Spelunky 2

Derek Yu makes a return to his classic actionRoguelike

- Derek Yu

After Derek Yu shipped Spelunky for Xbox 360 and PC in 2012, he took a big break from making games. He’d just become a father, and he was also recovering from the stresses of remaking his freeware GameMaker game with programmer and fellow designer Andy Hull. But Yu wasn’t exactly idle. For a start, he had to look after his new daughter, but he also started writing a book about Spelunky’s development and design, a way for him to unpack his thoughts about its creation. And in it lay the seed for a sequel.

“I was essentially doing research on my own game,” Yu tells us. He spoke to everyone involved in its development, and finally read what had been written on the game and watched videos of people playing. “I’d thought about making a sequel for a while, but it made me want to do it even more because I’d just relived the development of the first. I could see it a little more clearly because I wasn’t in the middle of it.”