After BioShock, Irrational Games co-founder Jonathan Chey tried not being a game developer. In fact, for two years after leaving 2K, a noncompete clause in his contract actively prevented him from being one. Instead, he sat the entrance exam for medical school, and passed - before being knocked back for being "too old". So he went back to university, to study chemistry. "Because I literally couldn't do anything else for two years," he tells us today. "I could have worked in some other job, but I didn't have the skills." Once his period of creative confinement was up, Chey still hadn't discovered a new vocation. So, with no better ideas about what to do next, he founded Blue Manchu.
Stepping back into videogames, however, Chey certainly wasn't lacking ideas or inspiration. "My spare time was always spent playing a lot of collectible card games online," he says, "and so I really wanted to do a CCG." Rather than embrace the abstraction of that genre's arenas, however, Chey thought back to a D&D battle report he'd read in Dragon magazine in the 1980s. There the writer had described, as an action choreographer might, the way the party's fighters had moved up to block giants from entering a room - giving the wizard time to prepare a spell, while the rogue slipped around the side for a backstab. It was a form of spatial tactics that captured Chey's imagination. "I thought it might be interesting to try to reproduce that sort of combat scenario in a CCG," he says. "Which of course required adding a board to it."
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Denne historien er fra June 2024-utgaven av Edge UK.
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Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles
Anyone familiar with the concept of kitbashing is already halfway to understanding what Tomas Sala’s open-world builder is all about.
Children Of The Sun
René Rother’s acrid revenge thriller – an action game with its limbs broken and forcibly rearranged into the shape of a spatial puzzler – is at once a bonafide original and an unlikely throwback. Cast your eyes right and you wouldn’t blink if we told you this was a forgotten Grasshopper Manufacture game from the early PS3 era (we won’t be at all surprised if this finds a spot on Suda51’s end-of-year list).
Post Script
What does Rise Of The Ronin say for PS5 exclusivity?
Rise Of The Ronin
Falling in battle simply switches control to the next person up, and then quick revive fixes everything
Post Script
The pawn and the pandemic
Dragon's Dogma 2
The road from Vernworth to Bakbattahl is scenic but arduous. Ignore the dawdling mobs of goblins, and duck beneath the chanting harpies that circle on the currents overhead, and even moving at a hurried clip it is impossible for a party of four to complete the journey by nightfall.
BLUE MANCHU
How enforced early retirement eventually led Jonathan Chey back to System Shock
THE MAKING 0F.... AMERICAN ARCADIA
How a contrast of perspectives added extra layers to a side-scrolling platform game
COMING IN TO LAND
The creator of Spelunky, plus a super-group of indie developers, have spent the best part of a decade making 50 games. Has the journey been worth it?
VOID SOLS
This abstract indie Soulslike has some bright ideas