![]() ![]() I’ve been playing games for like 35 years. I think I first played an Atari 2600, told my parents and everybody in my family to chip-in together for birthday and Christmas to get a ZX80 Spectrum, which was the first time I ever made games. in first-person shooters and the relationship between story and gameplay.Īctually, when we made Dear Esther, I was teaching at a university and I was doing a Ph.D. And there’s a lot of discussion in the game theory community about whether games could be stories, whether you could have games with no story, whether you could have games with no gameplay. And a lot of people were saying, “Story is utterly dispensable. And story really is not what it’s about.” So it just came from an initial question of going, “Well, what happens if we actually take a game, and we remove everything apart from the story? Is that still going to be something that people are going to want to play?” And my hunch was it would be because of games like Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain, some of the early Doom mods, like there was a Doom mod called Aliens TC by a guy called Justin Fisher back in the early ‘90s… System Shock. All of these had these big patches of game where virtually nothing happened. And they’re incredibly atmospheric and incredibly emotional. So really, with Dear Esther what we wanted to do is say, “Well, what if we just have that? What if we just have a space you can explore? It’s all about the atmosphere. Is that going to work?” So we made this very simple little mod. Put it out on Mod DB as a Half Life 2 mod, and people loved it. Really, the mod community really championed it. And tens of thousands of people were downloading it. And it was doing really, really well.Īnd then we got contacted by an artist called Robert Briscoe. ![]() So at that point, it was just me and Jessica Curry, who is co-studio-head at The Chinese Room and the composer on the project. And he had just finished working on Mirror’s Edge. He said, “Look I’m looking for a downtime project. I’d like to essentially re-skin this mod.” And he started work on it, and his work was absolutely beautiful. And Jess then started saying, “You know what? I would like to re-record the music, and rather than using digital samples, get live musicians because I think that’ll give an incredible lift as well.” And we realised the only way we could afford to do all of this stuff was if we maybe sold it at the end of it. Not because we thought we’d be making any money, or that we’d sell many units, but just because we hoped to make enough money back that we’d be able to borrow enough money to license the Source engine and pay musicians. So we spent a couple of years doing this. And really, we were expecting to sell a few thousand units. We thought if it sells 20,000 units, we can pay back the money we’ve borrowed and we can put a couple of thousand pounds to Jess, a couple of thousand pounds to Rob, which isn’t a lot for two years’ work but it was something. And it sold 60,000 units in the first week, and it’s now at somewhere in the region of 830,000-840,000 units.
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