The most captivating bit of fiction I’ve read in recent months starts in darkness. A wanderer, alone in a nameless forest, lights a fire. A stranger stumbles toward it. The pair cooperate to improve their meager circumstances, building tools, workshops, and eventually a village. Then, a metaphorical darkness takes hold. The wanderer becomes imperial, driving his partner, and his village, to… well, you should read it to find out.
Er, I mean, you should play it. The story is not traditional text but a video game—a one-dollar iOS game, to be specific, called A Dark Room. And though it rejects nearly everything we think modern video games need to succeed — there’s no multiplayer mode and the “graphics” are made of ASCII text — it was the top-selling paid app on the App Store for most of April. (It’s currently in second place.) By the end of that month, A Dark Room had been downloaded around 325,000 times, netting its two developers, Michael Townsend and Amir Rajan, something close to a quarter million dollars.
“I’m going to pay off the mortgage,” says Townsend, who lives in Ottawa. “Maybe buy every single Nerf gun ever made.”
This is not Candy Crush money. But it’s an amazing accomplishment for a game so simple and no-frills that it could probably be ported to a Commodore 64. In ADR, the primary game action is pressing rectangles to collect wood, check traps, build things, or fight. The world map is nothing but text symbols: Roads are represented by strings of hashtags, the barren desert is a swathe of periods. Battles require simply thumbing rectangles that say “Slash” or “Shoot.”
Mindlessly tapping boxes isn’t what hooked me on A Dark Room. The story did. And to be clear, it’s not Shakespeare; in fact, it’s not even Dan Brown. But the narrative is well-paced and suspenseful and, combined with the simple game mechanics, absolutely addictive. Subtle cues convey that amidst all the mindless wood-collecting and trap-baiting, your character is becoming a monster — in fact, may already be a monster. And because it’s a game, you feel like you’re helping guide and create the narrative, that it’s possible to forestall or amend the fate you seem destined for — though in actuality, the story is mostly linear and immutable.
And I’m not alone. Devoted fans have set up a wiki to elucidate the game’s secrets and discuss the story. Adulatory reviews on the App Store praise the pacing, the mystery. “While I don’t want to ruin anything,” writes verbarmateAbsconded on the App Store, “I can firmly say that anyone who has the will to finish the story will be humbled.” Says Theone680: “This game is worth much more than ninety-nine cents… This game goes so deep.” Though ADR fits into the tradition of text-based adventure games that date back to the mid-1970s, it’s the first to majorly succeed in a casual gaming ecosystem more hospitable to Scrabble knockoffs and birds that flap, fling, or float.
The irony is that while the main draw of ADR is the slowly unfolding narrative, the narrative almost didn’t exist. Townsend, a longtime indie gamer, built a desktop version of ADR in mid-2013. The browser-based version is less story-driven and considered an “idle game”: During slow stages while, say, stockpiling wood, the player can simply do something else. “It’s meant very much to be tabbed away from while you’re doing work, then tabbed back to,” says Townsend.
Rajan, a freelance developer in Dallas, knew that the iPhone’s small screen discourages such multitasking, so iOS players wouldn’t tolerate as much drudgery. He invented the story just to liven up the slow moments. “I needed some way to keep the player engaged,” Rajan says. He fleshed out characters, like the sensitive builder, and wrote increasingly foreboding snippets of text to heighten the atmosphere and keep people tapping rectangles.
The final “scene” where—SPOILER ALERT—the wanderer’s spacecraft ascends through the atmosphere, was even more accidental. At first, Rajan kept the gameplay sparse, simply a spacecraft to maneuver left or right to dodge asteroids. But a blind person playing an early version through voiceover capability, which reads text out loud, wrote to Rajan complaining about the sudden dead spot. So Rajan made up a storyline “to keep the blind entertained” and, after realizing it worked, made it available to everyone.
For Townsend, the lesson is clear: “The big secret that nobody wants you to know is that game design is ninety percent accidental.”
I came away with a different lesson. That even in the world of quad-core gaming chips and $7 billion IPOs based on columns of candy, good stories can take you far.
