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Nine years after being introduced in this very spot, the Dead by Daylight team has returned to its original slashing grounds of PAX East, happy to discuss the game's incredible success in the past decade. Much of that success comes from the many franchise DLCs that Behaviour has been able to work into the gameplay, with characters like Freddy Krueger, the xenomorph, and Ghost Face making appearances as playable killers. But according to game director Mathieu Côté, all those slashing successes can be traced back to one legend of the genre: Michael Myers.

To be fair, game developer Behaviour Interactive already had a strong reputation as a game maker as the game was coming out in 2016. "We had mostly been doing work for hire," Côté told me on the PAX showfloor, "Making games for other people, for licensers. We had a reputation for being great at what we do."

However, as Côté admits, folks that weren't studio insiders were a lot less likely to known Behaviour by name. And so, when the studio would reach out for licensing rights, there was less of a chance that they would get a yes. But that all changed around Halloween 2016 (appropriately), when the company scored the rights to use John Carpenter's infamous horror villain from the 1978 Halloween movie.

"Once we got Michael Myers," says Côté, "Then you could go to the others and go, 'Michael Myers is in the game.' And then so it snowballed from there."

As we've already mentioned, that snowball took the shape of a host of other classic horror movie killers - Chucky, Leatherface, and Sadako have also joined the game's hellish ranks. In fact, as any fan of the game knows, the killer list extends beyond live-action movies, into anime, tabletop gaming, and even (as Côté says), into music.

"Five years ago," Côté says, "We started talking about the fact that we were building the Museum of Horror [a new feature of the game]. Then we'd call up the manager for Iron Maiden and go, 'By the way, we are thinking of opening the music wing of the Museum of Horror, because the visuals and the style of metal and horror are so very close and very linked.' And they're like, 'Oh yeah, I get what you're saying.' The narrative that we were creating as we were building our world made sense. It was an easy story to tell people and engaging them and go, yeah, I want to be a part of that."

There's a thinkpiece here about the cyclical nature of this whole thing - slasher films created Dead by Daylight, Michael Myers created slasher films, etc. - but I'll leave that or someone smarter than I to write. I've got a game to play with an old friend.

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