lines: “The genius of ‘Pacific Drive’ is that the focus for the traditional ‘gather and craft’ loops of the survival genre is on a singular object: your car. It’s your base, companion, suit of armor, armory and skills, all embodied in a single stoic, rickety chassis. It goes everywhere with you. It takes every knock for you, and it needs constant maintenance and modification.”

The car that you chose is a kind of boxy, old-fashioned looking – even in 1998, when the game takes place – station wagon. How did you choose this car?

Dracott: It’s an old station wagon. I grew up driving station wagons and it was definitely in my head early on. I think my family drove Volvo station wagons. It ended up fitting really well because it’s both Americanized – these old woody wagons that are a part of the Americana that we use to connect the player to the weirdness of the zone – but it’s also adaptable. Even going back to old station wagon ads of the ‘80s, it’s for the family, it could go camping, you can put stuff in it, it’s still a good car, it’s very fancy, it’s got air conditioning, it’s got all these features.

So it ended up fitting really well. And obviously, we don’t have a specific design that we used for the game, but it’s certainly inspired by all of those cars from those eras.

Miller: Can you describe the many things that can go wrong with the car, or the weird things that can go wrong, when you turn the wipers on or make a left turn?

Dracott: It’s one of my favorite parts of the game. Early on in development, we knew we wanted to do something with weird car problems. We would talk to people for fun and just be like, “Hey, tell us a weird story, a thing that your car does.” And I built this giant data table of weird things that could go wrong with your car. We looked at that and we realized that we could proceduralise some of these elements.

Under the hood, the game is finding these strange causes and effects. A cause could be, “I shut my door, " or “I hit a bump,” or “I turned on my courtesy light,” or “I turn left,” or something like that. And then, we also built a bunch of manifestations. The horn honks, the radio toggles on or off, your speedometer goes silly. On our end, as developers, we buy us some of these combinations in different ways, but for the most part, it is randomized and it’s picking all of these different things.

As you play the game, your car will get unique “quirks” – what we call them – for your car, and they can chain together. So if you have one [like] “when I pop my hood, my horn honks,” you could have another one that says “when my horn honks, my right door opens.” And all of a sudden, when you pop your door, the horn honks and your right door opens. It does this amazing thing of building more character into this vehicle because we really wanted you to have that relationship. It was such a special thing.

Miller: There are some complicated fixes that are required as the game goes on. But you also have a seemingly magical repair putty, goopy paste, that players can scoop up and slop onto their car. I want to give folks a sense for what it sounds like when that happens.

[Sound effects playing: metal scraping and slimy bubbling]

How did you approach the sound design of this game?

Dracott: First off, the credit for the sound design goes to the team, A Shell in the Pit. They’re a company that we work with to help with our audio, and they are incredible at what they do. They put so much love and care into every part of the sound design. When it comes to how they built the world, I would have conversations with them about different things that I had in mind. But for the most part, they took it and they ran with it. They were genuine in giving the audio the attention to detail that matched the level of interactivity that we had in the game.

This isn’t just a car that you can get in and out of, it’s a car that has 30-odd different parts that can change in customization options. And you can interact with all of it, take off one of the four wheels and then still try to drive. They did such an incredible job at going in and figuring all of this out. I can’t speak to that specific one, but I know a good chunk of the audio was sourced from real station wagons. There’s a video of multiple station wagons, just recording audio from it. I think …

Miller: There’s also music. How did you select which music people could hear on the radio?

Dracott: The music is something I’m particularly proud of. On my end as a creator, I find a lot of emotion in music. I took it upon myself to try to build a track list. It was one of the things that I was directly responsible for, as the creative director. I would listen to all of these different songs. We’re talking hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of songs from different Indie artists, most of which were around the Pacific Northwest, trying to find ones that I felt captured that road-trip era nostalgia. But I would bias it in different directions. Some of them I would want to be a little bit more upbeat, a little bit more rock and roll, some of them needed to feel a little bit more melancholy. And we built this, over the course of 20, 25 songs, little selection of different moods that could come across in the music. And I think it worked well because we can’t dictate how players experience the game.

It was something that, originally, we were going to be really scripted on. We were even gonna do stuff like, OK, at this point in time, the car is stuck and the player has to save the car, or maybe vice-versa. But what we found when we were testing is that players were getting attached to their car with the stories that they would make for themselves. Like, “I forgot to put the car in park, and now it’s rolling down the hill, and a storm is coming, and I’m chasing after it, and it’s dark in the woods …” They remember these moments, but we didn’t script that. That’s just part of the gameplay. And the music and the radio soundtrack had to reflect that as well. So we had to make sure that there was enough variation in there. As much as I would love to fill it with just singer-songwriter music, that wouldn’t always fit. There had to be something of a selection.

Miller: Cassandra, thanks so much.

Dracott: Yeah.

Miller: That’s Cassandra Dracott, CEO and creative director of Ironwood Studios. Their first video game is called “Pacific Drive.” It came out last year.

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