Do you find while developing The Darkness you can employ unused ideas from the Riddick project as you're still using your own custom Starbreeze graphics engine?

MS: We had a prototype up and running pretty early on the Riddick engine, and so this gave us a starting point. As both games use a first-person perspective, we could use animations from Riddick to test out the engine and get things going, steadily progressing towards what you are seeing now. It looks and plays a lot differently from Riddick, but there are common elements that we have been able to use so development can progress more quickly.

JM: But there are some things you really can't take from Riddick, even though we and other people really liked them - like the melee attacks.

JM: In Riddick we had this guy in prison and it didn't seem realistic that he was carrying guns. But being a hitman for the Mafia, you're going to have access to weaponry, that's just the way it is. So if you have access to guns all the time, you don't just walk up and punch people in the face.

MS: We also have some storytelling ideas that we developed during the Riddick production that we pushed further. Because in Riddick we wanted to limit the number of cinematic cutscenes and bring as much as possible into the actual gameplay. In The Darkness we've gone even further. There are cinematic cut scenes, but all of them bar one are in the first-person. It's in the style of Half-Life, but far more dramatic.