Long Story on Kotaku about The Church in the Darkness
Richard talked to Kotaku about the thrill of buying a lottery ticket on an "out there" game idea like this one, then they got into some specifics about how the dynamic narrative works. Here's the lead off:
"You’re sort of buying a lottery ticket,” the game developer Richard Rouse recently told me while explaining the mindset of trying to make an indie game after spending many years doing big budget stuff for Microsoft, Ubisoft and others.
“It might be really successful,” he said. “I certainly hope it is. But you shouldn’t go into this betting on that.”
Rouse’s new game, the murkily titled The Church In The Darkness, is a gamble. No one has done it before, so no one knows what the potential is for a game about infiltrating a religious cult in a South American jungle in the late 1970s. No one knows what the potential is for an action-infiltration game, for a throwback to one of Rouse’s old favorites, Castle Wolfenstein, with the twist of having a malleable story.
He’s done big game studio work before on series such as Rainbow Six and The Suffering, but his cult game was going to have to be indie. It’s not a big-publisher kind of game.
“People don’t want to go out on a limb with something that is maybe going to offend someone,” he said. “I wouldn’t even propose a game like this with a $50 million budget. Because, will this sell 8 million copies? Probably not. But will it sell 100,000 copies? Hopefully.” Hopefully The Church In The Darkness will also be as interesting in its finished state next year as it seemed when Rouse showed it to me last month in San Francisco.
Read the full story right here: http://kotaku.com/the-gamble-to-make-a-video-game-about-infiltrating-a-19-1769873692
Great Story on The Church in the Darkness in Engadget
Great article about The Church in the Darkness today on Engadget (and totally not April Fools, we promise).
We talked with them a bunch about the variety of inspirations for the game (and not the ones you expect). Piece is titled "Uncovering the glory and gore of a 1970s South American cult" (and how can you not like it with a title like that?)
From the article:
Rouse recognizes the strangeness and corruption that often seeps into communities like the Source Family and Rajneeshpuram, but he also sees their ingrained humanity. In researching communes and cults, he discovered a common thread among many former followers: They repeatedly claimed they weren't brainwashed or crazy, and they looked back fondly at their time in the communes. Their intentions were noble, even if ego and power eventually won out.
'You don't join a cult because you're a weak person,' Rouse says. 'You join it because you want to change the world or you have a really strong viewpoint or you can imagine the world could be better. So, you're going to join this group and see if you can make a go of it.'
