BLUE MANCHU

How enforced early retirement eventually led Jonathan Chey back to System Shock

- JEREMY PEEL

After BioShock, Irrational Games co-founder Jonathan Chey tried not being a game developer. In fact, for two years after leaving 2K, a noncompete clause in his contract actively prevented him from being one. Instead, he sat the entrance exam for medical school, and passed - before being knocked back for being "too old". So he went back to university, to study chemistry. "Because I literally couldn't do anything else for two years," he tells us today. "I could have worked in some other job, but I didn't have the skills." Once his period of creative confinement was up, Chey still hadn't discovered a new vocation. So, with no better ideas about what to do next, he founded Blue Manchu.

Stepping back into videogames, however, Chey certainly wasn't lacking ideas or inspiration. "My spare time was always spent playing a lot of collectible card games online," he says, "and so I really wanted to do a CCG." Rather than embrace the abstraction of that genre's arenas, however, Chey thought back to a D&D battle report he'd read in Dragon magazine in the 1980s. There the writer had described, as an action choreographer might, the way the party's fighters had moved up to block giants from entering a room - giving the wizard time to prepare a spell, while the rogue slipped around the side for a backstab. It was a form of spatial tactics that captured Chey's imagination. "I thought it might be interesting to try to reproduce that sort of combat scenario in a CCG," he says. "Which of course required adding a board to it."