The Making Of... Observation

How Alien met 2001: the untold story of No Code’s stellar sci-fi

- Chris Schilling

Few studios have made such an attention-grabbing start as Glasgow’s No Code. Observation opens with a squall of noise, the crackle of a microphone audible over a rumbling score, as a caption tells us we’re aboard the titular space station, orbiting 410km above Earth. A light briefly illuminates a darkened room within the craft, which is passing floating detritus (including a spinning astronaut helmet), as the nervy voice of Dr. Emma Fisher lets us know something has gone very wrong. She accesses the station’s computer system, SAM – at which point we discover it’s not Fisher, but the AI we’re playing as. As a relative calm settles over proceedings, we’re asked to run hull and pressure diagnostics, reading data and feeding back to the anxious medic. Then, out of nowhere, a series of symbols interfere with SAM’s display, alongside a persistent high pitched sound. A message appears onscreen in all caps – “BRING HER” – and we cut to black. Establishing the game’s premise and the story’s central mystery with the economy and no little flair, it’s one of the most memorable introductions of recent years. And all the more remarkable when you consider this was the studio’s debut.

Or at least that was the plan. No Code’s second game was supposed to be it's first; Observation was, after all, the project co-founder Jon McKellan set up the studio to make. The idea behind it first took root while he was working at Creative Assembly as the lead UI artist on Alien: Isolation. On a project with a lot of overlap between roles, his work involved plenty of general game design. While there, he began mulling over the idea of making an adventure game that played to his skills. “I wanted to make something that had a lot of motion graphics, and a lot of UI work – something where we could tell a story through the UI in some way.”