Dear Esther dev 10 years on: "That was strange. That was quite a ride."

Influential first-person exploration game Dear Esther released commercially 10 years ago this month. But before it was on the front page of Steam and selling like hotcakes, it was a Half Life 2 mod cooked up by designer and writer Dan Pinchbeck and a group of friends. “I was doing a PhD, weirdly, on first person shooters,” Pinchbeck says. As part of that, he had been reading a lot of game studies, but had mixed feelings about sitting back and talking about what could, should, or ought to be done in games. “I was like, ‘Well, we could just build [something],’” he says. “That felt much more in the spirit of games as a medium anyway.” Read more