In a blog post reflecting on the goals set for Dead Space, executive producer Glen Schofield writes how they examined images of car accidents and war scenes to get the gore in the game to look just right and beliavable, “because if you don’t, the effect isn’t horrifying, it’s just ludicrous.”

“We knew this would be difficult to portray, because sometimes gore in games looks cheap and unrealistic. Sure enough, the first few corpses that we did, just weren’t convincing enough. I rejected them,” Schofield explains.

“This sounds horrible, but we had to go look at pictures of car accidents and war scenes and things like that because we had to get it right; we had to portray scenes of terrible carnage and realism. It’s a big part of making that experience convincing.

“The corpses that we ended up making are just horrible. When you see them like that, they’re pretty disgusting. We had to have some gore to be sure that it was much more realistic then any game before.”

By watching the past dev diaries it was clear they were taking getting things right pretty seriously, but this is what I call dedication beyond the call of duty.