Role: Designer
Platforms: PlayStaion 4 /PC
Developer: The Chinese Room
Publisher: Sony Santa Monica
Released: 2015

Overview

The world ended 37 minutes ago. It is time to begin. Yaughton, Shropshire. 06:37am 6th June 1984.

Deep within the Shropshire countryside, the village of Yaughton stands empty. Toys lie forgotten in the playground, the wind blows quarantine leaflets around the silent churchyard. Down on Appleton’s farm, crops rustle untended. The birds lie where they have fallen.

Strange voices haunt the radio waves as uncollected washing hangs listlessly on the line. The televisions are tuned to vacant channels. Above it all, the telescopes of the Observatory point out at dead stars and endless darkness. And someone remains behind, to try and unravel the mystery. Immerseyourself in a rich, deep adventure from award-winning developer The Chinese Room and investigate the last days of Yaughton Valley. Uncover the traces of the vanished community; discover fragments of events and memories to piece together the mystery of the apocalypse.

Featuring a beautiful, detailed open-world and a haunting soundtrack, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is non-linear storytelling at its best.

I joined The Chinese Room before Dear Esther had been released. We were still unsure how the world would react to "walking simulators", but we had to figure out what the follow-up would be. It was my job to start prototyping some of the ideas and scenarios that were being discussed and weave them into a playable demo.

A few months later, Dan and I found ourselves in Santa Monica, pitching the game to Sony - the top choice on our hitlist of publishers. Luckily, they bought into the idea, and 3 years later we delivered Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. It was a brilliant experience. It was hard work, but a very rare opportunity to run with an idea, with the support and funding of a publisher.

The key to its success was that we were ruthless at editing and remaking anything that didn't meet our high standards. The result was a game that made an impact. Rapture became the joint record holder for the most BAFTA Game Award nominations ever, it also won several Game of the Year awards, and best of all, seemed to strike a chord with an army of fans.