Gun Interactive CEO Wes Keltner records ambient sounds for a project. Attention to detail and realistically rendered environments help distinguish the game developer’s titles from the competition.
Founded in 2011, Lexington-based Gun Interactive has quickly grown to be the most prominent video game developer in Kentucky — and one of the most recognizable indie studios anywhere — thanks to its spooktacular games.
Known for nightmarish horror titles like “Layers of Fear 2” and “Friday the 13th: The Game,” Gun is set to supply even more scares on its next video-game project, which is modeled after the iconic 1974 movie “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
A longtime video game and horror film aficionado, Gun Interactive CEO Wes Keltner says he was just going through the motions as a sociology major at the University of Kentucky in the early 2000s when he visited one of his professor’s offices to discuss a class project. While there he noticed a pile of video games on the table and learned that his professor ran a website that reviewed them. After writing for the site for a short time, he was assigned to cover the Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3, in Los Angeles. Being on the conference floor captivated Keltner, who likened the experience to being a kid in a candy store.
However, Keltner quickly realized he liked playing games far more than writing about them, eventually leading him to found Gun Interactive a few years later.
Keltner launched his first entrepreneurial venture during his time at UK, when he worked with American Apparel to open a virtual store in the online world of the game “Second Life.” Players could purchase clothes for their in-game avatar, as well as make purchases in real life. It was one of the first brands to appear in “Second Life,” and the idea took off.
“Before I knew it, I was consulting with Ford Motor Company, Samsung, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Intel and several other big companies,” Keltner said. “For Ford, we partnered with Apple to release a photo-editing app on the iPhone, which was brand new at the time, to showcase Ford’s newly launched Ford Flex.”
A partnership with Clear Channel to bring interactive video games to their video boards in New York City’s Times Square followed, along with working with companies like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Sony.
A zombie-fied illustration of Wes Keltner, founder of video game developer Gun Interactive.
As Keltner’s confidence and professional network grew, so did his ambitions. He secured about $900,000 in angel investor funds from the Bluegrass Angel Fund and launched Gun Interactive with a four-person team. The company’s first game, “Breach & Clear,” debuted on PC and Apple devices in 2014.
It was “Friday the 13th: The Game,” launched in 2017, that gained the indie studio notoriety — and some unforeseen backlash.
The game received rave reviews and accumulated 14 million players. Soon after, however, the studio was forced by a court order to cease the creation of any new content for the game as a lawsuit played out between Victor Miller, the movie’s original screenwriter, and Sean Cunningham, producer of several films in the series.
The sudden stop in post-release development angered many of the game’s fans, some of whom began harassing Keltner and other studio employees online and even sent death threats. Keltner remains assured that the IP issues that plagued “Friday the 13th,” albeit out of Gun’s control, won’t come up again with its current project.
“The problem with ‘Friday the 13th’ was that [Miller] filed to regain his copyright, setting off the whole legal battle between the two parties,” Keltner said. “In the case of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,’ it’s just [Legendary Entertainment] who’s the rights holder. It’s his team who came to us about making the game, so I’m not concerned about a similar scenario playing out.”
Legal hurdles aside, what’s set apart Gun’s video game horror from other developers has undoubtedly been Keltner and his team’s — now a dozen strong — attention to detail when replicating the IPs they’re teaming up with.
“We studied all the ‘Friday the 13th’ films inside and out so that the floors, the curtains, the rugs, the sofas — every single thing you see in the game you can go find it in the movie.”
“We studied all the ‘Friday the 13th’ films inside and out so that the floors, the curtains, the rugs, the sofas — every single thing you see in the game you can go find it in the movie,” Keltner said. “We also have a cool virtual cabin in the game where you can walk around, look at and hold a bunch of different props from the movies, and even have Jason [the film’s antagonist] chase after you. The fans really appreciate that attention to detail and authenticity. We’re doing the same with ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,’ which we plan to share bits of in the coming month as we continue working through early development.”
Much like “Friday the 13th: The Game,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” is expected to allow players to play as multiple different characters, along with single and multiplayer game modes.
According to Keltner, crafting scary scenarios and environments in multiplayer games is a unique challenge, as music and other cues don’t prove quite as effective as single-player games.
“In multiplayer, it doesn’t work like that because everyone in the space is a human,” Keltner said. “So, to create those moments, you instead have to give the player all the tools in the sandbox, and they create their own moments. Sometimes you may play a match where you don’t ever get that moment, but then it’ll be constant tension in the next one.
“That’s what gets people hooked. We’re all used to talking with our friends about what we would have done if we were in ‘Friday the 13th’ or another horror movie. In our games. You get to put your money where your mouth is and try it.”