The Chinese Room, the guys behind Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture, Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs has decided to mothball their operations.
The peeps who essentially invented the “walking simulator” genre has decided to call it quits, as Dan Pinchbeck and co-director Jessica Curry are burnt out, as described in an interview with Eurogamer.
The Chinese Room essentially became well known after the success of Dear Esther, followed by Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and then Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (which won 3 British Academy Games Awards and was nominated for seven more), where they got to work on immediately after A Machine for Pigs.
However, in July the outfit began winding down their operations, vouching for its outgoing staff to other developers so they could land jobs elsewhere.
Developing games as an indie developer is already hard, and where they were working with Sony Santa Monica Studio on Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture ran into cultural misunderstandings (The Chinese Room is UK based) and were bogged down making sure all the details were authentic to the era the game took place in. That and Pinchbeck implied that the game’s vision was cramped by the corp structure of the PlayStation producers managing the project from afar, further complicating the process.
Either way, with The Chinese Room apparently also has a survival-horror role-playing game on the way called 13th Interior but with the sounds of things, that won’t be coming anytime soon.
