DIRTY WEEKEND
There’s nothing quite like Mudrunner for cooling the blood, to paraphrase the classic Flanders and Swann number. There’s something meditative about plunging a truck into brown soup, then spending ten minutes wiggling the left stick and attaching winches to trees in a gradual and patient attempt to free your wheels from the quagmire. It’s a premise that would be considered ponderous or perverse by conventional game design standards, which hold that players should be swept along and kept busy at all times. But Mudrunner didn’t come from conventional game design – it came from the mind of Pavel Zagrebelnyy.
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Zagrebelnyy was born in St Petersburg, Russia, the world’s northernmost metropolis. It was a grounding that would give him access to people, infrastructure, and ultimately work at an internationally known game studio. But it also gave the young Zagrebelnyy reams of strange, swampy countryside to explore. When he was at home, he played with toy trucks in his sandbox; when he was outside, he watched real trucks and excavators work in the fields.