Miller agrees, which is why he returned to the Prey concept he'd long thought dead. "In the '90s, Prey was truly a game that was ahead of its time, and that's one of the reasons it was so hard to complete. The game featured environments that could be totally destroyed, it had portals, and it had a unique angle with the Cherokee lead character and Native American mythology. It turns out that in 2001, when we were talking about reviving Prey, these same things were still relevant and interesting."
Of course, Prey didn't hit shelves until 2006. Back in 2001, no one envisioned another five years of development. The new Prey started out being developed with the Unreal 2 engine, but that quickly changed. Gerritsen says, "We realized that some of the things we were trying to do with gameplay were going to take us longer to accomplish than a typical game development cycle, and that by the time we released, Unreal 2 would look fairly dated. We didn't want to come out at the end of an engine's life cycle, and at that time Epic had not even begun work on what would eventually become the Unreal 3 engine."
Fortunately, Human Head had other options. "After looking into the tech base and content pipeline, we decided that Doom 3 would be a great fit for what we wanted to accomplish with the engine, so we became the first official licensee of the Doom 3 engine."
Despite this good news and the progress the team made on the game, they labored under a thick veil of secrecy. According to Gerritsen, "Since Prey had a really storied history, all the parties involved agreed that Prey would be under a complete development blackout until the game was at an advanced level of completion. We knew that the game would take a fair amount of time to complete, and the last thing we wanted was for people to start calling the game vaporware. ... We even gave the game the code name of Dark Harvest, which was a reference to the code name George Lucas used while filming Star Wars, which he called Blue Harvest."
Even with everything all set up, the project still had its problems. You would have been forgiven if you'd thought Prey was cursed. It gave Gerritsen and his team some nail-biting moments. "Though I can't discuss details due to non-disclosure agreements, I can say that Human Head worked without a publishing contract for about 18 months due to our dispute with our publisher. That was pretty frightening since Human Head is an independent studio, and we were dependent on our milestone payments to pay for production.
"3D Realms, however, believed in the game and what we were doing with development, and they funded us during that period. This kept the company, and the project, alive during that period."
That sort of support from a third party is rare in the game industry, but 3D Realms thought enough of what they'd seen so far to put their money where their corporate mouth was.
