If you’ve seen Cabin in the Woods, you know it already has a bit of a gamer vibe to it. Invisible walls? Check. Madcap conspiracies? Check. Both plays a genre straight and turns it completely on its ear? Check. Hilarious ad hoc weaponry? Total check. So it’s not so surprising that there could have been some kind of interactive venture in store for the movie, if only the film’s original distributor, MGM, hadn’t initiated its autodestruct sequence before we could get it.
Speaking with fans yesterday in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything,” the film’s director, Drew Goddard, says we could have had a Left 4 Dead/Cabin in the Woods mashup via DLC, had MGM not gone bankrupt beforehand:
We actually were going to do a downloadable L4D2 expansion pack, where you’d fight in the Cabin world, but then MGM went bankrupt so the delay squashed it. But the people at Valve were still cool enough to let us use some of their monsters to fill the cubes in the background (I had a lot of cubes to fill.)
By the way — the game was gonna be amazing. You were gonna be able to play in both the upstairs “Cabin in the Woods” world and the downstairs “facility” world with all the monsters. Believe me, I HATE all video games based on movies, they always suck, but porting Cabin into Left For Dead felt like the right fit. It pains me that it didn’t happen.
I don’t know about always sucking –I think in a post-Chronicles of Riddick world we need to reevaluate our biases about licensed games– but Goddard makes a good point. Cabin in the Woods and Left 4 Dead would have been a pretty swank fit.
Incidentally, the film is out on DVD and Blu-ray now, so if you haven’t already seen it and are wondering what the hell Goddard is even talking about with this “cubes” thing, I think you owe it to yourself to go check it out.
Drew Goddard IAmA via Tom Francis (by way of Kotaku).
