Italian preview of the Path

It’s like the beta of The Path is making a tour through Europe. Claudio Todeschini wrote an interesting preview on Games Village about how The Path is not exactly fun and offers a deep emotional experience instead. He explores his confusion further in an editorial article about the meaning of the word videogame.

It’s nice to see how much thought our little project can provoke. Though we personally think The Path can be fun. Perhaps just a different kind of fun.

The Path release date

The Path will be released on 18 March 2009, exactly ten years after Auriea and I met in person for the first time and launched our first collaborative project. We are planning to repeat this event in one month from a room in the exact same hotel in San Francisco, with The Path. There will be no witnesses.

To celebrate the announcement, we have opened a new website for The Path:

go to grandmothers-house.net

grandmothers-house.net

with a personal page for every Red Girl, screenshots, videograbs and quotes from the game and pictures of the creators as teenagers!!!

The Path will be available for purchase and download form our own website, from Direct2Drive and from Steam. As of March 18. There’s a countdown here. 😉

Free song from The Path

Jarboe and Kris Force have created the first track of what we hope will become The Original Soundtrack of The Path, simply entitled Safe Song. You can listen to it here or download it here.
I say “created” because in the game, the music is completely dynamic and never the same twice. So this linear song is only an approximation of the experience of the music in the game. A distillation of its perfume. Like a blossom picked from a tree. :)

Interview with Chris Bateman

Chris Bateman

Chris Bateman is the designer behind Discworld Noir, Ghost Master, Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition and many others (videogames as well as board games). With the exception of the independently developed Play with Fire, he works mostly as a designer “pur sang” in the sense that he seldom initiates a project or comes up with the basic themes for a game but instead works in a much more applied fashion, like a furniture designer would or a fashion designer. We hired him ourselves in that capacity when we were working on “8” and he did a spectacular job, saving us from having to design the actual gameplay ourselves (which, as you may know, is something we detest 😉 ).

That being said, by now, Mr. Bateman is probably much better known as a provocative games theorist, philosopher and even economic analyst on his fascinating blog Only a Game. He’s currently finishing up his second book on game design. But it is reading his first book “21st Century Game Design” that prompted this interview. In this book Chris Bateman and Richard Boon map the play behaviour of different people to their psychological profiles and come to the conclusion that different people play in different ways. As logical as this may sound, it is one of the most ignored aspects of the medium in the videogames industry. So much so that one company who recognized this was able to outclass and outsell two other companies while they were comparing the size of their consoles and with products that were technically inferior. That company was Nintendo and the success of its strategy was predicted by Mr Chris Bateman.

To learn why there’s more to videogames than first person shooters, what the commercial opportunities are in experimental games and why the Sims and Grand Theft Auto remain unrivaled and unparalleled:

Read the interview!