The Art of Enemy Taunts
The lesson for secondary dialogue (e.g. “There’s something out there waiting for us, and it ain’t no man. We’re all gonna die.”) in games - don’t make it too real:
I was told to rewrite the lines where anyone expressed a strong desire not to die. It was “sadistic” to kill people who directly asked you not to kill them. This sort of sadism is exactly the stuff that gets us a red flag from the ESRB. I felt pretty bad about this - I had written sadistic material! - before I thought about it. The thinking was, it wasn’t sadistic to create elaborate torture sequences as a heavily marketed feature; it was sadistic for the people being tortured to death to raise objections. It was sadistic to suggest that the individuals you killed had resembled human beings, that they were afraid to die.