Shigeru Miyamoto exploring the forests and caves of his hometown, a childhood landscape that would later form the contours of Hyrule; Hidetaka Miyazaki at the school library, poring over fantasy books in a language he couldn’t fully read; Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri’s youthful enthusiasm for catching insects, so feverish that he was nicknamed ‘Dr Bug’. It’s easy to see why these origin stories have passed into videogame myth, seeming to present a key to the work and minds of some of our most important developers, a rare concrete answer to the age-old question of where they get their ideas from. Redfall co-director Harvey Smith has one of these origin stories too, but it’s rather less wholesome.
As a teenager, Smith and two friends broke into an abandoned house in Texas. They picked through the lives of its former occupants, now long gone, and thrilled at the knowledge they could be caught at any moment. As detailed in E383, Smith is open about the formative impact of this event, and its effect on his understanding of game design. He sees it as the essential basis of a videogame design philosophy that eschews the ‘rollercoaster’ approach in two major ways.