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Tomorrow Corp. discusses how Little Inferno came to be

by rawmeatcowboy
20 February 2013
GN Version 4.0
A portion of a Gamasutra interview with Tomorrow Corp's Kyle Gabler...

GS: How did you come up with the concept?

Kyle Gabler: We'd been noticing a trend of games that were like slightly interactive screensavers. Like a virtual aquarium. Or a virtual garden. And they seemed so obviously terrible, we thought it would have been brilliant if the developers had hidden a terrifying plot and genuinely great game just below the surface. And maybe only a few players would ever discover it.

A virtual fireplace seemed like a good start -- a suspiciously tiny, deliberately constrained premise, but still ripe for dripping in pieces of an outside world that's huge and scary and just out of reach. We've always loved the idea of setting expectations and then breaking them (here's the first thing we all worked on together back in grad school). Unfortunately, a game like this is a terrible idea for marketing! It's really really difficult to talk about -- and probably a good reason this game would never have been made by a real company!

There's a piece of Animal Crossing fan fiction from like 2007 that's a hilarious example of what can happen if you take an unassuming "casual" game and give it an actual direction. It's called The Terrible Secret of Animal Crossing and well worth a read if you have a free afternoon.

Full interview here