Last year the oil and gas industry saw itself represented in Amazon Prime’s The Rig and this year the critically acclaimed video game Still Wakes the Deep took inspiration from the North Sea.
Although The Rig was met with mixed reviews in 2023, Still Wakes the Deep demonstrated there is an appetite for North Sea-based scares when gamers got their hands on it in June.
The “narrative horror game” set on a rig off Scotland has been nominated for a plethora of awards.
Players who spent time on Shell’s Brent Delta, which was decommissioned in 2017, may feel a sense of deja vu as they creep through the labyrinthine layout of developer The Chinese Room’s fictitious Beira D rig.
© Supplied by Secret ModeLaura Dodds, associate art director for The Chinese Room told Energy Voice: “The Brent Delta was a key reference for us visually, although ours is a bit smaller.”
The Delta was the first of the four Brent platforms to be decommissioned with the Charlie being the final topside to come ashore earlier this year.
Dodds added: “Rigs are made of components where entire modules can be constructed separately and then bolted on, which meant we could cherry pick a reference for the accommodation block from one rig and look at another for their lifeboat set up, for example.”
Having looked at reference images from a range of installations, the Beira D rig became a “patchwork of rigs,” Dodds explained.
© Supplied by Secret ModeShe added: “Generally we tried to only look at rigs that were operational in the 70’s in the North Sea rather than something American.”
To get hands-on with the industry the team behind the game arranged a trip to a North Sea installation, however, the pandemic stopped that from happening, senior game designer, Jade Jacson said.
“A few members went to the wind farm just off the coast of Brighton but that’s the closest we got! We had planned to visit an oil rig, but sadly couldn’t because of the pandemic,” commented Jacson.
However, the team at The Chinese Room did manage to grab some snaps of platforms and get firsthand accounts of life in the North Sea through friends and family.
Dodds added: “Through friends and families that used to work on oil rigs, we were also able to collect quite a lot of pictures, interviews, and information too.”
In addition to this, online resources helped the team paint a picture of what life was like in the North Sea in the 1970s.
© Supplied by Secret ModeDodds said: “BP and The Huntley Archives have a lot of archive footage which was really helpful.
“It was difficult finding the right imagery at first, but after a while we built up an extensive glossary and list of specialist terms that could help us track down images of particular bits of machinery, equipment and functional areas on an oil rig.”
To obtain information about the kit used offshore at the time, the games designers found themselves diving through often obscure documents.
Dodds said: “Sometimes this meant trawling through very niche manufacturing websites and manuals for offshore suppliers!”
The game’s story centres on protagonist Caz, a North Sea worker from Partick, as he experiences a shift that would have a health and safety inspector scream.
Gamers are tasked with navigating the Beira D rig as it collapses while fending off an “otherworldly horror”.
© Supplied by Secret ModeStill Wakes the Deep came from the ideas of “The Thing on an oil rig” and “Annihilation meets The Poseidon Adventure”, Jacson said.
“From there it became about what would be the best location and time period that would fit these ideas,” she added.
“With the 70’s being so packed with questions about Scotland’s oil, it was almost a given. The time period was also very important for us since it meant that they would not be able to contact the mainland as easily as they can nowadays.”
The game’s protagonist is a newcomer to life in the North Sea, as Jacson explained: “It made sense that the oil industry might not be something he was intimately connected to before, and that he had a full life in Glasgow that he had run away from.”
With fiction inspired by the North Sea making headlines in 2023 and 2024, it stands to reason that the offshore energy sector will continue to be a source of inspiration for the creative industries going forward.