JRPG Canon - Fallen London (2009)

But first, we should talk about the history of the game.

So back in the aughts, Alexis Kennedy was a web developer who loved writing and thought that he was pretty good at it.

So he started one of those Twitter interactive fiction threads and began to trace the outline of a world where London was decaying and gothic and weird, but like not in the way it always is.

Zing.

I've never been to the UK.

I don't even know if this joke makes sense, but here we go.

His Twitter fiction got some decent engagement, so he thought that maybe he could make a text adventure game for the browser.

Because this was back when browser games were all the rage, like Farmville and Mafia Wars and all of that.

So he thought that there would be room for an interactive fiction entry into that space.

He said in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, The new thing at that time was social games, and my plan, almost explicitly, was this.

Step one, Mafia Wars has several million players and Mafia Wars is shit.

Step two, let's make a game that isn't shit.

Step three, question mark.

Step four, profit.

But to get around to step four, he thought that his game needed some art to bring it up to snuff.

So he reached out to his journalist friend, Paul Arndt, who he knew drew for fun, and asked him if he could provide 20 icons for his new game idea.

Kennedy told Arndt, I want this to be legit and professional.

I want to pay you for all of the work that you do.

But Arndt said, you can just give me a percentage of the profits.

And Kennedy was like, there's a very high chance that I will make $0 off of this forever.

and aren't said that's fine by me so those 20 icons became 200 icons and in 2009 they created echo bazaar and it was completely free how was that percentage of zero dollar street and you aren't so the way that mafia wars and farmville made money was through microtransactions and the way that it gained players was by endless amounts of social media spam And Kennedy and Arndt didn't want to be spammy.

They wanted to be, quote, viral but gentle, which didn't go very well for them.

People won't know that your browser game is gentle and not spammy until they already give you their contact details, which they're not going to do because all of the other games are spammy.

And any time they would try and get press for...

Uh, for echo bizarre, the top comment in the comment section was always, oh, this is one of those Twitter games.