The new Prey game isn’t just rebooting that franchise — it’s also rebooting real-world history.
Bethesda released a video today for the shooter from Arkane Studios that dives into the lore of the sci-fi world. While Prey takes place on a space station called Talos I in the year 2032, its backstory stretches all the way back into the late 1950s and deals with the space race between the United States and Russia. That will lead to players exploring an orbiting research facility as human Morgan Yu when Prey launches in 2017 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Arkane and Bethesda present the clip as an in-fiction training video for TranStar employees that leaked out despite a scary nondisclosure agreement. And you should check it out by clicking play up above.
In Prey’s alternative timeline, USSR cosmonauts encounter extraterrestrial lifeforms. Unable to contain the threat, the Russians approached the United States to ask for aid in building a research station to contain and study the mysterious creatures living in Earth’s exosphere. But in 1963, an attempt to assassinate president John F. Kennedy failed, and that led the United States deciding to take unilateral control over the joint space station, which it poured resources into over 30 years before abandoning it.
Closer to the events of the upcoming Prey game, in the 2020s, a corporation called TranStar reclaimed the orbiting laboratory. It transformed it into the Talos I base that players will explore in the game. Of course, now under the pressures of the private sector, TranStar’s research scientists have started to make major breakthroughs with the nonterrestrial beings that “will redefine what it means to be human.”
Yup — that sounds like a video game setting to me.