With no major releases under their belt, the studio soon hit a wall. So you needed a publisher."Įager to attract a backer, the Ratloop crew tried their hand at a third-person action adventure game, but it never got off the ground. Four guys in Virginia aren't going to be able to handle that. And Walmart had a stipulation where you needed to be able to provide, say, 5000 copies anywhere in the US within 24 hours. The real component to that in the US was Walmart. You needed to press discs and make boxes and ship them. "You needed a shitload of capital up front. "In the late '90s, if you wanted to sell a game, there was no Steam, there was no online storefront," Pope says. So they quit their jobs, formed a studio in Virginia and prayed to Walmart. Pope and his crew had just finished Malice, a total conversion mod for Quake, and wanted to properly enter the heady world of '90s game development. Not long after, in 1998, Pope hooked up with a couple more Quake modders and founded Ratloop, his first indie studio.
I hooked up with the guy who was doing that and did a couple of skins for him." Quake's Anaconda mod wasn't much of a looker, but then what was in the '90s? Sony had the idea to make a Quake mod to promote. Then I got involved with a couple guys on the internet who were making small commercial mods.
"You could just open up a 2D file and draw one and then you could see it in 3D. "I started out doing skins mostly, because that was easy," Pope tells me over Skype from his home in Tokyo, Japan. To understand why, you have to back much further than 2014, all the way back to the '90s, to a small town in Virginia where a young Pope finds himself enamoured with a Macintosh and Quake mods. Pitched as a death-fuelled mystery adventure set aboard an abandoned trade ship, Obra Dinn first surfaced in 2014, just as Pope was polishing off the bulk of Papers, Please. Today, the Papers, Please guy is hard at work on another experiment: Return of the Obra Dinn. Those experiments would eventually lead to Papers, Please, one of the finest games of 2013 and, to most people, Pope's first name. He found a seat at Naughty Dog during the development of the first Uncharted and stuck around for Uncharted 2, but when Drake's third outing rocked up, he left the studio because he wanted to experiment with smaller, weirder games.
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