The Forgotten City isn't lacking in atmosphere. 'I loved making the mod, but I’ve always considered it a rough draft of what it could have been,' he reflected. The mod has been downloaded over three million times and won Pearce a National Writers Guild Award in Australia in 2016. Over the next three years, The Forgotten City grew from a dull Dwarven hallway into a sprawling underground city that would play host to a time-travelling murder mystery told via a non-linear 35,000-word screenplay, full voice acting, and an original orchestral score. The rest of it just sort of evolved from there.' I Fought the Law 'That thought prompted the idea to allow the player to travel back in time to interact with the people who used to live there. 'I remember looking at it and thinking it was just another big empty ruined place,' Pearce said. He didn't know it at the time, but he had laid the first stone foundation of what would eventually become The Forgotten City. When Bethesda released the SDK for Skyrim in 2012, Pearce taught himself to mod, studying tutorials online to at first build a Dwarven hallway, which evolved into a large underground city. The next big moddable game to come along was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. 'I decided to have a go at my own mod when the next big moddable game came along.' 'In 2011, I played a mod called New Vegas Bounties from a modder called someguy2000 and it was a revelation to me that a mod could be as good as an official DLC, or maybe even better – and a vehicle for world-class storytelling,' Pearce recalled. By 2011, he found himself working as a lawyer lobbying the government for regulatory reform. He played games on and off all his life, and as a kid had even taught himself enough programming to make his own 'virtually unplayable' games on a venerable IBM 8086 PC. Ten years ago, Nick Pearce worked a full-time job in Melbourne, Australia as a Regulatory Strategy Advisor at what he describes as a big tech company. In Pearce's case, he’s not trying to celebrate all those late nights working but rather they seem borne of his attempt to make up for lost time.

Honestly, I was surprised to discover it's even physically possible, but it is.'Ĭrunch is an omnipresent labour issue in the games industry, and the developers that produce good games while crunching do so despite the time spent crunching, not because of it.

And I certainly would never allow my staff to work hours like that. 'To be clear, that's something I wouldn't encourage anyone to do, because it's not healthy or sustainable.

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