director’s preface
Growing up in the 1980s was wild. I lived in a country that had managed to stay independent from the Soviet Union — yet stood right next to it. Finland was wedged between the West and the Eastern Bloc, a nation walking a tightrope to keep its balance.
We absorbed as much from the Soviets as from the West. My worldview was shaped by that balance more than by anything that followed. I still remember the morning my father pointed at the red mass on the world map and said: This country doesn’t exist anymore. I didn’t understand what he meant.
When the Iron Curtain fell, Soviet secrets began to surface — failed experiments erased from history, but also their bold, utopian dreams of space. Gagarin was as much a hero to me as Armstrong; through science, East and West seemed briefly united, even if much remained untold.
In Finland, we couldn’t escape Soviet propaganda — endless boasts of progress in technology, education, reform. Later, we learned it was mostly illusion: their utopia was never their reality.
When I began developing Deep Red, I wanted to explore that illusion — a Soviet utopia on Mars, watched as it crumbles the moment an outsider arrives. Because communism, at its core, could only survive in a sealed vacuum.
And what better vacuum than Mars — a red world, 225 million kilometers away, untouched by human influence. The perfect stage for the story to begin.