On the long, transformative walk from research team to videogame studio
The Chinese Room’s Brighton office, with its corridor of frosted glass and rooms of filing cabinets and phones, looks more like the setting for a ’70s cop show than a game studio. Before it moved in, this was the building for the local branch of Unison, the public service union. It still very much feels like it: most of its rooms are unoccupied, canvases of concept art propped up against the skirting boards still waiting to be hung. Down the hallway is the main workspace, an open-plan room filled with busy desks.
It’s a haphazard arrangement. (Suspiciously so, in fact: we’re told the previous landlord was convinced some kind of gambling outfit was being operated in here.) But it suits The Chinese Room somewhat. “We became a game studio kind of accidentally,” co-founder Dan Pinchbeck says. He’d been working in the University Of Portsmouth’s creative technologies department on a doctorate on the uses of story and nontechnological elements to enhance presence in virtual reality. “I was playing TimeSplitters one night, and I went, ‘Wait – this is mass-market virtual reality!’” he laughs. “‘Why am I doing VR when I could be doing games?’” He switched the subject of his PhD to how story should be considered a mechanic. “I talked to a few people and they were like, ‘This is just theory’.” He and a few others began modding Doom and Half-Life 2 in an effort to gather data. They made a version of Doom 3 with rubber bullets to see how stunning enemies instead of killing them changed the gameplay (“You’d end up with 100 zombies following you around a level”).
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 2019-Ausgabe von Edge.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der October 2019-Ausgabe von Edge.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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