O
ne of the tensions throughout my career
is that the stuff I want to be making is on
the edges of commercial viability,” says
Johnnemann Nordhagen. “They’re the
sort of thing that, if you get the right
niche interested in them, they may pay for themselves- but they’re never going to make a billion dollars.”
It’s not as lonely a position as you might think. Nordhagen
spent a formative part of his career at Bioshock 2 developer
2K Marin, surrounded by people who loved immersive
sims like Thief and Deus Ex. It’s a genre that has always
teetered on the boundary of commercial viability –
requiring big budgets, but rarely pulling in large audiences.
At times, it’s been considered indulgent – a genre more to
the tastes of game designers than players.
“Most people were there because they were excited
about games being something more interesting,” says
Nordhagen. “I feel a little silly about this, but when
Bioshock came out, it felt like someone taking art game
concepts and putting them into a commercial product.
Someone was making a philosophical statement, and also
you could shoot guys. It was a revelation in some ways.”
Nordhagen had leveraged his expertise as part of Sony’s
research and development department to get onto 2K
Marin’s first project: porting Bioshock to the PS3. Following
that, he worked on the sequel’s interface and AI
programming, and became an integral member of the team
that produced its acclaimed DLC. To make Minerva’s Den,
a small group within 2K Marin leaned into Bioshock’s focus
on surprising narrative payoffs, telling the story of a
supercomputer and its creator.“It told all of us on that team it was possible,” says
Nordhagen. “We could tell a really compelling story
without many resources. It was the thing that gave us the
confidence to make Gone Home.”
Released independently by just a handful of
developers and leaning heavily on their experience with
Bioshock, Gone Home posited that the archeological
storytelling of immersive sims could carry an entire game.
“The idea of, ‘Let’s take this immersive sim thing, take out
the combat and just tell a story with it. Is this interesting?’
Turns out it was,” says Nordhagen.HOME RUN
Gone Home proved a pivotal game for indie development,
and for the genre now referred to as the ‘walking simulator’- sometimes derogatively, sometimes not. Afterwards,
Nordhagen drifted further towards the edge of commercial
viability, moving back to San Francisco and dedicating four
years to Where the Water Tastes Like Wine – a game about
sharing stories on the road in Depression-era America. In
some ways, it was a reaction against his experience with
immersive sims, which tended to tell just one story – that of
an auteur writer-director.
“I became conscious of the similarity of stories in games
like Bioshock,” says Nordhagen. “These games give a lot of
power to the player, but only tell the same kind of story.
The idea arose of, ‘Why don’t I make this game a platform
to let other people tell their stories? I will build the stage
and let them do their performances on it.’”
Where the Water Tastes Like Wine became an anthology-
style showcase of writers from diverse backgrounds
reflecting the “patchwork of experiences that is America”.
“I was never at all unhappy with that choice,” says
Nordhagen. “It was the right thing for sure.”
Today, Nordhagen is still straddling that boundary
between art games and the AAA industry. On the one hand,
he’s moving to Stockholm to start a job at Ubisoft, working
as a technical narrative designer. On the other, he’s
releasing Museum of Mechanics on Steam – an exhibition of
the different ways videogames have approached
lockpicking. “It is meant for a very, very small audience of
people who like doing deep dives on game mechanics and
wandering around a space without much challenge or
narrative in order to have an experience,” he says.
Lockpicking, of course, is a mechanic beloved by
immersive sims. Evidently, some intrinsic part of
Nordhagen still holds a candle for them: those would-be art
games that forever flirt with the mainstream.
Jeremy Peel
BEYOND BIOSHOCK
Gone Home developer JOHNNEMANN NORDHAGEN’s career on the edge
2K MARIN-ATION
Other great indie games from the Bioshock 2 teamTHE NOVELIST
Kent Hudson used
Dishonored-style
teleportation to cast you as a
ghost, flitting between the
light fittings of a family home.THE BLACKOUT CLUB
Jordan Thomas directed
Bioshock 2 before working
on this creepy co-op horror
game that crossed Thief with
Stranger Things.ELDRITCH
A roguelike from David
Pittman, this leans on the
same form of first-person
stealth that powers many
immersive sims.“NEWS | OPINION | DEVELOPMENT
INSPIRATIONS AND CONNECTIONS IN GAMESPositive
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