Here's the thing with firsts. To a large degree they define your relationship with and standards for the thing you're experiencing. For better or worse, my first experience in the video game mines was making the greatest RPG to date alongside my best friends, all serious Artists. An unlikely event in a place where 'video game' to most means those Hugo platformer tele-games you play over the landline on your TV screen for 99 cents a minute. 

When you go first, you gotta figure it out yourself. Giants who live very far away in the Golden Cities in the radiant West could teach you if you didn't live at the bottom of a gravitational well. Grounded by design. Twenty-year information lag. They just started airing “Santa Barbara” down there for fuck sake. And still, armed with an unhealthy amount of optimism and driven by the desire to create, a motley crew of highschool dropouts, desperados, inva-communists, mercenaries, madmen, drug addicts and financial criminals were going to try to scale a dormant stratovolcano in their swimwear.

We thought: That doesn't look hard. Let's give it a shot. “It's basically walking but more vertical, no?” we thought. “It's easier the higher we get. Less oxygen means less drag right?” It didn't and it wasn't, but we figured it out. Little by little, piece by piece, driven by passion and the belief that it *is* possible, you figure it out. And as with lots of things in life, it's the journey that matters, not the Arc de Triomphe in the end. Or the vacuum metastability event that follows.

And with nothing to compare it to and nothing to learn from, we didn't know if it had been difficult or not. We didn't know it was a miracle.

After the miracle, men came to us in suits of clown and called us amateurs, enthusiasts, *hobby-ists*. They seemed almost angry, as if the miracle had threatened some unspoken balance that now needs to be allowed to return to its rest state. An unspoken “You kids are lucky you didn't blow your goddamn heads off” hangs over every interaction.

Eager were the men wearing suits of clown to uplift us from our savagery. Why use a knife for slicing ham when you could be using twelve forks, a tear-sized spoon and a Senior Producer? “Let me optimise this for you, buddy,” the clown suit-clad men said and made more of themselves. “You'll all be filthy rich,” they promised, because they desired to be filthy and rich. And when we turned them down, because it was never about money and only a bit about the filth, they brought a sword to the doorstep of our home. Us and the clown suit-clad men were same in flesh but not in spirit. 

“But the memory remaa-aaains,” sang Lars Ulrich, before suing Napster forever signed Metallica to the Hall of Lame. And remain it does indeed. Memory of the blueprint for the Greatest Thing in the Universe and the artistic ecstasy that came with crafting it. Is it memory or is it hunger?

I saw it was possible to live like this. I saw it was possible for everyone to have enough and to respect each other and proudly craft something that unashamedly calls itself Art. I saw that the Producer can indeed lie down with the Artist when everything is on the line. And it's easy to forget the difference between workers and owners when you're all trying to dig your way out of a collapsed mine shaft. But once you’re out, they go sleep in white mansions and marble halls and you go back to the brick shithouse behind the chemical combine.

I saw how it was possible and then I saw it disintegrate in the face of unquenchable greed. We just weren't ready, didn't train for success. Losing was our forté, our national sport. But I’ve always been a glass-is-miraculously-refilling-itself kinda guy. I believe artistic integrity triumphs even greed, and that artists in control of the means of creation can raise artistic standards for the entire industry.

Enough with the randomly generated and the procedurally built and the algorithmically assembled. I need to feel that a human being placed that poor goblin — and the Crude Club he drops after I slay him for 1XP — on my path. I want to feel that another soul put thought into crafting this experience for me. It's meaningless if it's just me and the machine. I don't need my time wasted as a service, thank you and I'm more of a DIY kinda guy when it comes to lobotomy.

I believe that the last time around we made something genre-breaking. Discipline-transcending. Something completely new. I am not ready to give up on that. The lessons learned, skills developed, experience forged — for five fucking years I've been waiting to put them to use. So we went back to the drawing board with one goal in mind — let's do it fresh from the start, but this time let's not fuck each other the moment the checkered flag drops. It makes the entire mankind look bad.

Dust off the machinery, heat up the furnaces, walk back the health and safety regulations. It's time to go work in the shit factory again.