Category: Publications

The TEF Fan Art Calendar for 2010 is here!

TEF - 2010 Fan Art Calendar

We are pleased as punch to announce that The Endless Forest deviantART fan club lead by Jen Stuber, has once again made a Calendar filled with beautiful artwork from players who love the game. It’s pretty freakin awesome!! Michael and I don’t have enough exclamation points! :)

All cash raised goes directly to help to fund the future of The Endless Forest. I think we can count ourselves fortunate to have such a sweet and talented player community!

buy the Calendar on deviantART

And speaking of the community… The Endless Forest community website has received an overhaul these past weeks. The community site is a very lively place where TEF players of all ages can meet each other outside the game.

Endlessforest.org/community

Hard for me to believe but TEF will have been going for 5 years in 2010. Thanks to MUDAM for continuing to support us with the game server hosting. They have been great. Anyway, maybe for the TEF 5th anniversary we’ll have to have a big party. In the forest, of course! 😉

GEE loves the indies

Get your hands on the September issue of Germany’s GEE Magazine! There’s a unique feature story, that we are particularly happy to be a part of. It is documentation of a Skype audioconference that took place between Jason Rohrer, Kellie Santiago (thatgamecompany), Aleksey and Nikolai (Ice-Pick Lodge) and us, Michael and Auriea (Tale of Tales) where we all discussed art, life, each other’s work, and game design philosophy. It was a very honest and frank discussion between developers in drastically different circumstances and with overlapping/contrasting motivations. Should prove insightful to anyone curious about “why do we do it?”

GEE Magazine, Sept. 2009

GEE Magazine, Sept. 2009

The Path in EDGE Magazine

What more to say than simply that. An interview and a few kind words appear as a 4 page feature about our game in development, The Path, in the December 2007 issue of UK games publication extraordinaire Edge Magazine. It’s a great article and it looks beautiful so you should pick it up!

Edge Magazine December -Tale of Tales - The Path - spread1

Ahem, to say we’re happy about this would be an understatement(!) For now, I think I’m still in shock.

Essay on The Endless Forest

Dutch Judith Dormans is bachelor student at the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Maastricht University, specialising in game studies. She participated in our Drama Princess Symposium and now she’s written quite an impressive in-depth essay about The Endless Forest. She criticizes Salen & Zimmerman‘s rules-based analysis of games as being limited and argues for broadening the horizons of game studies.

A case study of The Endless Forest shows that the theories about formal systems aren’t sufficient anymore. They give no room for the participatory nature of games and they put too much emphasis on the traditional forms of games. It is required to redefine what the formal system of a game is.

Read it here.

2 of our projects profiled in “Web Cinema” by Luca Barbeni

Web Cinema: L’immagine Cibernetica by Luca Barbeni From a series of emails in 2005 to a book 2007. In Web Cinema: L’immagine Cibernetica we are interviewed by Luca Barbeni about our design philosophy and the lessons learned from two of our projects: the vintage online performance Wirefire and our current multiplayer game The Endless Forest (which grew out of our experiences with Wirefire, in case you didn’t know.)

Also featured are the always engaging web video projects of Peter Horvath and Peter Greenaway’s Tulsa Luper Journey. Unfortunately, this book is only available in Italian language right now.

some links:
Buy from Hoepli.it
Review by Noema