I think it all dates back to when I was a child growing up in Australia.
And I remember that was the mid-eighties when that was
the golden age of the arcades.
And I remember just always walking around with my pockets
full of like these 20 cent coins because you never know
when you're going to bump into an Arcade there, right?
Yeah, I think that that helped define a lot of my creative sensibilities.
Just a lot of the arcade games of that era,
like the really highly challenging, really rewarding type of experiences.
And at the time there was a lot of abstraction as well.
It felt like there was a lot of imagination
You could form really personal kind of connections
with all of those things that were happening.
Yeah, I think that was probably where everything started.
And that continued when I moved to Greece afterwards,
where I spent my formative years again, just playing a lot of arcades,
growing up with a lot of consoles
and of course, you know, consuming quite a lot of science fiction and,
you know, horror movies and action movies, of course, and everything in between.
I think that it all kind of culminated recently into this point
with Returnal expressing a lot of those sensibilities together.
Regarding influences for Returnal, I think there was a melting
pot of a lot of different themes and ideas there.
I mean, there were of course a lot of different movies with, you know,
horror, dark sci-fi, time loops, of course.
A lot of video game influences.
And clearly the arcade spirit that we've established
over many years now at Housemarque,
that kind of neon-infused explosive arcade action.
And with Returnal, we just wanted to crank that up to 13, really.
It's interesting because I think a lot of the work that we do as creative people,
whether we like it or not, it ends up being quite personal.
I think we end up expressing something through that
and there were a lot of challenges that I was facing in my personal life at the time
that I feel made their way into Returnal, into Selene main character.
Yeah, just that idea of, you know, not having enough time in the world
feeling that you're being pulled into two different directions at the same time,
trying to, you know, pursue greatness in your career,
but also trying to be a loving and present father and spouse for your family.
And I was thinking, like, what would be the ultimate cosmic joke
for somebody who needs, somebody who wants a lot more time?
Well, throw them in a time loop.
Now they have all the time in the world, right?
We kind of nailed a lot of the fundamentals fairly early on.
So the controls, the kind of interconnected levels,
the rogue-like elements, the camera.
I think that, you know, even a year in development,
we kind of had the core of it working fairly well.
And that was polished, of course, to perfection over like four years.
But it didn't change fundamentally.
I think the biggest changes that were noticed were regarding the scope.
Returnal was an exercise in dreaming,
and I remember just thinking, yeah, we're going to have 15 different areas
and they're all going to have their own unique enemies and narrative beats
and mini bosses and bosses and we ended up shipping 6 bioms instead of 15.
But that was just following the process of distillation as well.
And honestly, I feel like it did result in a better game
because, you know, more isn't always better.
Sometimes it's just more.
Brainstorming tends to be additive, but good design is always subtractive, it seems.
Back when we had originally settled on the premise of the game
and you saw that you’re crash landing on a hostile, alien planet and you’re stuck in a time loop,
death is no escape.
The planet knows you better than yourself,
that you must break the cycle, we had this ‘helevator’ pitch,
as I called it, and from that pitch,
that premise, we ended up making a ripomatic.
So a ripomatic is kind of like a mock up trailer that you produce interally,
to try to communicate the vision of the game.
And as we were collaborating with Sony Creative Arts back then
to make that trailer, we were looking for somebody to voice it
because we had like a V.O, like over and over,
‘I keep dying’ and so on.
And Jane actually appeared as an option
there to just help with recording of that.
And we're like, ‘Damn, this is like,
this sounds like Selene, this sounds like our main character.’ You know?
And from that moment, we just felt like yes, this is the person
we definitely want to work with.
She had the charisma, the grit, you know, the eloquence, you know, the character.
It was just, it was exactly what we were looking for.
And the rest is history, as they say.
Yeah, it went something like this.
You crash land on a hostile, alien planet with no hope of escape.
You don't remember how or why you got there,
but you quickly succumb to the cosmic forces on the planet.
But upon your death, instead of finding peace,
you reawaken just moments before the inevitable crash landing again.
So you're trapped in this endless cycle where death is no escape.
Each time you awaken, you see that the planet is somehow different.
It's like some cosmic forces are toying with your sanity.
And as you slowly make progress, you start discovering remnants of the planets
history, of this alien civilisation that met an untimely demise.
And perhaps most eerie of all,
you start encountering things that seem deeply personal in nature.
So it seems almost like this planet knows you
better than you know yourself
and despite all this,
your only hope is to keep moving forward and to keep looking for answers.
And your only hope is to break the cycle before the cycle breaks you.
It's the ‘helevator’ pitch.
It's a pretty long elevator ride.
It's a fantastic feeling of fulfillment to know that
all of our our hard work really paid off.
I mean, making games was pretty hard,
and over four, four and a half years, you learn to embrace uncertainty
and you always have doubt.
It's like, ‘Is this going to work out? How is it going to land?’
You know? How's it going to be received?
And I think especially with Returnal, we were treading so much uncharted territory.
I think it was a new thing not only for us,
but generally for like the third person action genre in a way.
So of course we didn't really know what to expect.
We felt that we had a fairly strong concept and, you know, a strong game,
but it was incredible to see just the positive reception,
the award nominations and the awards themselves coming later,
the crowning jewel of which, of course, were the BAFTAs that we won.
So we were nominated for nine BAFTAs and ended up
winning four, including that of Best Game.
And that is by far the best possible
kind of reward we could get for all of our hard work, I feel.