Steve explains: "We weren't like 'we want to make a game about the 90s'. But the Fullbright Company chose it deliberately as the best way of telling a story through design. The period is a time that many players of the game will have lived through and will be immediately familiar with - even affectionate towards. Gone Home is set on a day in 1995 to the sound of a howling storm, a Riot Grrl soundtrack, the scratch of television static and the squeak of answerphone messages. It's the beginning of a slow fierce rebellion, one in which atmospheric game space sharpens our appetite for investigation and human stories stripped bare. He's breaking the curse over us, like some sort of cheeky punk-influenced gilet-wearing shaman. Steve is involved in making a first person game that is the antidote to years and years of run and gun shooters. There haven't been many attempts at the sort of structured environmental story design the Fullbright Company is creating - and without one combat or puzzle mechanic present. Last year's Dear Esther did a good job of bringing the industry's attention to first-person exploratory narrative games, but still, it had an experimental air. It's interesting that games haven't fully utilised the impetus of human curiosity that much. "We're a small team, so we were like, how can we have that experience of being a person that's in a place, that's exploring, that's finding a house, like a family's house - it'll be small, so we can build it, and really dense with all this ephemera that tells you all about the people's lives." "We came from working on Bioshock together and we wanted to make an environmental storytelling exploration game, and we didn't want to have combat or puzzles in it," Steve says. In the IGF Award-nominated Gone Home, you arrive home to an empty family house, and the only indication of where your missing family are is told through the notes and objects they have left lying around. Now, there's a freeing simplicity around the way that he sees games. Once a senior level designer at 2K Marin and Irrational Games, Steve left to set up Fullbright with two co-workers.
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