The final words I wrote as a games journalist were written five years ago and oh God, it still feels so strange writing in the first person. But here I am, here I am.
Five years ago. At that junction, the one between games journalism and games development, I arranged to meet a friend who’d taken the same career path a decade before. We went for a drink; you will make sacrifices, he said, and it will be horrible. I was young and petulant and angry but that evening I nodded like a disciple, and he was right. I went from a world where I knew everything to a world where I knew nothing. Not just that; a world where my prior arrogance was revealed as a horrifying mix of naivety, ignorance and blind luck.
Five years later, idiocy noted, sacrifices made, and I’m creative director at a development studio based in Brighton, Zoë Mode. It seems to me that creative director is a flattering way of declaring on your business card that you have no practical skills. Maybe it is. Either way, I am fortunate to be working with people who can do more than just talk and write. Zoë's charity XBLA game, Chime, is released today, and it is those people who are responsible for Chime, not me.
Chime hasn’t taken five years to develop but it hasn’t taken much less, on and off. Nor has it been a smooth journey. It is a small game but it has been through several short development cycles at Zoë, on several different platforms, and I was ecstatic when it found a home with OneBigGame. It seems appropriate that a project shared by so many across the studio ends up being a purely philanthropic one, and I could write a song and dance about how great that is now. How noble, how generous!
But if I said the charity angle made the project any more personally rewarding I’d be lying. OneBigGame is a fabulous initiative, a smart way of getting new money to good causes and the sort of good PR the game industry desperately needs. I am proud to be (peripherally) involved in it, for sure. The satisfaction for me, though, is simply that it exists: that Chime is now part of the real world, not the infinite twilight of pitching and prototyping.
Many projects aren’t so lucky. Every developer has dozens of ghosts in its closet, foetal ideas that seemed brilliant and really might have been but, for one reason or another, were stillborn. A better writer than me will write a book about these one day, detailing videogaming’s hidden history, mapping a landscape that might have been. The book will doubtless have a huge chapter on puzzle games, a genre in which it is notoriously difficult to make money.
(This is a shame, but it is also entirely understandable. Think of an action puzzle game, one you’d assume was relatively popular. No, not that one. Or that one, but that one, cute, fast and fun. Know how many copies the PC port sold in its first week of release? I do. Seven.)
I hope Chime is one of the exceptions and does so well for OneBigGame that they’re drowning in Microsoft Points by the end of the week. Not just because the charities they’re supporting deserve it but for entirely selfish reasons: because I want the industry to recover its confidence in these small, hypnotic games; I want more gamers to discover the joys of having their palette cleansed by things like Chime between sessions of tense, aggressive full-price epics; and because I want our game’s protracted development cycle to continue. I have an email sitting in my inbox which contains a list of things the team would have changed and added given more time, and I am too scared to open it at the moment because it seems a bit presumptuous. Reviews are drifting in now. People seem positive. But there are no sure things in games development, another thing I’ve learnt. If it’s a success, if if if.
When you have that striking, horrible, gut-punch of a moment where you realise that you know nothing, the only thing you can do is start to learn and I have learnt a lot. Writing is a solitary creative process. When I was a writer I had an idea, put down one sentence after the next and, assuming I could avoid subediting by submitting my copy as close to the deadline as possible, the end result was my own. Games development is not like that. Ideas are just the start, a fraction of something bigger. The end result is no less rewarding.
And whatever happens now, the Chime team are quietly in love with their game, and I hope no one who purchases it has to rely on their conscience for validation. It is a charity game, not a charity case. I’m glad I can write that – even if using the first person still feels slightly uncomfortable, even if the eyes are a slightly different shade – and I hope you enjoy it too.
Ste Curran is creative director (and has no practical skills) at Zoë Mode. You can follow him here or on award-winning radio show One Life Left, which finished its fifth season on Monday.