History VideoGame / TheThing2002

** On a similar note, this means any NPCs that's survival is currently a game over condition (Such as Engineers for opening fuse boxes) will seemingly never get infected...until the game decides they have outlived their plot armor and they usually then get a scripted transformation.

* EvilAllAlong: [[spoiler:Colonel Whitley turns out to have been manipulating Blake all along from the beginning of the game by acting as his commanding officer.]]

* ArmiesAreEvil: Unsurprisingly, the U.S. army wants to weaponize the Thing. [[spoiler:Colonel Whitley]] even shoots Dr. Faraday when he objects.

* LighterAndSofter: An inadvertent byproduct of expanding the arena (you aren't trapped in a tiny little space with an unknown number of monsters running around in disguise as in the movie), giving you far superior weaponry, and the limitations of the graphics of the time. In the movie, the "thing-outs" were both [[NauseaFuel nauseating]] and [[NightmareFuel terrifying]]; here they are almost casual events, happening to cardboard cutout characters, and quite quickly disposed of.

* SanityMeter: The game gives your party members sanity meters. If a Thing tries to eat them, they won't react well. (Not uncommonly, one of ''them'' is a thing, and the others utterly freak out when they're betrayed.)

* CanonImmigrant: The video game version officially follows the events after the film ended, and reveals what happened to Childs and RJ [=MacReady=]...[[spoiler: Childs died of exposure, and RJ survived]].

[[SimilarlyNamedWorks No relation]] to [[VideoGame/TheThing1988 the 1988 game of the same name]].

* UnwinnableByMistake: There is a stage where the player descends a long staircase, and has to deal with automatic turrets on every level, scalding steam vents, seemingly endless streams of [[GoddamnBats scuttling creatures]] that pop out of dead bodies (and attack you from front and behind), and the medic, the only hope of surviving the stage, turns into a monster at random points. If the player doesn't have enough health packs, or enough firepower, it's impossible to get through the stage(though there is one way to make it easier, if you leave the medic near the top of the staircase and run back up to him to get healed instead of having him follow you, he doesn't seem to turn into a monster).

* LoadingScreen: The loading screen shows a 'Thing' cell attacking, absorbing and imitating a regular animal cell, taken from the simulation Blair runs in the film.

* PlotHole: The game never explains how [[spoiler:[=MacReady=] survived in the cold for three months (the timeframe between the end of the film, and the beginning of the game), and how he managed to get a flyable helicopter. One possibility is that he was captured by Gen Inc. and held as a potential test subject, only to eventually escape, and steal a helicopter. A much darker interpretation is that [=MacReady=] is actually a Thing by this point, and killed the Whitley Thing to facilitate his own escape to the mainland.]]
** Though considering that Childs had been outdoors for a longer period of time there’s a good chance he succumbed to hypothermia while [=MacReady=] escaped in time.

* LoadingScreen: The loading screen shows a 'Thing' cell attacking, absorbing and imitating a regular animal cell, taken from the movie that inspired it.

* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: Carter and Cruz, the first two squad mates you receive after encountering the Thing, turn out to be infected, but neither of them attack you when you're alone with them, and if you give them the blood test before the scripted event that turns them into Things, it shows that they're human, while there is dynamic infection and testing, teammates are scripted to reveal themselves as Things when you hit certain plot flags even if you've just tested them and confirmed they were human. This is mostly so the game can get you alone whenever it requires you to be alone, this combined with the somewhat low infection rate for NPCs means it's entirely possible for none of your team to get infected and reveal themselves before the game is scripted to do it anyway to have you be alone.

* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: Carter and Cruz, the first two squad mates you receive after encountering the Thing, turn out to be infected, but neither of them attack you when you're alone with them, and if you give them the blood test before the scripted event that turns them into Things, it shows that they're human. In fact, the "tests" only seem to work when scripted to, and teammates can reveal themselves as Things when you hit certain plot flags even if you've just tested them and confirmed they were human. This is mostly so the game can get you alone whenever it requires you to be alone.

* ArmiesAreEvil: Unsurprisingly, the U.S. army wants to weaponize the Thing. Colonel Whitley even shoots Dr. Faraday when he objects.
* ArtificialStupidity: Col. Whitley's soldiers. They never take cover, and in one section, where laser trip bombs are hidden all over in a maze like warehouse, they will kill themselves walking into the more obvious ones.
* BigBad: Col. R.C. Whitley.

* LaserGuidedKarma: No prize for figuring out that Whitley's Thing immunity [[spoiler:is all too short lived, as he becomes the Whitley Thing, a monstrous version of the Blair Thing that combines all Thing biomass from Gen Inc. and requires a helicopter and massive amount of fire to kill.]]

* ProfessorGuineaPig: Colonel Whitley injects himself with a genetically modified "denatured" version of the Thing in hopes of curing his terminal cancer. Needless to say, the modified strain of the Thing isn't as "denatured" as Gen Inc. thought and Whitley ends up being taken over, though it's unclear the extent to which Whitley was subverted by the Thing versus him simply being a megalomaniac.

** Though considering that Childs had been outdoors for a longer period of time there’s a good chance he succumbed to hypothermia while MacReady escaped in time.

* BossArenaIdiocy: The final boss just so happens to be placed in an area where there are flammable barrels all around, and for some reason, when you shoot them, they shoot fire inwardly towards the [[spoiler:Whitley-Thing]] instead of exploding.

* SequelInAnotherMedium: A survival horror video game sequel to a horror movie based on a sci-fi novella.

''The Thing'' is a survival horror game from the year 2002. It acts as a sequel to the film ''Film/TheThing1982''.

No relation to [[VideoGame/TheThing1988 the 1988 game of the same name]].
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* TheComputerIsACheatingBastard: The first two squad mates you receive after encountering the Thing turn out to be infected, but neither of them attack you when you're alone with them, and if you give them the blood test before the scripted event that turns them into Things, it shows that they're human. In fact, the "tests" only seem to work when scripted to, and teammates can reveal themselves as Things when you hit certain plot flags even if you've just tested them and confirmed they were human. This is mostly so the game can get you alone whenever it requires you to be alone.

* GasChamber: There is a scene where the protagonist is lured into a room quickly being filled with poison gas. The message left on a computer screen in the room is a nice touch:

* TheCameo: John Carpenter contributes his likeness to the character of Dr. Faraday, and [[spoiler: [=MacReady=], alive and well, shows up to help you fight the final boss]].

* ColbertBump: The game went largely unknown until it was given some (negative) exposure when it was used as the basis of one of the earliest episodes of [[WebVideo/TheSpoonyExperiment]].