effects of greed and ambition. He described Altman in the book as unremarkable until put into a difficult situation. One of the challenges was communicating with text the tense style of gameplay players experienced in the first game during zero-G or outer space sections. Due to the nature of the series and several pre-established elements, Evenson had to work within some constraints despite being given freedom by Visceral and Electronic Arts to portray Altman as a complex figure and question the Unitologist narrative surrounding him. Martyr was first announced in April 2010 with a press release from publisher Tor Books. The book was published on July 20. It was promoted at that year's San Diego Comic-Con. Titan Books republished the book on January 28, 2011, alongside Dead Space 2. Evenson later collaborated on the series again with Dead Space: Catalyst, a second prequel novel set during the period of experimentation with the Markers. Synopsis Martyr is set in the year 2214, over two centuries before the main events of the original Dead Space and at the beginning of the series timeline. In the wider narrative, humanity discovers an alien artifact called the Black Marker, which has the potential to produce limitless energy for the resource-starved planet Earth. The Black Marker emits a signal which causes dementia and psychosis, culminating in outbreaks of hostile reanimated corpses dubbed Necromorphs. The storyline focuses on the birth of Unitology, a religious movement that worships the Marker, and the origins of the derivative Red Markers. After a Necromorph body washes up on a Mexican beach near the Chicxulub crater area, the local inhabitants burn the corpse, though a local named Chava finds his wise woman dead from suicide afterwards. Geophysicist Michael Altman, working with his girlfriend anthropologist Ada Chavez, is investigating a gravitational signal coming from the Chicxulub crater, which appears to be associated with recent events. Altman meets with Charles Hammond, a freelance worker hired by resource corporation DredgerCorp to investigate the signal in secret. After Altman leaves, Hammond suffers auditory hallucinations and is approached by a seemingly hostile group, committing suicide in his growing delusional state. DredgerCorp sends a bathyscaphe down into the crater to investigate the object at its center; one of the crew suffers from a hallucination revealing the object to be the Black Marker. When the Marker is drilled, the signal drives the crewman insane, killing his partner and using