1000XRESIST

How the pandemic propelled a team of performance-arts practitioners into a new dystopian future

By Alan Wen

Format PC, Switch

Developer Sunset Visitor

Publisher Fellow Traveller

Origin Canada

Release 2024

Hekki Allmo. Six to one. Hair to hair. Sphere to square. These are just some of the cryptic phrases you’ll encounter in 1000xResist. As nonsensical as they might initially appear, picking up the vocabulary of this dystopia becomes a key part of the game’s appeal, tapping into the inherent fun of learning a new language. That goes for real-world dialects, fictional jargon or – if we open up the definition to include not just words but rules and systems – the twin languages of game design and development. In these, only one of the four members of Sunset Visitor’s team was fluent, or even conversant, when they started making 1000xResist.

Studio founder and creative director Remy Siu had previously dabbled with Unity, but for reasons that had more to do with his background in music composition than any desire to make videogames. And then COVID-19 happened, bringing the world of performing arts in which Siu worked to a crashing halt.

“We had many tours and performances planned in 2020, and those were cancelled one by one,” Siu says. He saw that, regardless of how long it took for the pandemic to loosen its grasp on the world, the damage to the performing arts would last considerably longer. Concluding that a “harsh pivot” was necessary, in lockdown Siu picked up Unity once more.

There was, he discovered, at least one advantage in turning his attention to games: the opportunity to make something on a scale that had eluded him in his former field. “The performing arts is very piecemeal. Ten years into it, I think I was a little bit frustrated with how difficult it continued to be just to do the most basic things,” he says. “As artists we would spend 90 per cent of our time doing administrative work, then by the time we got into the room to make the work we were already burnt out.”

While Siu got to grips with the technical side of things, narrative designer Pinki Li wrestled with a different challenge. Beforehand, Li had been a dance choreographer by trade, and her creative writing had mainly taken the form of poetry. “I had taken a screenwriting course somewhere years before, but I had definitely not written anything of [this scale],” she says. “Remy will attest to the fact that the learning curve was steep, and when I started I wasn’t very good.”