Let's talk about Forrest Kaysen - in Spy Fiction.
Let’s talk about Forrest Kaysen - in Spy Fiction.
Forrest Kaysen left a major impression on many players of Deadly Premonition,
from his initial appearance where York made the “FK” connection, to the
bizarre sequence where you walk his dog, to his eventual role in the
game’s main story. Many such players, then, must have been surprised to
find out that he also appeared as a character in the director’s previous
game, Spy Fiction. But other than appearance and name, the
characters were totally different, having different personalities,
occupations and roles in the plot. Unrelated reusing of a character
design… right?
Right?
Spoilers for both games, but mostly DP - if you haven’t played Spy Fiction, reading this will tell you what happens to Kaysen in it, but it won’t spoil any big SF reveals or anything.
Now that we are under the line and the let’s talk about the big difference between the two characters: DP Forrest Kaysen is an unaging monster from another plane of existence and SF Forrest Kaysen is more or less Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park. Those are, obviously, totally different characters. But if that’s all there was to say, then I wouldn’t be writing this article.
In fact, there’s a pretty major similarity between them that IS immediately apparent. In Deadly Premonition’s backstory, Forrest Kaysen and the US military performed an experiment on Greenvale with a mysterious bioweapon Kaysen created - a purple gas that caused people to attack eachother. Although this event does help explain the game’s plot, the military’s involvement in it is never fully explained.
Some years earlier in Spy Fiction, though, there is also a purple gas bioweapon involved heavily in the game’s plot! It’s called Lahder, and it’s mostly different than the one in DP - for one, rather than affecting you psychologically, it instead straight up kills you. But what really solidifies the connection is that its main developer in the course of the game is, yes, Forrest Kaysen (although it was first created by a different character, Dr. Coleman, Kaysen shortly displaced her and took control of the project).
But there’s more to this, as evidenced by a certain garbology (document/file) you can find in the game - #50, “Midnight Meeting!”. This shows that Kaysen was trading information with “a military” (implied to be the US military) in… Seattle. Seattle, Washington. Seattle, a city less than 30 miles away from Snoqualmie, a small town that was used as a reference for Greenvale in Deadly Premonition (and even contained the real Milk Barn until its recent closure)!
Those who have played Spy Fiction might think, “wait, i thought he was dealing with Enigma”, Enigma being the main antagonistic group of the game with which Kaysen and other minor antagonists are working with (to some extent). Well, Iris (the in-universe author of the article) calls it “the military”, and makes mention of a connection with a Navy officer. Again, one might assume that to be talking about fellow Enigma ally Lysander (another character who reappeared in Deadly Premonition), but Lysander is a green beret, and would thus be part of the Army, not the Navy.
Now, this is all well and good, but another thing you might be asking is, “doesn’t Kaysen die in Spy Fiction?”. And you’re right - he was killed by his own Lahder, which seems to preclude him appearing in a future game. But in the beginning of Deadly Premonition, there is a map of the US on which are several Kaysen dolls, all wearing different clothing. That COULD just be related to Kaysen’s travels around the country - he is a traveling ‘salesman’, after all - but even in flashbacks, Kaysen seems to always be wearing those overalls. Rather, I think there are multiple Forrest Kaysens in the first place - to corroborate this, director Swery once revealed in an interview that there are other agents of the Red Tree. Although it seems that the podcast in which the interview was contained has been lost to time, the first post of this Giant Bomb thread vouches for that statement’s existence.
Most of you probably still aren’t convinced - the purple gas being a Lahder reference, sure. Multiple Kaysens, maybe. But is there really any reason to believe that Forrest Kaysen in Spy Fiction is anything more than an ordinary guy? And this is the huge “WTF” part, because oh my god, there is.
…but it’s buried on the Japanese website. That’s not quite a problem for us, though, because Wynyard translated a good chunk of the Japanese website’s content on their Spy Fiction blog. Here’s Kaysen’s profile. There are two big things that stand out on it.
First is that his age is “self-styled”, as in, he claims that he’s 39 years old. In Deadly Premonition, Kaysen is a lot older than he seems, and that seems to be the case here too, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent since the profile does say he was born in the 1900s. But that’s nothing compared to the big “oh my god???” thing in his personality section - that is, this bizarre line that comes out of nowhere:
“A sneaky and clever emissary-like being. The root of all darkness, he can only feel happiness when immersing himself in research.“
This… does not describe Kaysen as we see him in Spy Fiction. In-game, he’s portrayed as a bit of a joke, an arrogant creep who most people don’t really like - evil and conniving, sure, but not the root of all darkness. But more importantly, emissary-like being? That’s exactly what Kaysen ends up being in Deadly Premonition - in his own words, “a messenger of the Red Tree”. (And no, Wynward’s translation is not wrong - I checked the kanji and it does indeed mean messenger/emissary).
So, that exists. That’s real. But… how is it real? Why is that there? Why is there a connection that exists between two games seven years before the second game existed?
It was very surreal to me when I ran across that post for the first time, but I think I have an idea. Well, from looking at the Spy Fiction website on archive.org, the “World of SPY FICTION” section (which contains the Kaysen profile) has what looks like a spoiler warning on it. The archives don’t go back before late 2005, but because of that warning I am going to assume that the section wasn’t posted until a bit after the game was released, which was on Christmas of 2003. So the profile was likely written, or at least posted, some time during 2004 or 2005 (probably the former).
Swery and Access Games’ next work Rainy Woods began development in 2004. Although it would never release until 2010, after a cancellation and restart under the new name of Deadly Premonition, screenshots seen as early as 2007 show that Rainy Woods’ story and content was still going to be quite similar to the final product. You can even see it in the name of cut protagonist David Young Henning, whose middle name shares the Y with York (suggesting that the “alphabet characters” format was likely already planned).
That is all to say that Swery had the story of Deadly Premonition worked out quite some years before it actually released. I don’t know how early - obviously, a lot probably changed between 2004 and 2007 - but it’s not unreasonable to think that Swery had possibly already worked out that he wanted to reuse Kaysen’s design - and make him the game’s otherworldly antagonist. So when the time came to write the material for Spy Fiction’s website, he may have decided to include that detail in there as foreshadowing - foreshadowing that would not come to pass for six more years.
I hope the DP fandom enjoys this, Spy Fiction is a sadly undocumented game (even if it’s not exactly a ‘good’ one) and Deadly Premonition contains quite a lot of references to it, most of which have gone unnoticed by almost everyone. Credit to supergreatfriend’s LP for the garbology archive and Wynyard for both the translation blog and for getting the word out that the Japanese SF’s script is different than the western one - if they didn’t tell people, I’m certain that I never would have found out. And of course, if you like Swery’s games be sure to keep an eye on his upcoming fourth title The Good Life and perhaps even help fund it when its fig page goes public!
Right?
Spoilers for both games, but mostly DP - if you haven’t played Spy Fiction, reading this will tell you what happens to Kaysen in it, but it won’t spoil any big SF reveals or anything.
Now that we are under the line and the let’s talk about the big difference between the two characters: DP Forrest Kaysen is an unaging monster from another plane of existence and SF Forrest Kaysen is more or less Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park. Those are, obviously, totally different characters. But if that’s all there was to say, then I wouldn’t be writing this article.
In fact, there’s a pretty major similarity between them that IS immediately apparent. In Deadly Premonition’s backstory, Forrest Kaysen and the US military performed an experiment on Greenvale with a mysterious bioweapon Kaysen created - a purple gas that caused people to attack eachother. Although this event does help explain the game’s plot, the military’s involvement in it is never fully explained.
Some years earlier in Spy Fiction, though, there is also a purple gas bioweapon involved heavily in the game’s plot! It’s called Lahder, and it’s mostly different than the one in DP - for one, rather than affecting you psychologically, it instead straight up kills you. But what really solidifies the connection is that its main developer in the course of the game is, yes, Forrest Kaysen (although it was first created by a different character, Dr. Coleman, Kaysen shortly displaced her and took control of the project).
But there’s more to this, as evidenced by a certain garbology (document/file) you can find in the game - #50, “Midnight Meeting!”. This shows that Kaysen was trading information with “a military” (implied to be the US military) in… Seattle. Seattle, Washington. Seattle, a city less than 30 miles away from Snoqualmie, a small town that was used as a reference for Greenvale in Deadly Premonition (and even contained the real Milk Barn until its recent closure)!
Those who have played Spy Fiction might think, “wait, i thought he was dealing with Enigma”, Enigma being the main antagonistic group of the game with which Kaysen and other minor antagonists are working with (to some extent). Well, Iris (the in-universe author of the article) calls it “the military”, and makes mention of a connection with a Navy officer. Again, one might assume that to be talking about fellow Enigma ally Lysander (another character who reappeared in Deadly Premonition), but Lysander is a green beret, and would thus be part of the Army, not the Navy.
Now, this is all well and good, but another thing you might be asking is, “doesn’t Kaysen die in Spy Fiction?”. And you’re right - he was killed by his own Lahder, which seems to preclude him appearing in a future game. But in the beginning of Deadly Premonition, there is a map of the US on which are several Kaysen dolls, all wearing different clothing. That COULD just be related to Kaysen’s travels around the country - he is a traveling ‘salesman’, after all - but even in flashbacks, Kaysen seems to always be wearing those overalls. Rather, I think there are multiple Forrest Kaysens in the first place - to corroborate this, director Swery once revealed in an interview that there are other agents of the Red Tree. Although it seems that the podcast in which the interview was contained has been lost to time, the first post of this Giant Bomb thread vouches for that statement’s existence.
Most of you probably still aren’t convinced - the purple gas being a Lahder reference, sure. Multiple Kaysens, maybe. But is there really any reason to believe that Forrest Kaysen in Spy Fiction is anything more than an ordinary guy? And this is the huge “WTF” part, because oh my god, there is.
…but it’s buried on the Japanese website. That’s not quite a problem for us, though, because Wynyard translated a good chunk of the Japanese website’s content on their Spy Fiction blog. Here’s Kaysen’s profile. There are two big things that stand out on it.
First is that his age is “self-styled”, as in, he claims that he’s 39 years old. In Deadly Premonition, Kaysen is a lot older than he seems, and that seems to be the case here too, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent since the profile does say he was born in the 1900s. But that’s nothing compared to the big “oh my god???” thing in his personality section - that is, this bizarre line that comes out of nowhere:
“A sneaky and clever emissary-like being. The root of all darkness, he can only feel happiness when immersing himself in research.“
This… does not describe Kaysen as we see him in Spy Fiction. In-game, he’s portrayed as a bit of a joke, an arrogant creep who most people don’t really like - evil and conniving, sure, but not the root of all darkness. But more importantly, emissary-like being? That’s exactly what Kaysen ends up being in Deadly Premonition - in his own words, “a messenger of the Red Tree”. (And no, Wynward’s translation is not wrong - I checked the kanji and it does indeed mean messenger/emissary).
So, that exists. That’s real. But… how is it real? Why is that there? Why is there a connection that exists between two games seven years before the second game existed?
It was very surreal to me when I ran across that post for the first time, but I think I have an idea. Well, from looking at the Spy Fiction website on archive.org, the “World of SPY FICTION” section (which contains the Kaysen profile) has what looks like a spoiler warning on it. The archives don’t go back before late 2005, but because of that warning I am going to assume that the section wasn’t posted until a bit after the game was released, which was on Christmas of 2003. So the profile was likely written, or at least posted, some time during 2004 or 2005 (probably the former).
Swery and Access Games’ next work Rainy Woods began development in 2004. Although it would never release until 2010, after a cancellation and restart under the new name of Deadly Premonition, screenshots seen as early as 2007 show that Rainy Woods’ story and content was still going to be quite similar to the final product. You can even see it in the name of cut protagonist David Young Henning, whose middle name shares the Y with York (suggesting that the “alphabet characters” format was likely already planned).
That is all to say that Swery had the story of Deadly Premonition worked out quite some years before it actually released. I don’t know how early - obviously, a lot probably changed between 2004 and 2007 - but it’s not unreasonable to think that Swery had possibly already worked out that he wanted to reuse Kaysen’s design - and make him the game’s otherworldly antagonist. So when the time came to write the material for Spy Fiction’s website, he may have decided to include that detail in there as foreshadowing - foreshadowing that would not come to pass for six more years.
I hope the DP fandom enjoys this, Spy Fiction is a sadly undocumented game (even if it’s not exactly a ‘good’ one) and Deadly Premonition contains quite a lot of references to it, most of which have gone unnoticed by almost everyone. Credit to supergreatfriend’s LP for the garbology archive and Wynyard for both the translation blog and for getting the word out that the Japanese SF’s script is different than the western one - if they didn’t tell people, I’m certain that I never would have found out. And of course, if you like Swery’s games be sure to keep an eye on his upcoming fourth title The Good Life and perhaps even help fund it when its fig page goes public!
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