Dan Houser

I'm always, you know, I love the sound of words, but just wanted to feel like when they sounded, it didn't sound cheesy.

It didn't sound ridiculous.

You wanted to hear them speak more.

It didn't make you cringe awfully when they spoke.

That was the, at some level, that was all the goal was.

And then they felt like this guy was going to go on this life and death odyssey and you cared about him.

You had to care about his wife and child that he left behind, even though you didn't know them.

I remember we did a meeting with Christian, the designer,

I can't remember what year, probably some point late 2008, early 2009.

And we were discussing the last bit and said, I think he's got to die.

And he leapt on the idea and went, yeah, yes, yes.

And then I went, no, it can't work.

Games can't work like that.

They can't work if he's dead.

And then I began to think through, well, if we just technically, it doesn't work because you have to be able to finish all the stuff up and then began to think through, actually, I think we can make it work if we do it this way.

And so he then really pushed for that idea.

And it seemed to, I was like, I was still torn.

I thought it was clever narratively, but I was torn if it was going to work technically as a piece of game design.

But I think it did.

Oh, yeah.