John Carpenter's classic sci-fi/horror film The Thing ends with MacReady and Childs both alive, but the official Thing video game reveals their fate. The first in Carpenter's unofficial "Apocalypse Trilogy" - along with Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness - The Thing is technically a remake of the 1951 movie The Thing from Another World, itself an adaptation of the John W. Campbell novella Who Goes There? In practice though, Carpenter's Thing is its own beast.

Carpenter's The Thing was infamously a critical and commercial failure when first released in 1982, opposite the Steven Spielberg hit E.T. In the decades since though, The Thing has come to be regarded as arguably Carpenter's best film, and one of the most seamless blends of horror and sci-fi in history. In the tradition of films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing presents a scenario in which no one can be fully be trusted, as once assimilated by the titular alien, it's extremely hard to identify human from Thing.

Related: 10 Secrets Behind The Making Of John Carpenter's The Thing

The Thing sports an open-ended conclusion, in which MacReady (frequent Carpenter collaborator Kurt Russell) and Childs (Keith David, future star of Carpenter's They Live) are the only two characters still alive. They're likely to freeze to death outside in the Antarctic cold, but since neither is sure if the other is human, they have even bigger problems. This ending has generated a lot of theories, but an officially licensed The Thing video game actually provides specific, definitive answers.

The Thing: What Happened To MacReady & Childs

Kurt Russell John Carpenter The Thing

Released in 2002 for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Windows PC, The Thing video game served as a sequel to Carpenter's film, with a special forces team being sent to discover what happened to the people stationed at Outpost 31 three months later. The game was not only endorsed by Carpenter himself, but also featured his voice in a cameo role. Early on in The Thing game, the player comes across Childs body, frozen alongside the bottle of whiskey he and MacReady shared at the end of the film. It's not conclusively stated, but since he's frozen, seemingly to death, the logical conclusion is that he was still human. However, that doesn't mean MacReady was The Thing.

MacReady is still very much alive in fact, as he shows up in a helicopter near the end of the game to assist the player character in fighting off an enormous Thing creature. He identifies himself as MacReady, so this isn't just a case of a lookalike character. He survives the game, leaving him the sole survivor of The Thing's cinematic rampage. However, this does itself leave some unanswered questions, such as why MacReady abandoned Childs, how he survived exposure to the cold, and where the heck he got a helicopter. It's possible these questions would've been answered in the planned sequel video game, but unfortunately, developer Computer Artworks shut down due to financial issues before it could be made.

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