About Tale of Tales

Tale of Tales is a games development studio, founded by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn in Belgium in 2002 (*).

The purpose of Tale of Tales is to create elegant and emotionally rich interactive entertainment. We explicitly want to cater to people who are not enchanted by most contemporary computer games, or who wouldn’t mind more variety in their gameplay experiences. For this purpose, all of our products feature innovative forms of interaction, engaging poetic narratives and simple controls.

Tale of Tales started life with the design of 8 , an epic single player PC exploration game inspired by the various versions of the folk tale, Sleeping Beauty. The 8 project is being re-visited in 2010 and developed under the name The Book of 8, which is in the early prototype stage.

The Endless Forest is our second big project: an online multiplayer game. The Endless Forest was launched in September 2005 and continues to evolve.

The Path is our first commercially available single player game, released in March 2009. A spiritual sequel to 8, The Path is a short horror game inspired by the tale of Little Red Ridinghood.

In 2009 we also released, Fatale based on the play Salome by Oscar Wilde. Fatale explores the story of Salomé in motion and stilness. An interactive vignette much like an explorable painting.

The Graveyard is quiet and short experience about death and life we released in 2008 to wide acclaim and controversy. In 2009 we also put an iphone version of The Graveyard on the AppStore.

Also in 2009 we created Vanitas, a virtual box of treasures for iPhone and iPod touch.

Next to our games, we are also involved with research projects, like Drama Princess, and theoretical discussions, as expressed in our Realtime Art Manifesto.

Our work has been shown in many new media art exhibitions around the world and we regularly give presentations on such events. But our focus remains online where we can stay in touch with players, friends and flames. So join us in the Forum for some lively discussion!

About Our Name

We chose the name from Italian Poet Giambattista Basile‘s book Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille a.k.a. The Tale of Tales. In this book he collected and adapted folk tales which previously had only been part of oral tradition. We decided on the name while working on our first game, 8, which was deeply inspired by his translation of Sun, Moon, and Talia (now more commonly known as Sleeping Beauty) which appears in that book. Humans have a physical need for wonder and poetry. It is our desire to carry on the tradition of telling and retelling of tales old and new.

We later found that Tale of Tales is the name of a famous animated short film by Yuri Norstein. The richness of these tales runs deep, perhaps he too was inspired by the same source!

(*) legally a BVBA since December 2003