One Of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Scariest Parts Is Easily Overlooked

In my The Texas Chain Saw Massacre review, I called it one of the scariest games I’ve ever played. I’ve since put over 100 hours into the game, and that remains true to this day. A horror game can rarely be affecting for that long. Usually, exposure should desensitize you to even the genre’s all-time greats. But the unpredictable nature of the PvP game makes each round feel like a new horror story unfolding around me.

Beyond the famous family and their taunting dialogue, the maps arranged like dizzying death traps, and the final girl (or guy) music that pulsates like an encroaching cacophony of violence, there’s another layer that adds to the haunting atmosphere of the game–but it’s easily missed. At the start of each round, brief excerpts of radio broadcasts can be heard. These range from seemingly innocuous baseball recaps to reports of murder and mayhem alluding to the game’s playable cabal of killers. GameSpot recently spoke to Gun Media creative director Ronnie Hobbs about why and how the Texas Chain Saw Massacre news feed came to be, and how giving the game a sense of place creates a terrifying reality for the players.

“I think there was one point in development where we wanted the initial radio broadcast, the one talking about Maria Flores, to play. So for a while, that’s the only one we had.” Hobbs told me. “It talks about her disappearance, just to set the tone for the match as you load in. And even though you only hear like 10 seconds of it, it grounded the game in reality. And then when we heard it, we were like, ‘Wow, okay, this is actually really cool.’ And we’re like, ‘This is so cool that we should fill it in with other things.’ We just didn’t know what those were. So that was really how it got started. Myself and my assistant, Rob Fox, wrote these. Once we figured out that we wanted more of those, he and I started down the journey of doing that.”

Hobbs said the team, and even he alone at times, went to Texas while doing research for the game, visiting “100 different small towns” and sleeping in his SUV to get a better sense of the setting. The team would stumble upon odd shops selling artwork for thousands of dollars in the middle of the desert, talk their way into a mill for a tour–which would go on to inspire today’s new map in the game–and chat with locals to learn the backstories of these places that aren’t often notable enough to appear on maps. Many of these encounters inspired broadcasts in the game, like one that speaks of the Marfa Ghost Lights in Marfa, Texas, a decades-old phenomenon that some locals attribute to aliens.

Since I’ve played so much TCM, I’ve become familiar with many of the broadcasts, and I’ve loved how they come in a few flavors. There are 29 news report broadcasts in the game according to the full list Hobbs provided me, each of them delivered in an authentic Kronkite-like style that suits the game’s 1970s setting. While some hint at other unseen crimes of the family–Hobbs confirmed with me that Sissy is the “Terror of I-40” you can hear about at the start of some rounds–others feel so out of place that it’s their juxtaposition that winds up being most haunting.

A round of TCM can be nauseatingly scary when you’re facing an adept group of killers. To sit through the introduction of a match featuring the grotesque kill room and other torturous setups to the tune of the Texas Rangers’ roster acquisitions has the unexpected effect of making it all worse. There’s a world beyond the oppressive maps on which the game is played, and sometimes it’s the blissful ignorance of that world that haunts me–how can they be playing baseball right now? Don’t they know I’m running for my life?

Other times, it’s a more direct and obvious scare that colors in the world. In my opinion, the most unsettling of all the two-dozen-plus radio broadcasts relates to the scene of a gruesome cult suicide: 13 men dressed in matching plain white clothes ingested potassium cyanide and died sitting in chairs scattered around a ranch, each of them holding bibles and wearing sunglasses. It recalls infamous scenes like Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate and reminds me that, though The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is only very loosely based on a true story, its depictions of senseless violence really do occur in our world, too.

That was a major point of the original movie; it was a response to the violence of the Vietnam War. While real-life news networks shied away from reporting on the war’s casualties, the film’s creators dared people to stare directly into their inescapably dark reality and not blink. 50 years later, the game has captured this same effect. It creates a genuinely guttural sense of unease for the duration of every round as a way to authentically portray the movie in video game form.

These radio broadcasts could’ve just as easily not been in the game at all, and it probably still would’ve worked. The team sweat the small stuff and remade the house, the chainsaw, and the family in a way that winds up seeming like a museum to the film. But by adding layers to that world, like the news feed does so well, we sink even farther into the hellscape.

“All the trees, the grass, the rocks, the dirt–every single thing you see, you know–all the rusted metal. That’s all from Texas. So when you play our game, it feels like you’re actually there. So we went with that angle, as opposed to just making sure the house was right. We created the whole world from Texas. And I think that gives it a sense of uniqueness that not a lot of games can say they did or they have. So that just keeps trickling down, you know, down to, ‘Okay, yeah, that is the right chair, or that’s the right wallpaper, or these characters are really wearing the right clothes from 1972 or 71. Or they have backstories that link them to real schools or real colleges or real towns.’ That was very important to us. If you know Texas, you know these places that we’re talking about; they really exist. And then we carry that down to the radio broadcasts.”

The finishing touch to these news reports is how you’re not likely to hear the whole thing in any round. A match begins, and as the team of victims, you’re introduced to the map and the selected killers so you can begin to plot your escape before both teams are handed control of their characters. All the while, you hear a news report, but it’s bound to be cut off before you can hear the whole story. This has a classic horror-movie effect that instinctively asks the player to fill in the details, like a restless child making monsters out of shapes in their closet. It all feels so cohesive as a feature, and yet, so optional that Hobbs wasn’t ever sure anyone was paying attention to them.

“It’s fun to talk about it because I still go, ‘Man, is anyone actually hearing these? Do they appreciate it?’ wondered Hobbs. “And then every now and then I run into people who know them all, and they send me questions like, “What about here? It cut me off! What’s the whole story?'”

As mentioned, sometimes these broadcasts allude to the game’s killers, but importantly, not always, even when wicked things are being reported. It’s important to the world-building that some of the game’s news reports are unrelated to the Sawyer family, or else you could wind up creating something like an Evil Forest Gump who happened to be present for every grisly event in Texas at the time. Still, I wondered if players might spot any references to killers yet to arrive in the game.

“They’re all there for a reason. Very, very few of them are just there because we liked the way they sounded,” Hobbs teased. “I’ll leave it at that. None of them are there by accident.”

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, PS5, Xbox One, and PS4. It’s also available via Xbox Game Pass. Today, the game received a new update that adds the latest map, The Mill, alongside a new playable victim portrayed by horror legend Barbara Crampton.