A first introductory chapter summarizes the history of the project: How the idea started. When we got funding. And how long it all took.

In the next part, scheduled for tomorrow, we delve deep into the design of the game, followed by an overview of what went right and what went wrong, to conclude with a look at reception and sales.

We hope you enjoy the read.

For the next 10 days, until Sunday March 28, prices are:

• ☛ The Path (PC or Mac): $5
• ☛ The Graveyard (PC or Mac): $2.5
• ☛ The Graveyard (iPhone): $1
• ☛ Fatale (PC or Mac): $3.5
• ☛ The Godlove Museum (PC or Mac): $10
• ☛ Vanitas (iPhone): free

One year ago, tonight, The Path was released from a bed in a room in a hotel in San Francisco, where Auriea and I first met in person, exactly 10 years before. To celebrate this double anniversary we’ll be revealing and announcing The Path related material throughout the week. So keep an eye on our blog, facebook, twitter or wherever you’re reading this!

On 18 March 2009, we launched The Path from a room in the hotel where we first met exactly 10 years before. Get ready for celebrating the first anniversary of our six little girls and their very own big bad wolves! Expect an elaborate and revealing post-mortem/making-of, a special limited USB edition package, a nice discount on the regular download, an updated translations patch (now also on Steam!), an interview with a source of inspiration, news about the soundtrack, and of course an Endless Forest bathed in darkness and mist.

The Graveyard and The Path are now available on Stardock’s Impulse platform.

Last week, 1C released a full translation of The Path in Russian. So now our friends in Russia, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldavia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan no longer need to fiddle with badly made torrents. They can simply get the game here.

And thanks to the help of many volunteers, you can also play The Path in Danish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish, next to the English and Dutch available in the normal release. A patch that translates the game to any of these languages can be downloaded here. Credits for the translations can be found here.

Oh, and there’s also the Polish version, of course, published by Topware. We still have a few copies available in our store.
More languages will be added later. We’re working on Arabic, Czech, Japanese and Korean at the moment.

Six years ago, on a freezing snowy day like today (at least that’s how I remember it), the document that founded “Tale of Tales BVBA” was officially published. To celebrate our anniversary, we’re discounting our three commercially available downloads for the week. As a lucky coincidence, this means you can still get a quick and cheap and very original Christmas gift for your loved ones! :)

From now until next Saturday, you can get The Path for 6.66 US Dollars (30% off).
Available from the regular page.

Plus, The Graveyard and FATALE are bundled together for 6 US Dollars (50% off!).
Available only through these links:
FATALE/The Graveyard bundle for 6$ PC version
FATALE/The Graveyard bundle for 6$ Mac version

These offers are valid until 26 December.

(Just a quick note, because we are experiencing some Internet fail at home today :p)

Can’t believe I never blogged this until now! (>.<) BUT
In our recently revamped online store you will find we have the Polish Collectors CD Edition of The Path (playable in Polish or English, with great extras!), The Endless Forest postcards and the usual assortment of posters and USB drive games (which we’ve marked back down to 25 EUR.)

If you order by Friday I can still send things out this week. Will probably reach you in time for Xmas.

That is all. xo.

Much to our surprise, The Path has ended up second in this year’s Quest3D Awards.

When you start the game you immediately notice this game is different. Your first instruction is “Stay on the path” and visit your grandmother. If you do so the game ends and you start over. What could be the intention behind this game? This game offers an experience no other game can so this alone makes it deserves a spot in our Quest3D awards.

Quest3D is the authoring tool that we used to create the game. It is mostly used for architectural visualisations. So the winning projects are usually these amazingly photographically realistic spectacles. Hence our surprise.

Quest3D is a great tool to make games, though. Especially for the code-allergic and the artistic (like us). Its realtime visual programming system is second to none. That’s right, both The Path and The Endless Forest were created by connecting little virtual blocks together with little virtual wires. We believe that one day, this style of programming is going to supersede coding, much like C++ and Javascript have removed the need to punch in zeroes and ones today.

This is part of the “source code” of The Path, in the Quest3D editor. There’s hundreds of little flow charts like this and together they make the whole thing tick. And look pretty. :)

We’re happy to announce that today we paid off our loan to CultuurInvest for the production of The Path. We are debt free! That took about 35,000 sales. The loan only covers part of the entire production budget. But the rest was funded with subsidies and art grants with much more modest expectations of return on investment.

Ergo: as of now, every copy of The Path sold contributes to new Tales of Tales!
Or returning to an old one…

This the edycja specjalna of The Path, published by the great guys at Topware in Poland. It is the very first Tale of Tales product that has been published for retail. We’ve had some great reviews in the Polish press, so hopefully The Path will do well in the stores in Poland.

Our friend Paul Eres’ Immortal Defense is not included in the celebration (despite it being his own birthday). But he lets us know that you can get it for $3 by entering BMCN000H7 as Discount code.

Sadly, we will not be able to attend the event -because we are w o r k i n g- but it looks like it’s going to be great!

Red is the colour of blood, and therefore signifies both life and death. We never see the mother at the beginning of the story, but in a sense she is there nevertheless, because the red room from which all the girls start their journey can be interpreted as a womb-symbol.

British writer Edward Picot, well known to us for his wonderful exploration of computer games as art, has published an in-depth review of The Path both on Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange.

It’s a remarkable article because it goes a lot further in analyzing the content of the game than most reviews have so far. There’s quite a bit of fair criticism as well, which only contributes to the article’s much appreciated sincerity.

The posters walked away. Many folks stopped by to play and question us relentlessly (^_^) t’was awesome! Wonderful to meet and chat with so many other developers and students.
Glad to be home and let the others who remained have their GamesCom. Game Developers Conference was where the real action was!

We will be attending the European Game Developers Conference in Cologne on Monday and Tuesday. We’ll be presenting our work in the Flemish Pavilion (booths 162, 163, 168 and 169) in the GDC expo.

We’ll be bring some posters of The Path with us to give away for free. We’ll bring 6 posters of each girl for every day. So if you catch us at our booth (we won’t be there all the time, we also want to attend lectures and meet people), be sure to ask for a poster of your favourite girl! :)

To compensate for your trouble, Direct2Drive is throwing in 4 other indie games (Defense Grid: The Awakening, Democracy 2, Zeno Clash and Cogs). They call this the Best of Indie Bundle and charge 17.75 US Dollars for it. But you can buy The Path for 7.76 Dollars less right here!

Steam is doing a similar -if not even more spectacular- stunt by offering a choice of two bundles, each including The Path, and one more expensive than the other! At Steam you can pay up to 29.99 Euros for The Path (or US Dollars if you are so unfortunate as to live in the Home of the Brave). You do have to accept the 9 other indie games they add to the bundle (Audiosurf, Everyday Shooter, Blueberry Garden, Braid, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Gish, Mr. Robot, Darwinia and World of Goo). If you’re worried whether your hard disk can take all that, you could settle for the 19.99 version of The Path (and only get Everyday Shooter, Blueberry Garden, Braid and World of Goo extra). Steam considers these to be Top Indie Games but remember that The Path is much cheaper here. Only 9.99 weak American Dollars!

So grab your chance to pay more for The Path now! It’s a limited time offer!

Seriously, for those who worry about our well being, we totally approve of these discounts. We only get a fraction of the share that we usually get per sold copy. But the theory is that you sell so many more copies that you end up making more money than if you were selling at the normal price. And so far, this does indeed seem to be the case. I guess this means that there’s a lot of cheapskate gamers. But on the other hand, our work gets exposed to a lot of people who had never considered purchasing it. And perhaps they end up appreciating it anyway. So, its a good thing!

An MP3 version of the piece can be downloaded here.

This first quote is actually from a comment on an early review of The Path. But we thought it very poignant.

The Path reminds us of how innocent and hopeful most video games are. Look, say, at Doom. Man with shotgun takes on the Devil and destroys Hell. That’s optimism. Unrealistic, but a nice thought to keep you warm at night when things aren’t going well.
Real life is a variable experience where you learn things, have some enjoyable experiences, some nasty ones, and then… you die. That’s The Path.

comment by sagesource

The experience of the journey is what The Path is about. What you find in the forest, who you meet, and your girl’s eventual fate intertwine into an experience that’s almost certainly not a game in the classic sense, but does bring to mind the awesome power of interactive experiences in a way many games simply don’t do.

Matt “Steerpike” Sakey on Tap Repeatedly

There is no doubt that Tale of Tales is showing the gaming world exactly what it needs to see: that there is more to this new medium than what we are familiar with, that video games can be emotionally evocative in their own right, and most importantly that we, as gamers, should expect more from developers than overused conventions.

C.T. Hutt on Press Pause To Reflect

Der Wald kann Spiegel eurer Psyche sein, sofern ihr es zulasst. Es gibt keinen Lösungsweg, keine vorgekauten Richtungen. Ihr selbst seid Teil des Spiels, müsst euch aber darauf einlassen können.

Markus Grunow on The Gamer’s Base

O objetivo de cada uma das irmãs não é chegar sã e salva à casa da vovozinha. Na verdade, o que cada uma delas busca é encontrar o seu próprio lobo mau na forma humana. Enfrentar esta tendência pode ser tão denso e visceral que faz com que ser devorada viva pareça um final feliz.

Baixaki

What if the wolves you meet are not furry creatures with sharp teeth, but rather metaphoric wolves constructed from your past experiences, fears, and future desires that you need to understand and confront in order to be ready to cross the threshold into grandmother’s house?

Michael on VGBlogger

The music and ambiance of the game is the one that will really mess with you. Not only is it suitably haunting, which leaves you feeling a bit unsettled like something is out there watching you (guess what you’re right!), but the sound effects that are playing, while random, always seem to be happening right when your nerves are frayed from the music.

Josh Martin on netGameRadio

What if ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ was not simply a cautionary tale, but a metaphor for life instead?

Brad Cook on Apple.com

A The Path egy olyan bizarr mese, mely teljesen új megvilágításba helyezi gyerekkorunk egyik meghatározó, mindenki által jól ismert, “happy enddel” végződő történetét. Egy metaforikus költemény, melyben mindennek mondandója van, minden utal valamire, amit vagy megért a játékos, vagy nem. Döntéseinknek súlya van, rajtunk áll mikor és mit csinálunk, és hogy mindezt hogyan éljük meg.

Horváth Tamás on SG.hu

Obwohl kein Blut fließt, wirkt “The Path” ausgesprochen
verstörend und unheimlich.

Nico Nowarra in c’t magazine #13

Iedereen die geïnteresseerd is wat er allemaal mogelijk is met games en de manier waarop men op interactieve wijze verhalen kan vertellen, is het aan zichzelf verplicht dit grimmige sprookje te gaan spelen.

Jan in Power Unlimited magazine #186

The Path, while minimalistic, provides a magical setting in which the player’s mind blooms with imagination as they discover the beauty and terror that encircles the safety of the beaten path.

iPawn on Subjective (t)ruth

Indie game developer Tale of Tales’ The Path pulls off the virtually impossible: to create a new genre of video games that is not only addictive in its replayability, but more psychologically challenging, haunting, and disturbing than the average horror game, all at a fraction of the developmental cost and manpower of the average title.

aybendito on Ay, Bendito… UFF DA!

The last article also calls The Path “The Blair Witch Project of video games” which is enormously flattering but sadly incorrect giving the discrepancy between the two in terms sales figures. At least, so far… So don’t stop talking about The Path! :)

Also, we have just signed a contract with Zoo Corporation to translate The Path to Japanese and distribute it through their digital network.

Christian Schiffer expresses his hopes for the future of videogames in German mainstream newspaper Die Welt, focussing on yours truly and ignoring that we may not be all that representative of the indie scene. His optimism sure is contagious and confirms my belief that Europe is currently the best place in the world for innovation and exploration of the medium (partially because we’re running behind in market terms).

The article is also available online (in German, of course).

For some people this attitude comes naturally. But others may need to do an extra effort, or perhaps simply learn about it. It is for them that I’m writing this post. Because I have a feeling that many might be looking for an answer in the distance while it’s actually right in front of them.

“Once I figured out that the demo is solely attempting to establish an atmosphere, I enjoyed it quite a bit.”
– from a comment referring to “The Path – Prologue” from WK on TigSource

Tip #1: It’s about the girls
We realize that in many videogames, your avatar is mostly a vehicle that allows you to navigate through a virtual world. In The Path, however, the behaviour and personality of the girls is crucial. If you witness them carefully and try to imagine what they are thinking -and perhaps respond to that by caring for them- the game will become a lot more meaningful.

“Each girl’s journey through the forest is not so much a series of plot points but a non-sequential, undirected character study of the girl herself, leading up to a confrontation between that psyche and the adult world.”
– from a review by Rebecca Wigandt on Gamer’s Intuition

Tip #2: It’s about playing together
The avatars in The Path have a certain degree of autonomy. And sometimes they do things that you did not expect or do not want. This is on purpose. The idea is that you try to develop a relationship with the avatar and play the game together. You do your part, she does hers.

“Do not even try to fight against the pace, just surrender.”
– from a blog post by Tetelo on Femina Ludens

Tip #3: Everything is meaningful
While some things might appear absurd or the result of bad design at first sight, in most cases they are the fruit of careful consideration. The Path becomes much more enjoyable if you take everything that you see seriously and interpret it as part of the story. This is a very playful activity (feel free to even include technical errors in this “game”: it’s fun!).

“The effort put into The Path is equal to the enjoyment received. Look at the game like a difficult piece of literature that needs to be sampled over and over again.”
– from a review by Aaron Thayer on The Silicon Sasquatch

Tip #4: Play pretend
The Path is a fiction. It is not real. The girls are composed of polygons and pixels and algorithms, the leaves of the trees are abstract ornaments, day turns into night depending on place, etc. But you need to forget about all that and pretend that everything is real. The Path asks you to suspend your disbelief but it doesn’t force you to. If you can willingly do this, you will enjoy the game much more.

“The joy of it comes not from the way in which the journey ends but rather in the full immersion that one experiences on the way.”
– from a blog post by Joshua on Mouseandcat

Tip #5: Play, don’t game
Elements in The Path that appear to be traditional (rules, goals, collecting, grading, inventory, etc) form part of the narrative that we invite you to ponder. They are not the point of the game. Traditional gaming behaviour (like trying to completely explore the forest or collect all the flowers or beat the game in a minimum amount of time) is not rewarded. For joy, ignore those urges and approach things with wonder instead. Delight in what you receive and don’t go “hunting”.

“I found the game more enjoyable when approaching it more as an interactive narrative than a traditional “game”.”
- from a review by Dan Liebman on Game Zone

Tip #6: It’s pretty
If all else fails, just enjoy the sights and sounds that The Path brings. If music can be simply beautiful and a painting can be enjoyed purely for its aesthetics, why not a game? Just look, listen and enjoy. Don’t even try to find meaning. Indulge yourself. The gameplay will not get in your way in this game.

The whole environment is beautiful, and I love how the look and feel changes depending on whether you’re on the path, in the woods, or near a wolf. The game IS artwork.
- from a review by Allison Boyer on Binge Gamer

I may have missed some possible tips. Maybe I’ll create a second post like this in the future, with more tips. If you have enjoyed The Path, please comment about how you did it, what attitude you assumed versus the game, what expectations you brought, etc.

Awesome Ruby cosplay photo, sent to us by Per Janssen, as seen at an anime convention.

I think The Path is so freakin’ postmodern that its whole purpose is to challenge classification. And, therefore, whether or not it’s a game is irrelevant. Let me explain…

Not many critics have talked much about the actual design of The Path (apart from the relatively general mantra “as a game, it sucks”). Despite our sincerity as storytellers, we do find this “meta-layer” important -and amusing. Check out Touché Bitches for some interesting observations.

We’re not the world’s greatest authorities on deconstructivism and intertextuality but we have always considered the interactive medium to be the single artistic medium that is truly able to embrace the conclusions of postmodernism and allow us to use them to create better experiences for the viewer/reader/player -instead of falling into the trap of “cleverness”, irony, cynicism en relativism we’ve seen in a lot of fine art. The multiple layers of experience and the multitude of realities that can be created simultaneously in a virtual world offer opportunities for telling stories in ways that they have never been told before and, more importantly, about things that we were never able to talk about before.

I’m not claiming that The Path does all of that with equal success. But we do believe that this is one of the more interesting areas of the medium to explore.

De retoriek is goed: iedereen zoekt naar manieren om games vernieuwend en toegankelijk voor een groot publiek te maken. Maar de realiteit is dat er weinig games gemaakt worden die buiten de nauwe genres vallen. We willen dat verschil tussen de retoriek en de realiteit verkleinen. En we willen ontwikkelaars aanmoedigen om onafhankelijk te werken en te denken, niet koste wat het kost deel uit te willen maken van deze industrie.

And speaking of the Prologue… There was an issue where it wouldn’t run on Mac OSX 10.5.6. The Path full game runs happily on that version. Transgaming (who handled the port of the game) had made the Prologue 10.5.7 only without telling us. We’ve had them roll this back. So now, if you’re on Mac you can run both the game and the demo on OSX 10.5.6 upwards. If it wasn’t working for you before we invite you to download the Prologue again.

But its probably a good idea to upgrade your OS anyway. Because Apple puts new graphics drivers in every system upgrade making all 3d games run better, smoother, faster on your computer.

Okay… end of announcement. Lets hope we never suffer downtime like that again.

In The Path – Prologue, you control the mysterious Girl in White. There’s a not a lot of gameplay in this demo. This should inform players looking for that sort of thing that The Path is perhaps not for them. It’s just about exploring the forest and pondering the sights.

Something strange seems to have happened. Did it really happen before the Red Girls visited the forest? How is that possible?

Download The Path – Prologue here!
Available for Mac and PC.

The Path is thoroughly gynocentric in its design, character direction, music, etc. (…) You don’t have to be a female gamer, though, to appreciate The Path’s take on literary symbolism, Gothic sensibility, and relaxing pace of play.

Rebecca Wigandt on Gamer’s Intuition

The Path is a sort of anti-game in a way, a game turned inside out in service to something deeply personal, human and disturbing.

Mike “Scout” Gust on Tap-Repeatedly

The Path, in my opinion, transcended everything I’ve ever thought a computer game to be and instantly planted itself into my thought patterns.

fullmetal_ky on Niko’s face

What’s more, certain independent games are entering a phase – familiar to historians of jazz, comics and indeed 20th-century literature – of vigorous experimentation with techniques of narrative. (An evening with the frightening and baffling The Path, rather like an Angela Carter story siphoned through The Sims, will show you what I mean.)

Tim Martin in Telegraph

Telling a story through open interactive medium is not a simple task, but Tale of Tales pulls it off using atmosphere and implication. They also leave plenty for the reader’s imagination. Love or hate the experience, The Path is a marker in the evolution of storytelling.

DG Shrock on Writing for Torre

Man muss sich in jedem Fall auf The Path einlassen, muss in den Wald ganz eintauchen und den Alltag hinter sich lassen. Wem das gelingt, den erwartet ein ganz besonderes Erlebnis.

Noli_me_tangere on Resurrection: dead

The Path, in sostanza, è la Corazzata Potemkin del videogioco. Pretenzioso, soporifero, sconclusionato, per chiunque sia alla ricerca di un normale videogame. Elegante, ipnotico, onirico, per chiunque sia alla ricerca di un’esperienza audiovisiva.

Ivan Fulco in l’Unità

What I experienced was nothing short of breathtaking: entire worlds of narratives and areas to explore unrestrained by contrived and cliched gaming tasks (such as “defeat this monster, progress to the next level” etc).

Adrian Clement on Rollaroll

The animations are beautiful. The music can be chilling. The words and images grow increasingly disturbing, and sometimes sexual, though opaque. When it’s all over, there’s a lot to think about, which turns out to be a more enjoyable exercise than actually playing The Path.

Chris Suellentrop on Slate

I’m really torn on The Path. I don’t know what to do about it.

Akela Talamasca on Big Download

Many won’t enjoy it and some won’t understand, but this is an important step in the evolution of gaming. This sort of experimentation deserves recognition and reward and I only hope we’ll see more like it.

Dave James in PC Format 227 (June 2009)

The Path probeert je duidelijk te maken dat je je eigen levensweg moet bepalen en niet altijd naar anderen moet luisteren, zelfs al weet je dat het naar je eigen ondergang zal leiden. Zware kost dus, afwisselen met Braid is dan ook toegelaten.

Bart Van Heymbeeck in PG Gameplay 157 (May 2009)

There was also a 4 page review plus interview in the Ukrainian Gameplay magazine. Apparently, according to our esteemed colleague of Ice-Pick Lodge, they rated The Path the same as Killzone 2. :D

As an art house project The Path can be considered quite successful. The work of Tale of Tales is preserved thanks to the vagueness of the game’s genre. It’s difficult to review something that has nothing to be compared with. If you’re looking for a new experience, then consider your $10 well spent.

Kirill Tokarev in Gameplay

It wasn’t easy to shoehorn the DirectX-slave that is Quest3D into the seductive arms of Mac OSX, but with the help of the friendly people at TransGaming and Act3D, we did it!

Now there’s no more excuses to stay on the PC path. The OSX forest is filled with temptations. Give in to your thirst for Knowledge of Good and Evil. Come, Adam, come! I have a sweet and juicy apple here for you!…

The Mac version costs the same as the PC version. $9.99.
Which means Good because it is 666 upside down.

Get it here. Now.

Oh, and for the occasion, we have made some new desktop wallpapers (in Mac resolutions only) and… new Deluxe Edition USB sticks!

Thank you, Vikas and Blair and Daniel and Mark and Rob and Paul and Ferry and Remko and Jos!

The Path poses many intriguing questions about the division between art and game, it is also a horror game of the finest degree, it doesn’t have any shocking scare moments. Rather, it unsettles and unnerves you in many ways.

Chris Evans in The Reticule

Es ist eine interaktive Erzählung, eine Geschichte, die man sich selbst erzählt.

Carsten Görig on Spiegel Online

But is it a game, per se? Probably not, yet the game mechanics are key to its success.

Chris Dahlen on A.V. Club

En The Path se habla de la vida, de la muerte, del amor y de la sexualidad haciendo uso de un simbolismo sugerente como en muy pocos otros medios se encuentra, y al contrario que en muchas ocasiones en las que se intenta emplear escudándose en un sobrecargado diseño y exageradas pretensiones, funciona.

Aitor Fernández on Eurogamer.es

Be sure to approach this short horror game as an experimental interactive narrative rather than a typical video game with clear goals and rewards, and you won’t be disappointed.

Marc Saltzman in USA Today

Das genussvolle und bisweilen verängstigte Herumirren, die Ziellosigkeit und die Langsamkeit gehören nicht nur zu “The Path”, sie machen das Spiel aus.

Oliver Klatt in Gee magazine

To classify Tale of Tales masterpiece of interactive adventure in storytelling artwork as a game forces expectations on The Path and these expectations would do more harm than good to this brilliant and memorable experience.

Brian Edey in Game Focus

Mit diesem wirklich gelungenen Experiment im Bereich interaktiver Selbstfindung zeigen „Tale of Tales“, dass man in der festgefahrenen Branche durchaus noch Neues schaffen kann.

Paikea on Gaming XP

(…) it is obvious from the outset that developer Tale of Tales have made a conscious decision to attempt to shatter any conventions you may previously have held regarding gameplay and narrative.

Mike Priest on ME-Gamers

Het oogt en klinkt prachtig, en speelt uniek.

Niels ‘t Hooft in Bright

There’s also an interview with Auriea on Gamereactor TV, filmed at our booth at the Independent Games Festival.

And once more, for the record:

Without titles like The Path, games risk being relegated to permanent insularity. Audiences and designers who care about games must play– and buy – these kinds of games, and accept their role in the future legitimacy of the medium.

Leigh Alexander on Kotaku

Audiences constantly demand video games fight familiar boundaries. We’re sick of the same old, same old. We want creativity, artistic integrity, elegance and depth–or do we? Do players know what they’re asking for when they look for “more” from games? And if this is really what we want, then what’s with the mixed reception–both cultural and economic–when we get it?

Leigh Alexander asks the question on Kotaku. And she elaborates further while illustrating her points with our little baby The Path. It’s an interesting question and one that we have certainly pondered as well. Ever since we made contact with the games industry we have been wondering about the odd contrast between a strong desire for exploring the medium’s potential and the incredibly small number of fresh games. This is not just about the “dreaded” A word. This is simply about doing something new, something fresh, something that moves people, that touches them. It’s so rare.