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Fnord666 writes:

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/08/how-gone-homes-creators-rewound-time-to-find-their-sci-fi-future/

At most offices, the employees don't take kindly to a stranger rifling through their personal and professional effects. But most offices aren't Fullbright.

You may best know this game-development studio as the makers of Gone Home, the 2013 video game that ushered in a new era of "interactive narrative" hits. Gone Home focused on characters and plot, not action and puzzles, as its audience slowly uncovered a mysterious—and personal—story through found objects. Delightfully, similar things can be said for the company's follow-up game, Tacoma, out this week on Xbox One and Windows PCs.

I was fortunate enough to be invited into the studio's modest warehouse office space just outside downtown Portland. And between interviews, I busied myself by being a total snoop. I opened up books, flipped through greeting cards, examined toy dioramas, peered at screens, and cataloged entire walls of private notes.

The six employees on hand that day, including studio co-founders and directors Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonja, didn't complain. I figured they were distracted with work on last-minute tweaks and fixes, but later I realized something else was going on. Gaynor and Zimonja have a long history of littering their games' floors, tables, and cabinets with juicy bits of story. Bioshock 2 (and its beloved, weird DLC pack, Minerva's Den) did this with audio diaries and reflective story moments. Gone Home had crumpled letters and secret family discoveries. And now, the studio's triumphant return to form, Tacoma, adds time-shifting and augmented-reality twists to Fullbright's enticing storytelling formula.

This game studio had simply trained me to do what I was doing: to pick through its belongings; to find the stories hidden in the cracks; to replay the past.

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