From the ashes

The story behind the premature death – and surprising rebirth – of The Tomorrow Children

Everything’s good, Dylan Cuthbert says cheerfully, as he greets us from Kyoto. Well, almost everything. He’s managed to give himself a hernia – though he’s sufficiently recovered to be able to laugh about it. “We’re a few weeks from going into QA, and I’ve just been trying to cram in as much as possible before we do,” he says. “I was just really getting into it, thinking I was 20 again.”

He can smile, partly because of what those overexertions mean. On November 1, 2017, The Tomorrow Children, Q-Games’ fascinating multiplayer experiment – a hybrid of collaborative city-builder, social MMORPG and tower defence game, set in a distinctive Soviet-themed dystopia suspended in a viscous sea known as The Void – ceased operation. Five years later, it’s about to make a comeback, Cuthbert having wrested the rights back from Sony. Phoenix Edition will give the game a second chance on PS4 (with enhancements for PS5) within the next few months.

Its existence is testament to Cuthbert’s passion for a game on which the plug was pulled just over a year after release, leaving many of the studio’s ideas unrealised. “I think if you have any game ripped out from underneath you after one year, as a creator, you kind of feel… well, disillusioned, I suppose,” he says. But he knew it had more to offer. “Out of all the games I’ve made, it’s the one I can keep playing. Even after five years of it being offline, I still enjoy it, and that was a huge part of [attempting] to bring it back.”