Trivia / Descent

• Reality Subtext: An artist who worked on the first game mentioned on Twitter that the iconic super-angular font used in the main menus was designed that way to prove a point — he had wanted a font tool to have kerning capabilities, and the programmer working on the tool was skeptical because he didn't know what kerning was, so the artist made that font as a demonstration, to produce extreme examples of how bad a font could look without kerning. Seeing this, the programmer duly added the kerning support.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Descent:
    • The working title for Descent was "Inferno".
  • Descent II:
    • The game and novels conflict with each other regarding the origins of the virus. While the games describe the virus as being completely alien in nature, the novels mention that Dravis altered the virus for his own purposes. The release of Descent 3 and its Expansion Pack, Mercenary, canonizes both the game and novel's description of the virus, in that it truly is alien in origin, but a strain of it was then altered by the PTMC, under orders from Dravis, which was then let loose on the SRAD Research Laboratory on Tiris and CED outpost on Io to test its potential.
  • Descent 3:
    • The game was originally planned to be much more complex than what it is now. An old video on what used to be PlanetDescent shows a short segment of Level 3 when Descent 3 was still in testing, and an ancient Adrenaline Vault feature used to detail every single robot's strengths, weaknesses and capabilities, such as the Juggernaut being able to kneel down to dodge a missile, the Thief being able to generate three decoys to fool a pursuing player, and the Tubbs getting distracted by items jettisoned from the player's ship. Traces of some of these additional features are still present in the final game (like the Stinger being more prone to friendly-fire incidents, or the EMD Gun causing the Spy Hunter's self-destruct mechanism to dud). Boss battles were also meant to have taken place in larger locales or have more scripted events, such as the player navigating a maze while being chased by a Homunculus shrouded in darkness, or the Hellion Assault Mech smashing out huge sections of the cavern he is in to generate additional lava falls.
    • Descent 3 was also wildly anticipated by fans of the franchise, and had Interplay invested their funds in the right kind of advertising (a tournament held in the US is not the right kind of advertising), Descent 3 may have had a larger, albeit very broken, fanbase.
    • Level 3 of Mercenary was originally conceived such that the player would have a more drawn-out battle with the Tracking Station's Captain; he would remove himself from the lavatory and enter a secret door to the side into a very small room.
  • The next installment in the series, Descent 4, was being developed as a prequel to Descent. However, development of it was cancelled and several elements of the cancelled game found their way into Red Faction, such as the GeoMod engine, portions of the plot, and the name of the protagonist, Parker.
  • Three separate attempts at creating the next game in the Descent series failed, with the first attempt, Descent IV: Invasion, cancelled due to legal issues surrounding the use of the Descent trademark, the second attempt, Sol Contingency, left in Development Hell after it was outright Screwed by the Lawyers, and the developers of the third attempt, originally named Descent: Underground, ultimately forfeiting the use of the Descent trademark to avoid being completely Screwed by the Network, and reverting to the game's original working name of Ships That Fight Underground.