*
Sleeper Service
Dan Pinchbeck
*
L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other
*
[This may be easier to read as a PDF]
*
*
For every game that actually gets made, there's usually a whole load that don't make it. Some of them are never more than ideas, some get cancelled mid-way, some never make it out of prototyping. Sometimes it's because they just don't work like you'd hoped. Sometimes market forces or fashion conspire against them. I've long felt that a museum of lost games would be a wonderful thing, although in reality the combination of industrial grade NDAs and the weird secretive hang-ups of the games industry would almost certainly prevent it. So one of the advantages of having spent many years as an independent studio is that there's an archive of ideas I can share. I've already posted some of these on my Substack, but this one has been lurking and it's a particular favourite. It's an early internal concept doc that I made for the team (this will have been around 2016) for a follow-up to So Let Us Melt. It never got off the drawing board, as so many things don't, but I still think it would have made a really fun game. It was inspired by JG Ballard's "Thirteen to Centaurus" with shades of the old paper-based RPG Paranoia. Hope you like it.
Dan Pinchbeck is a writer, best known as the co-founder and creative director of The Chinese Room. Under his direction, TCR established itself as one of the most interesting and restlessly creative game studios in the UK, winning a whole load of some of the most prestigious awards in the industry along the way. He created, wrote and directed the games Dear Esther, A Machine for Pigs, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, So Let Us Melt, Little Orpheus and Still Wakes the Deep. Dan is now a full-time writer of literary dark fiction and horror and is represented by the Mic Cheetham Agency.
