In 2016, attorney Nick Pearce gave up his legal career to develop his popular Skyrim mod, The Forgotten City, into a standalone game. Today, the game has nearly 7,000 positive reviews on Steam alone.
What kind of game is this? The Forgotten City is a narrative adventure that sends players back in time to ancient Rome to unravel the mystery of the eponymous city. To do this, the player must talk to numerous characters and take advantage of the game’s time travel mechanics.
The Forgotten City was released in July 2021 for PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. However, the story of the game began 9 years earlier, with a completely different game. The Forgotten City was originally a mod for the RPG Skyrim and its creator, Nick Pearce, sacrificed a career as a lawyer to make it a standalone game.
The Forgotten City Launch Trailer
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In 2011, Nick Pearce was working as a lawyer for a large tech firm in Melbourne, Australia. In his free time, he wrote a novel and played video games, including Fallout: New Vegas. There he stumbled across someguy2000’s New Vegas Bounties mod, which left a deep impression:
“It was a revelation that a mod can be as good as or even better than official DLC – and a way to tell a top-notch story,” said Pearce.
The idea of developing your own mod was born, and when Bethesda released the Creation Kit for Skyrim in 2012, he taught himself to mod with tutorials.
A dwarven tunnel eventually became the ruins of an entire underground city. But Pearce didn’t settle for “another empty, derelict place”. He wanted to give players the opportunity to go back in time to interact with the former residents.
Then the rest just happened.
Colleague advised him to give up the “nonsense”.
For the next three years Pearce worked on The Forgotten City alongside his demanding profession as a lawyer. The result was a time-travel thriller with a 35,000-word, non-linear script, voice acting and background music.
Pearce released his mod in 2015 and was overwhelmed by its success: The Forgotten City was the first mod to receive an award from the Australian Writer’s Guild. The mod has also been downloaded more than 3 million times by 2021.
But after the site Kotaku called The Forgotten City “ambitious enough to be its own game” in a 2016 article, a new idea took hold in Pearce’s mind. He received encouragement from the Australian development team League of Geeks, who are behind the board game-like strategy game Armello, and of course from the fans of the mod.
However, it became increasingly difficult to combine his passion for development with his work. Pearce recalls being approached by a colleague after learning about his modding hobby:
He told me every waking minute of my life should be dedicated to my career. That was his way of telling me to stop this game dev nonsense, it was going nowhere.
Nick Pearce to Noclip via YouTube
Pearce made a bold move: he gave up his career as a lawyer to make The Forgotten City a full-fledged game. This was a big risk for him because, as he explained, it was very difficult to return to this job after a long break. Nobody would hire you anymore because the skills and experience you had gained were no longer useful.
So there was a lot at stake for Pearce.
From mod to standalone game
Pearce not only left his job, but also used his personal savings to hire a developer who had the experience he lacked himself. Then there was the artist John Eyre, who had worked on the dungeon crawler Hand of Fate 2.
Converting the mod into a standalone game presented some challenges. So the setting went from the fantasy world of Skyrim to the more historical setting of ancient Rome. This makes sense in the context of the plot, but it also meant that Pearce was pushing the limits of his personal historical knowledge.
He worked with dr. Cambridge University’s Philip Matyszak – a keen Guild Wars gamer – and Pompeii expert Dr. Sophie Hay together to make the “forgotten city” as authentic as possible – including the questionable hygiene of the public toilets.
The characters also had to be reworked to fit into the new setting of a Roman society. Pearce included the sense of justice and how the ancient Romans dealt with disabilities.
Each character was given their own backstory and motivation, which affects the choices the player must make. In addition, the original plot was greatly expanded and changed.
Existing possible endings were expanded, new ones were added. The script grew from 35,000 words to more than 80,000.
Pearce worked 80 hours a week for years
The animations presented another challenge. Even Bethesda, the AAA studio behind the Skyrim template, has been criticized for the facial animations of its NPCs. However, The Forgotten City focuses on the interaction with exactly these characters.
So going the route of other indie games and avoiding dialogue with NPCs wasn’t an option. It was all the more important to make them look good. But Pearce and his team didn’t have the budget for a professional animator.
Everything from lip movements to blink frequency to subtle head movements when speaking has been accounted for. A task that was “breathtakingly difficult”, according to Pearce: “I think it’s a wonder the game’s animations look as good as they do.”
To keep it all going, Pearce worked 80 hour weeks for 4 1/2 years. The consequences, should the project fail, would have been fatal, after all he had sacrificed his career for it.
However, he emphasizes that this way of working is neither healthy nor sustainable and he would not recommend it to anyone, including his employees. Pearce also took on these many hours to save his team from the infamous crunch.
Developer was prepared for disappointment
When The Forgotten City finally came out in 2021, Pearce braced himself for disappointment: “I thought maybe we’d get ’60s or ’70s [Bewertungen] and I have adjusted to be happy with it.”
Instead, The Forgotten City received numerous ratings ranging from 80 to 90 points. IGN gave the mystery game a 9 out of 10, and the Guardian gave it 4 out of 5 stars. On Steam, the title is rated “extremely positive” with 97% positive reviews.
The Forgotten City also received an Australian Game Developers Award for its story and was nominated for Best Indie Debut at the Game Awards.
So Pearce was rewarded for his courageous decision. However, since the success of The Forgotten City, his studio Modern Storyteller has quieted down a bit. In May 2022, Pearce wrote on Twitter that the next adventure was being worked on. However, he has not yet revealed what it will be about this time.
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