The great beyond
When talking to developers, particularly those who’ve spent years making one game, we’re sometimes moved to ask what possessed them to get into this line of work in the first place. When the clock strikes midnight on December 31, Riv Hester’s Pepper Grinder will enter its ninth year of existence in some form, the idea having originated in 2016. But the seed was planted long before that, when Hester and his father played Donkey Kong Country together. “One of the stages looked like Mayan ruins. There’s a really deep parallax background in that one,” Hester recalls. “My dad and I talked about how we wished we could go back there and explore the rest of the world outside the scope of the game.” Considering how that might be achieved was what first “got the gears turning”.