You're just temporarily, blissfully unaware of a goal. You get lost a little bit, but it was that awesome type of getting lost where you're not in danger. There are a ton of paths to get lost in, go biking, and I'd go down there maybe a couple times a week and keep choosing new paths. "When I was starting to make this game, my career was under control, I had no kids, and I was doing a lot of biking through Stanley Park which is Vancouver's big, old growth forest right next to downtown," he said. Maxwell's experience biking through the woods of Vancouver didn't involve any actual drugs, but definitely was a kind of zen experience. "There are a lot of games that might look like they'd be relaxing and have a nice soft art style or a nice song, but sometimes it doesn't come across" Ryan Cash He then added his personal experiences snowboarding and skateboarding growing up to create the final vision alongside lead artist and developer Harry Nesbitt. Cash told me that Alto's Adventure was born from a mix of inspirations: it took the immersive feeling Cash felt when playing Tiny Wings combined with the gameplay of another mobile title, Ski Safari. The former two both lead the creation of games with specifically "meditation" or "zen" modes, while Maxwell made a game that he describes as like a "bike ride through the woods while really high." So, meditative, of sorts.Īnother commonality is that all three of these games were inspired by real life experiences doing intense physical sporting activities. I spoke with three such developers: Snowman founder and creative director Ryan Cash, who created Alto's Adventure and Alto's Odyssey Giant Squid co-founder and creative director Matt Nava, who created ABZÛ, and Stu Maxwell, lead developer of Shape of the World and (by day) lead VFX artist at The Coalition. And whether by design or by accident, this has led to audiences or developers themselves classifying games or aspects of them as something seemingly antithetical to the idea of video games: meditative. In an industry built on high-energy, explosive, loud, and point-assessing experiences, a number of developers over the last several years have begun searching for slower ideas to dream up video games around.
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