The Chinese Room

On the long, transformative walk from research team to videogame studio

- Jen Simpkins

The Chinese Room’s Brighton office, with its corridor of frosted glass and rooms of filing cabinets and phones, looks more like the setting for a ’70s cop show than a game studio. Before it moved in, this was the building for the local branch of Unison, the public service union. It still very much feels like it: most of its rooms are unoccupied, canvases of concept art propped up against the skirting boards still waiting to be hung. Down the hallway is the main workspace, an open-plan room filled with busy desks.

It’s a haphazard arrangement. (Suspiciously so, in fact: we’re told the previous landlord was convinced some kind of gambling outfit was being operated in here.) But it suits The Chinese Room somewhat. “We became a game studio kind of accidentally,” co-founder Dan Pinchbeck says. He’d been working in the University Of Portsmouth’s creative technologies department on a doctorate on the uses of story and nontechnological elements to enhance presence in virtual reality. “I was playing TimeSplitters one night, and I went, ‘Wait – this is mass-market virtual reality!’” he laughs. “‘Why am I doing VR when I could be doing games?’” He switched the subject of his PhD to how story should be considered a mechanic. “I talked to a few people and they were like, ‘This is just theory’.” He and a few others began modding Doom and Half-Life 2 in an effort to gather data. They made a version of Doom 3 with rubber bullets to see how stunning enemies instead of killing them changed the gameplay (“You’d end up with 100 zombies following you around a level”).

Dear Esther, The Chinese Room’s seminal ‘walking simulator’, was one such experiment. “It was just, if we got some of my favourite points of stuff like System Shock and even