Lucas Pope | |
|---|---|
 Pope in 2019 | |
| Born | 1977or1978(age 46–47) [1] |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Video game designer |
| Notable credits | |
| Spouse | Keiko Ishizaka |
| Children | 2 |
Lucas Pope (born 1977or1978) [1] is an American video game designer. He is best known for experimental indie games, notably Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn , both of which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize alongside other awards. [2]
Pope grew up in Virginia. His father was a handyman, which gave Pope access to a well-stocked array of parts and tools that led to an interest in mechanical engineering. When he got to high school, he met a friend who was interested in robotics, and the two of them would take retail robot kits, take them apart, and reconnect them to their own computers to see how they could control them. Inspired to continue into the mechanical and robotics field, Pope attended Virginia Tech to study mechanical engineering. He found that the reality of what constituted the field was less desirable than what he wanted, but did take strong interest in the computer programming side of his coursework. During this period, he got involved with the Quake community and helped to develop mods for Quake and other games, principally working on the art used for the characters in the mods. [2]
Pope collaborated with other video game modders, including working on an officially-sanctioned Quake mod by Sony Pictures to promote Anaconda . [3] Pope and another set of modders decided to form their own studio, Ratloop, releasing the total Quake conversion mod Malice in 1997. [3] Ratloop struggled with distribution through retail channels. While Walmart would help distribute their game, the chain required Ratloop to have 5,000 copies ready to ship within 24 hours at any time, requiring Ratloop to secure a publisher to help. After a first failed 3D game, Ratloop decided to develop a car repair game, Gearhead Garage . It was successful enough to be picked up by Activision for retail distribution, and gave Ratloop sufficient funds to try a number of experimental games, something which had interested Pope. [3] However, none of these were published, and facing competition from other studios, particularly from Eastern Europe, that could make games at substantially lower prices, Ratloop became dormant. [3]
Pope left Ratloop and joined Realtime Associates in 2003. [2] While at Realtime, he was part of the team that developed the game Re-mission, a 2006 shooter whose goal was to encourage children with cancer to take their chemotherapy medication. [2] Pope moved to Santa Monica and got a job with Naughty Dog [4] in 2007. While Pope did not have a strong programming background, he felt that Naughty Dog had hired him because of his interest in developing the tools and interfaces needed to help in programming their games. [4] Pope's strength in developing GUI tools augmented Naughty Dog's weakness at that time, with Pope stating that at the time of his hiring, "there was no full-time GUI tools guy at all...Just command-line, back-end tools people." [2] Pope had been hired about halfway through the development of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune , and continued to work on the sequel Uncharted 2: Among Thieves . He credited the director of the sequel Bruce Straley for teaching him how to focus a game's design around core concepts to make the game fun, even if this meant sacrificing work that had already been completed. [4] Former Naughty Dog President Christophe Balestra said of Pope's work on their design tools: "We were desperate to find a good tools programmer. He was part of the people who saved the day." [2] Specifically, Pope developed GUI tools for the games' menus systems, save systems, level layout to assist level designers, and a system to organize sound and text files for various languages. [2]
After Uncharted 2 had shipped in 2009, Naughty Dog was set to continue onto the next sequel, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception , but Pope wanted to spend more time on his love of experimental games. In the interim between games, he and his wife Keiko Ishizaka spent two weeks to develop Mightier, a small game based around creating 3D levels from camera scans of a 2D drawing, and its title a play on the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword". They submitted Mightier to the Independent Games Festival (IGF) where it was nominated for one of the awards, and which led to Valve contacting Pope about putting Mightier up on Steam as a free game. [2] Both Pope and Ishizaka decided to quit their current jobs in 2010 and moved to Saitama, Japan, in close proximity to Ishizaka's family, and continue to pursue small independent game development. [5]
Over the next few years, Pope and Ishizaka worked on a number of experimental games. One of their first was a mobile game called Helsing's Fire , which won the 2011 IGF for Best Mobile Game. [2] Another title was The Republia Times in 2012 which he had come up with originally as part of a Ludum Dare game jam. [4] He helped to port Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken , a game developed by members of Ratloop, to the PlayStation 3. [2] This work required him and Ishizaka to temporarily live in Singapore for about a year with frequent trips to the United States. During these travels, Pope came upon an idea for a game involving a passport inspector, which served as the inspiration for Pope's breakout game, Papers, Please , released first in 2013. Papers, Please was critically praised, winning several awards including several Game Developers Choice and IGF awards (including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize for best indie game), as well as a British Academy (BAFTA) Games Award for Best Simulation Game. For Pope and his wife, Papers, Please was financially successful; [1] the game had sold about 1.8 million copies by August 2016, [6] and through 2018, still sold enough that Pope was not worried about his financial security as he was developing his next game, Return of the Obra Dinn . [3]
Obra Dinn's development had started shortly after Pope had completed all the work on Papers, Please, and took about four and a half years, principally due to Pope's expanded narrative. [2] On its release in 2018, it received similar high praise as Papers, Please, and has been nominated for and won several awards from the Game Developers Choice, IGF, Peabody, and D.I.C.E. Awards (including a second Seumas McNally Grand Prize), as well as being named one of the top games of 2018.
Pope states he plans to still develop games but wants to keep these at a small size; Obra Dinn was meant to be a small-scale game but ballooned out larger than he anticipated. [2]
In March 2024, Pope released Mars After Midnight exclusively for the Playdate system. In the game, players manage a community center among aliens on Mars. The character art for the Martians is procedurally generated, and the voices are synthesized using a system Pope developed. Pope said that he created the game with his children in mind. Wes Fenlon, writing for PC Gamer called the game "pleasant." [7]
Pope and his wife Keiko Ishizaka live in Saitama, Japan, with two children. They met while both working at Realtime and continued their relationship while Pope was at Naughty Dog and Ishizaka was at nearby 2K Games. [2] [3]
| Year | Title [lower-alpha 1] | Platforms | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Mightier | Windows | Developed at Ratloop |
| 2010 | Helsing's Fire | iOS | |
| 2012 | The Republia Times | Browser | Created as warm up for Ludum Dare 23 |
| 6 Degrees of Sabotage | Entry for Ludum Dare 23 | ||
| 2013 | Papers, Please | Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, PSVita | |
| 2014 | The Sea Has No Claim | Browser | Entry for Ludum Dare 29 |
| 2015 | Unsolicited | Entry for Ludum Dare 33 | |
| 2018 | Return of the Obra Dinn | Windows, macOS, PS4, Xbox One, Switch | |
| 2024 | Mars After Midnight | Playdate |
The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the independent video game industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, and innovation in video game development by CMP Media, later known as UBM Technology Group, IGF is now owned by Informa after UBM's acquisition.
Reflexive Entertainment was an American video game developer based in Lake Forest, California. The company was cofounded by Lars Brubaker, Ernie Ramirez, James C. Smith and Ion Hardie in 1997. They developed nineteen games independently, published two games, started distribution of downloadable casual games on their online Arcade, created a division of their Arcade entirely devoted to Mac games for Mac users and started hosting ad supported free online web browser games. In 2005, Reflexive's Wik and the Fable of Souls won three awards at the 2005 Independent Games Festival which included Innovation in Visual Art, Innovation in Game Design and the Seumas McNally Award For Independent Game Of The Year. In October 2008, Reflexive Entertainment was acquired by Amazon.com. On February 3, 2009, Amazon.com began hosting casual game content for internet download.
Seumas McNally was a Canadian video game programmer and designer. He is best known for indie games, notably DX-Ball and Tread Marks, which won the Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival (IGF). The award was posthumously renamed in his honour when he died at age 21 of Hodgkin's lymphoma, shortly after having received the award himself.
Naughty Dog, LLC is an American first-party video game developer based in Santa Monica, California. Founded by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin in 1984, the studio was acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2001. Gavin and Rubin produced a sequence of progressively more successful games, including Rings of Power and Way of the Warrior in the early 1990s. The latter game prompted Universal Interactive Studios to sign the duo to a three-title contract and fund the expansion of the company.
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Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a 2007 action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Computer Entertainment. It is the first game in the Uncharted series and was released in November 2007 for PlayStation 3. The game follows Nathan Drake, the supposed descendant of explorer Sir Francis Drake, as he searches for the lost treasure of El Dorado with journalist Elena Fisher and mentor Victor Sullivan.
Uncharted is an action-adventure video game franchise published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and developed by Naughty Dog. Created by Amy Hennig, the Uncharted franchise follows a group of treasure hunters who travel across the world to uncover various historical mysteries. The series features historical fiction, elements of fantasy and folklore, and fictional characters alongside real-world historical figures and events. In the main series, players control Nathan Drake; in the expansion, players control Chloe Frazer.
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Neil Druckmann is an Israeli-American writer, creative director, designer, and programmer. He has been co-president of the video game developer Naughty Dog since 2020 and head of creative since 2023, and is best known for his work on the game franchises Uncharted and The Last of Us, having co-created the latter.
Bruce Straley is an American game director, artist, designer, and studio director. He previously worked for the video game developer Naughty Dog, known for his work on the video games The Last of Us and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. Straley's first video game work was as an artist at Western Technologies Inc, where he worked on the Menacer six-game cartridge (1992) and X-Men (1993). Following this, he formed a company, Pacific Softscape, where he worked as a designer on Generations Lost (1994). After the company disbanded, Straley was eventually hired at Crystal Dynamics, where he worked as a designer on Gex: Enter the Gecko (1998) and was initially game director for Gex 3: Deep Cover Gecko (1999); he left the company partway through development of the latter.
Papers, Please is a puzzle simulation video game created by indie game developer Lucas Pope, developed and published through his production company, 3909 LLC. The game was released on August 8, 2013, for Microsoft Windows and OS X, for Linux on February 12, 2014, and for iOS on December 12, 2014. A port for the PlayStation Vita was announced in August 2014 and was then released on December 12, 2017. A new port for iOS as well as for Android was released in August 2022.
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Return of the Obra Dinn is a 2018 adventure and puzzle video game created by Lucas Pope and published by 3909 LLC. It was Pope's second commercial game, following 2013's Papers, Please, and was first released for macOS and Windows before being ported to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One a year later. Return of the Obra Dinn was praised for its gameplay, art style, and narrative; it won several awards including the Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
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Opus Magnum is a puzzle-based programming game developed by Zachtronics. It was released for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac in December 2017, following about two months of early access. In the game, the player must assemble a series of machines using various tools and program them to complete alchemy-related tasks. The player can advance with any working solution to each problem, but is challenged through leaderboards to produce a machine that does the task in the shortest time, with the lowest cost of materials, and/or the smallest occupied area. Opus Magnum is based on The Codex of Alchemical Engineering, one of the earliest Flash games made by Zach Barth prior to establishing Zachtronics.
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Helsing's Fire is a 2010 puzzle video game developed by Ratloop and published by Clickgamer.com. The protagonist, monster hunter Van Helsing, and his assistant Raffton battle Dracula and his minions by revealing monsters using a torch and defeating them with tonics. Developed over the course of 6 months by Ratloop co-founder Lucas Pope and programmer Keiko Ishizaka, the game was originally designed to be a roguelike action game, but eventually turned into a puzzler.
The Case of the Golden Idol is a 2022 adventure and puzzle video game developed by Color Gray Games and published by Playstack for macOS and Windows. The game depicts a narrative spanning 40 years in the 18th century, in which players collect clues to piece together concepts, characters, and evidence to provide context to the story. The game was developed by Latvian independent developers Ernests and Andrejs Kļaviņš, who aimed to create a detective game influenced by the visual presentation of 1990s adventure games. The Case of the Golden Idol was similarly inspired by the design of the 2018 game Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope, with the game receiving similar comparisons from reviewers.
Mars After Midnight is a 2024 management video game developed and published by Lucas Pope. The player controls an alien running late-night community support groups on off-colony Mars. The game launched in March 2024 as a Playdate exclusive.
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