Ill, a hyper-realistic and unusually gruesome horror shooter, has generated significant buzz since its debut trailer at Summer Game Fest 2025, despite almost nothing being publicly known about its small development team. Eurogamer spoke to creator Maxim Verehin, an Armenian concept artist whose credits include Diablo, Tomb Raider, Silent Hill and the TV series It: Welcome to Derry, to uncover the origins of the project and the team behind it, known as Team Clout.

Verehin says Ill began around 2020-2021 when he and a group of Armenian artist friends set out to make the kind of "bloody shooting horror" game they would want to play themselves, drawing on his long-standing fascination with grotesque, disturbing imagery. The team initially had little idea how to build a game of this scale, but leaned on film-industry skills in shot composition and timing to produce striking early trailers; the game's setting has since evolved from a small American town into the claustrophobic, decaying world seen in the current footage.