ΤΗΕ MAKING OF... CARD SHARK

How Kubrick and magic tricks inspired a whole lot of cheating

- JON BAILES

Misdirection is hardly an alien concept to games. We pay for the artifice, after all, knowing that the worlds we enter are built to immerse us in their scenarios and stakes, obscuring the machinic calculations that make them tick. Card Shark, though, holds misdirection unusually close to its heart. Its characters are impostors and liars, its visuals draw attention to their unreality, and its card tricks lay bare their component parts before your eyes. With that insight comes one of gaming’s oldest and greatest superpowers: the ability to cheat.

It’s no surprise to learn, then, that the concept for Card Shark was conjured after artist Nicolai Troshinsky took up card magic as a hobby. “In the process of learning,” he explains, “I discovered some concepts related to card cheating, because magic and cheating are very interconnected.” What pushed these discoveries forward into a vision for a game, though, was the cinematic magic of Stanley Kubrick – specifically the card-game scene in his historical drama Barry Lyndon, in which the hero cheats to victory. “I sparked this idea that you could have a game that’s just this scene from Barry Lyndon over and over,” Troshinsky says, “and because I was learning all these methods for doing tricks, I could see the potential for a variety of gameplay [situations].”