You know, people make guns and people make toasters. They think: ‘oh, China, military, sinister!’ But it’s actually just like, it’s for military contractors or whatever, that’s just a part of life. I think a lot of people misinterpret that.
The funny thing about that is that, in Shenzhen I/O, it’s not really sinister. It’s a good thing to have as part of a huge repertoire of things that you’re building in a game like this. And I think military stuff and conflict is very prominent in videogames and so making puzzles that talk about military stuff… it captures people’s attention. And like, people love those puzzles – not mechanically but thematically. And there’s one where you get a giant whale and you have to chop it up into whale meat and then package that. There’s these two food processing puzzles where you round up these little critters and, like, freeze pack ‘em. People love, like, food processing puzzles in Infinifactory. Like, there’s certain kinds of puzzles that are just fun. But if you do it a little bit, they’re fun. The dumb answer is that I think thematically that stuff, if you do it too hard it’s not very subtle and it kinda weakens your… it kind of cheapens the game. Why is that a recurring theme in your games?īarth: There’s two answers. In Shenzhen I/O it’s sometimes implied that you’re making stuff with military applications… and in Opus Magnum you end up making weapons as well. And sometimes your character finds themselves doing something unsavoury. RPS: In a few of your games there’s often a story embedded in it to drive what the people are doing or what you’re doing. RPS: It’s that weird thing where people land on a planet in No Man’s Sky and they share it thinking ‘this is amazing, it’s definitely cool’ but really it’s not that different from anybody else’s, it’s just that you’re there.
So, from my perspective, most of what they’re doing is actually kinda boring but they’re just playing the game as intended, you know? But I think that’s great … and I love that people feel attached to their solutions, even when they’re just kind of playing the game normally… I think in the past people only tended to show off when they did crazy things, but we’ve made it so easy and so accessible that it becomes this thing that everybody can show what they’re working on. Even people who aren’t, like, fucking breaking the rules or pushing the limits are actually still immensely proud because they really have made something that is their solution to the puzzle. And this is the thing that I think is so funny, is that there’s a lot of people – like the subreddit is almost entirely just GIFs – and there’s lots of people posting GIFs and, like, their solutions aren’t that special but they’re unique and they’re theirs, right? And so I think that speaks to the power of these open-ended puzzles. What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen made by a player so far?īarth: The funny thing is that a lot of the GIFs are people playing the game in a very conventional way. You must be inundated with GIFs of people’s machines. It’s not a mystery, it just wasn’t a good idea. So there’s a reason we didn’t pursue it further. RPS: What was the thing you were working on, or don’t you want to say?īarth: If I describe it people will be like: ‘oh that sounds like the best idea!’ But no, it was lousy and it sucked. And when our little research project we were doing didn’t pan out, we needed to make something, and that’s when your idea bank comes in handy. it’s just been sitting in our idea bank since 2013. So this was back in 2013, but we actually ended up not making that project and we made Infinifactory instead. Because it was fun, the alchemy stuff in Codex was fun and it has the same mechanics as SpaceChem but without the boring chemistry aesthetic. we could make another game about alchemy. And so I think that was sort of the thing that led us to believe: ‘hey, maybe we could just do another game like SpaceChem and it’d be okay, like maybe it’s okay to make these weird programming games’. And it was just like: ‘oh fuck, we need to make a game’… SpaceChem did pretty good and Ironclad Tactics we just assumed would do way better, right? And when it came out it didn’t do way better. Zach Barth: I liked the idea, and we had been working on another project for a couple of months and it wasn’t working. RPS: Opus Magnum is based on an earlier game you made called Codex of Alchemical Engineering. I spoke to him about the game's machines, his short stint at Valve, and the reasons he sold his own company. The studio behind it, Zachtronics, is headed by Zach Barth. The alchemical puzzler Opus Magnum has a few of us at House RPS scratching our heads and shouting "a-ha!" before giddily sharing our twisted contraptions in GIF form.
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