Prey is one of those games that ends up in development hell for one reason or another. Though it started life as a sequel to the original 2006 release, it has morphed into a reboot as announced back in June. Other than the announcement and a couple of trailers, developer Arkane Studios and publisher Bethesda have been pretty tight lipped about the finer details of the game. Now, they have released a new trailer that details the backstory of the world of Prey and its setting, the Talos I space station, through a classified video about the history of the station and its owner TranStar using comic book-style animation.
It starts by revealing that Prey relies on the use of alternate history. In 1958, the Soviet Union launched the Vorona I satellite to maintain its lead in the space race, though after a short time in orbit, it stops transmitting so a manned mission was sent to investigate. After finding no external issues, the Soviet leadership ordered the cosmonauts to open the satellite. The cosmonauts are attacked by a non-terrestrial life form and killed with the footage being buried as a State secret. Two years later the Soviet Union contacts the United States in order to contain the threat around the satellite with Kennedy agreeing to the proposal. This results in the Kletka program in 1963 which is the joint U.S.-Soviet construction of an installation dedicated to containing the life forms and the satellite.
This is short-lived, however, as in November of the same year, Kennedy travels to Dallas as in our world but in Prey he survives his assassination attempt by Lee Harvey Oswald. This causes Kennedy to seize sole U.S. control of the program and to expand the station over the course of the next 20 years into a full R&D program by 1984. The U.S. studied the creatures from that point until 1998 when a containment failure resulted in the death of an entire research team and the abandonment of the station. By 2030, the TranStar corporation had acquired the station from the U.S. government and refurbished it into a new-gen research and development center that has made more progress in 5 years than the entire 30 year purview of the government, leading up to the setting of the game in 2032.
I’ve always been a fan of alternate history fiction, and this looks to provide a solid foundation for the interesting world of Prey. You can watch the trailer yourself here.
from Nerd Reactor
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