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In Dead Space, one of the biggest deep space mining ships mankind has ever built, the USG Ishimura, floats derelict in orbit above a deep space colony. Its crew has been out of communication and virtually all the ship's systems are in disrepair. Players take the role of Isaac, a member of a small engineering team sent in to repair the Ishimura's communications system. They soon find out that the giant ship has far more going on than a broken communications array. The crew has been slaughtered and their corpses transformed into grotesque monsters, called necromorphs, bent on adding Isaac and his team to their ranks.

Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield described in detail the birth and development of the project in a recent interview.

Most of the interview describes the process by which the game was pitched, prototyped, and after one year, greenlit. Apparently, it was easy for Schofield to get the go-ahead from EA to start prototyping, because the company had already committed itself to creating new IPs. It took first 18 and later 25 people to create three prototypes (to test gameplay concepts and the game's in-house engine, called the Saber Engine) over the course of one year before the project received the greenlight to begin full development.

Schofield also let slip at the end of the interview that his team is aiming to pack about 20 hours of gameplay into Dead Space. That's close to par for the course for Survival Horror.

EA Redwood Shores' Resident Evil 4-esque sci-fi game Dead Space has a shot at being a compelling genre title. The genre in this case is Survival Horror, which carries some remnant elements of classic Adventure games. Deep, psychological storytelling (as in Silent Hill 2) is the most prominent of those remnant elements, and the Dead Space team has produced a preview video declaring its dedication to that tradition. Gameplay footage is laced in as well.

According to the video, Dead Space takes place on a derelict mining spacecraft. The ship's crew mine distant planets on behalf of Earth's desperately resource-starved human population. When they crack open yet another planet, they apparently found hostile lifeforms.

There will also be a lot of personal back story information regarding the protagonist and other characters across the narrative arc. For more details, watch the video.