There was a brief window after the release of Dead Space, EA's sci-fi horror where you played an engineer fighting for survival on a mining ship full of mutated creatures, when the main character Isaac Clarke appeared in a string of other EA games. The engineer, in full armoured welding gear turned up in NBA Jam, Skate 3, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, almost like EA was treating him as a mascot for the whole publisher.
However, it turns out it wasn't so much because Clarke was such a big deal for EA, as it was because the character was extremely easy to port into other games because of his bone structure. Game designer Ben Johnson, who worked on the original Dead Space revealed on Twitter that the game shared "the same basic model rig" as the other titles and was, in fact, "A branch off of Tiger Woods" and was "made in the same studio as Dead Space". So, the character you played with in Dead Space was the same one as you did in the sports games, just with a different model and animations. EA Redwood Shores, which became Visceral Games, Dead Space's developer, after working on the Tiger Woods games from 2000 - 2007.
Johnson was replying to a tweet calling out Clarke's lives in other games:
Personally, as much as I like seeing Clarke turn up in other games, I want to see if the logic holds true going the other way. Get Tiger Woods to fight through the hordes of grotesque monsters aboard the USG Ishimura. If there's one thing his golfing career has taught him, it's how to triumph against the adversity of a competitive golfing green, which we can all agree is exceedingly similar to an alien infested spaceship.
Featured Image Credit: EATopics: EA, Dead Space
