Studio Profile
On the long, transformative walk from research team to videogame studio
On The Chinese Room’s long, transformative walk from research team to videogame developer
The Chinese Room’s Brighton office, with its corridor of frosted glass and rooms of filing cabinets and phones, looks more like the setting for a ’70s cop show than a game studio. Before it moved in, this was the building for the local branch of Unison, the public service union. It still very much feels like it: most of its rooms are unoccupied, canvases of concept art propped up against the skirting boards still waiting to be hung. Down the hallway is the main workspace, an open-plan room filled with busy desks.
It’s a haphazard arrangement. (Suspiciously so, in fact: we’re told the previous landlord was convinced some kind of gambling outfit was being operated in here.) But it suits The Chinese Room somewhat. “We became a game studio kind of accidentally,” co-founder Dan Pinchbeck says. He’d been working in the University Of Portsmouth’s creative technologies department on a doctorate on the uses of story and nontechnological elements to enhance presence in virtual reality. “I was playing TimeSplitters one night, and I went, ‘Wait – this is massmarket virtual reality!’” he laughs. “‘Why am I doing VR when I could be doing games?’” He switched the subject of his PhD to how story should be considered a mechanic. “I talked to a few people and they were like, ‘This is just theory’.” He and a few others began modding Doom and
Half-Life 2 in an effort to gather data. They made a version of Doom 3 with rubber bullets to see how stunning enemies instead of killing them changed the gameplay (“You’d end up with 100 zombies following you around a level”).
Dear Esther, The Chinese Room’s seminal ‘walking simulator’, was one such experiment. “It was just, if we got some of my favourite points of stuff like System Shock and even Doom, those powerful quieter moments when it’s just you alone with your thoughts and feelings – would that work if that was all there was?” He asked Jessica Curry, his long-time collaborator (and wife) to compose the score for a Half-Life 2 mod, found a voice actor in Nigel Carrington and the help of a few keen students, put it together and uploaded it to ModDB. “We thought maybe 100 people would download it and write emails to us telling us how shit it was, but at least we’d have data. And it went in completely the opposite direction.”
These were the first seeds of Dear Esther. It won an award at IndieCade, which then hired their musicians and funded their engine licence.
Dear Esther launched on Steam in 2012. “We didn’t really expect anything of it,” Pinchbeck
says. “And then Jess and I were sat in bed at three in the morning watching it going, ‘Oh, oh!’” Six hours and a quarter of a million units later, they’d paid off their investment.
It was a success that would alter the course of their lives; at the time, it changed little. Indeed, the studio, if you could call it that – “We were all working for the University Of Portsmouth,” Pinchbeck explains, “so actually, The Chinese Room wasn’t anything other than just a name we stuck on the top of Dear Esther” – had already been in talks with the people at Frictional Games, who were fans of their Half-Life 2 horror mod Korsokovia, about creating DLC for horror hit Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It was supposed to be an hour-and-a-half affair, but morphed into a full, story-led sequel, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, and was even marketed through an alternate-reality game on Frictional’s website. The Chinese Room was becoming a name.
It wasn’t a traditional development cycle by any means: Pinchbeck and team worked on the game for about 18 months, before Frictional took it back for the final six or seven. “It was really odd,” he tells us, “and tense, because there were discussions about stuff we had done that they didn’t like, and ultimately it was their game. But suddenly it was very much our game when it came out. We didn’t have it for the last six months! Not that I would attempt to pass off any responsibility for the stuff that didn’t work.” They’d officially made enough of an impression to be considered culpable. It was clear that The
Chinese Room was here to stay. “The way Jess and I used to talk about it was, we sort of just made Dear Esther, a mod team made Pigs – and then we learned how to be a studio during the production of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture.”
They learned the hard way. The university’s arts and humanities council, still keen to support practical development as research, had funded Esther – which The Chinese Room ended up holding the IP for, due to the university’s dutyof-care clauses making it incompatible with distribution agreements. “We were like, ‘This is stuff universities need to know’,” Pinchbeck says. “‘So what if you give us enough money to build a prototype, and we deliberately try to run through every single hurdle and document it?’” The idea was to potentially prove with a saleable game that university research units could incubate riskier commercial products. “I dunno, I was just kind of going, ‘Eh, give us some money’.” They got it. “So we finished Pigs on the Friday, and started Rapture on Monday morning.”
This was equally due to excitement and insecurity. ”I was still working on the basis that at any point there’s going to be a knock on the door, and it’d be the game industry saying, ‘You’re a fraud, you can leave now, you don’t know what you’re doing’.” But there was plenty of interest: Sony Santa Monica (many of whom now form the core team of Annapurna Interactive) met with them, and suddenly their walking sim set in a rural English village was on a prototyping agreement with Sony. “I look back on the materials that we sent to them and I’m kind of gobsmacked they signed it,” Pinchbeck says. “But Journey had just come out, they’d just taken on Giant Sparrow for Unfinished Swan, PS4
“WE LEARNED HOW TO BE A STUDIO DURING THE PRODUCTION OF EVERYBODY’S GONE TO THE RAPTURE”
was coming out. The remit was, ‘We’re going to blow Microsoft out of the water because we’ll have every single exciting experiment – what’s going on Steam, we want on PlayStation’. So they were signing stuff in a very risk-taking way.”
The Chinese Room finally constituted as a company of 15 employees, Pinchbeck and Curry figuring out how to run a commercial studio from a flat conversion filled with damp and bees. “It was weird,” Pinchbeck says. “As a couple, we’re quite cautious. But there was a fair bit of press around at the time like, ‘Who do they think they are, coming into the industry and telling us?’ And we were like, ‘We’ve never done that at all!’ We were quite careful – we’d only made one game, and Esther was in the right place at the right time, and you have to retain a degree of humility about that. It felt like a bit of a fluke.”
But with Santa Monica on side, and more specialist hires, both studio and game began to take shape. They learned how to calculate production milestones, with Curry proving a particularly acute business mind and Pinchbeck playing the role of “charging around the studio with a flag going ‘Follow me, we can do this, trust me!’” Their naïvety gave them a alternative perspective on traditional practices, which was both help and hindrance: they rebuilt Rapture’s village five times, once just seven months out from going gold. They were treading new ground with an open-world walking sim, and figuring it out as they went made being efficient impossible. They were also outsiders in the British game industry, bunkered down in an intense dev cycle with nobody to call for a gut-check.
Rapture released in 2015, and the studio moved into the Unison building. But just two years later, following a stressful period in which they struggled to find funding for Google Daydream VR title So Let Us Melt, things fell apart. “We were saying ‘We’re going to be okay’ to the team, increasingly feeling like we were lying to them,” Pinchbeck says. “I wasn’t able to give the game the attention it needed, and the team were adrift without a leader for large chunks of it.” Conversations revolved around finance and planning. “Even as a couple, we’re talking about the company all the time – and not about the games. And this is not what we signed up for. It’s like there was a cliff edge getting closer every day. But what I’m weirdly proud of is before we went over the cliff edge, we went, ‘Right. If we make a really, really tough decision now, we stand a chance of surviving’.”
In July, all eight of the current staff were laid off, and studio operations “suspended”. The founders moved home, and took six months off to recover. Pinchbeck wrote a novel. He considered whether he still wanted to work in games. “I was so burnt out,” he says, “but I was able to sit there and go, ‘No, this is what I want to do with my life. There’s no alternative’.”
In December, Sumo Digital (newly on the stock market) suggested an acquisition. Curry decided she would not return to the running of the studio. Pinchbeck needed a studio director. “I’m going from running a business with my wife to working with someone I’ve never worked with before, so the personalities have to work.”
Fortunately, he met Ed Daly. “Dan had clear ideas about what games he wanted to make,” Daly says, “but some trepidation about delivering on them, having been through the mill to some extent. But to me, the easy bit was putting the studio together and making sure we didn’t run out of money. It’s the ability to excite people and get them to invest that seems harder.” Pinchbeck laughs: “That’s the fun bit for me!” With Sumo’s support on basic things such as refurbishing the offices, nowadays The Chinese Room is once again in a position to do what it does best.
Its latest project, Little Orpheus, is a sidescrolling, episodic mobile adventure starring a hapless astronaut with a penchant for bending the truth: think Playdead, only lighter and cheekier. Its second, unannounced project is something entirely different. “It’s the opportunity for me to make the type of game I’ve wanted to make for several years,” Pinchbeck smiles.
“Dear Esther was a fairly mechanically traditional game, but we put our spin on it,” he continues. “Like with Arkane, when people turn our games on, even if it’s a version of Tetris,
I want them to go ‘Oh, that’s The Chinese Room Tetris.’ You can feel that fingerprint of the studio. I don’t want to be known as a studio that makes a particular type of game. I hope that it comes through that we’re quite creatively restless.”
More generally, The Chinese Room is finally starting to settle: the canvases of concept art are one sign, and when we first arrive, several team members are decorating a wall with a giant studio logo. It might be an odd place to call home, but if the studio has proved anything so far, it’s that it can work grand transformations in the most unexpected of places.
“YOU CAN FEEL THE FINGERPRINT OF THE STUDIO… I HOPE IT COMES THROUGH THAT WE’RE QUITE CREATIVELY RESTLESS”