The Making Of Lair Of The Clockwork God

How ten years of pub chats spawned an emotional comic adventure

- Chris Schilling

When Dan Marshall started talking about the third Dan And Ben game, the second was only three months old. Time Gentlemen, Please had launched in June 2009; by September he’d announced the first in a series of new episodic adventures starring the digital alter-egos of Marshall and writing partner and co-designer Ben Ward. “Right then,” he tweeted the following January, “The ‘The Revenge Of The Balloon-Headed Mexican’ Hype-Machine starts here!” Needless to say, that machine ground to a halt; likewise when Marshall revealed that Son Of Ben And Dan would be the next entry in the series. Eventually, after 2017’s intensely silly football parody Behold The Kickmen, he decided it was finally time to make the game he and Ward had been discussing for the better part of a decade. “We’d done so much prep work and put so much effort into designing something we thought would be really cool that we felt it would be stupid not to make it,” he says. And so, at last, Lair Of The Clockwork God was born.