Firezide Chat with Mike Bithell

Retribution, yeah. The gritty reimagining.

I think that was the first game ever played where, like, your head moved with the camera. Which felt like a really big step at that point, even though it was, like, a double-A game, you know.

Yeah, it was. Well, that was Blitz. They had a pseudonym. They released that as Volatile because they wanted to step up to AAA. It was an amazing project, because they basically took all the people in the company who were eager to work in AAA and gave them space to actually try and do it. And I think there's a lot in that game that actually works. It holds up okay. I'm quite proud of that one.

I didn't do much on it. I've always tried to downplay my role in that because I basically came onto that in the last few months and did effectively a bunch of, like, they're called camera cases. So whenever you're in a game, not quite a cutscene because that's often a directed camera where you walk into a room and a camera pans through the environment and lands on you or something like that. I was doing those kind of camera setups, but I was only there for the last eight months, which gives it a feeling for me of, like, slight stolen valor. I think they'd been crunching for a year when I jumped onto that team, so I feel bad taking more credit than due for that game.

But that was a cool game. It was a weird game tonally because it was in the wake of Batman Begins, and Gears of War had just come out. So it was where Dead to Rights wanted to be, like, a dark, gritty noir take on the kind of an elevated comic book movie take on the franchise, but then it was—was it Namco or Capcom that game?

I can't remember.

I think it was Namco. I worked with both during that period. I can't remember which one it was, but whichever one it was, they wanted it to feel, you know, very Street Fighter, very big muscles, and very kind of that kind of aesthetic. So it was a weird mishmash of those two pulls that game had, so that was weird.

It was also my first time meeting American publishers, and I remember all the designers being taken into a room by an American suit who was like, "The level design needs to get better in this game. If you do a good job, all of you have jobs working on our next AAA game."

He was lying through his teeth, basically promising us everything and telling us our bosses were shit, and just going around the entire structure. And it was my first experience of the cutthroat world of AAA game development. It was a bit overwhelming. But it was a good process, and actually, genuinely, I think that game is better than history gives it credit for. I think it was ahead of its time on a few things.

Not to undermine your achievements, Mike, but Thomas Was Alone – you got a little bit lucky timing-wise, right? The timing that came out perfect for landing a big indie hit here.

Yeah, very, very, very lucky.

But what was it that made you want to strike out at that time? Because you couldn't have been that prescient, surely.

No, no, it was more… I've told this story a few times, and I think it changes every time a little bit. But basically, we would all play at lunch at Blitz. We'd all play games on our lunch breaks on our work computers, and because we were all skint, none of us had good PCs at home. So we were using the work PCs to keep up on PC games, right? So we'd all play LAN parties every lunchtime and whatever.

But for some reason, I have no idea why. It might be because I'd been playing the Orange Box. I downloaded Steam, I think, and I played World of Goo, and that was insane to me because I played it and I'd read that it was made by two people. I think that's probably one of those cases where it wasn't actually made by two people, but it was definitely presented that way.

And that just lit a light bulb in my head, like, you're allowed to make games on your own, and nowadays that seems like a very obvious thing. But we had kind of the whole story of, like, especially British game dev, had gone from, like, bedroom coders to, like, bigger, bigger, bigger, and the only direction of travel is teams keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger because that's how you make games better.

So me sitting there playing World of Goo and going, "Oh, this is actually – I'm allowed to make a game on my own," just blew my mind. It instantly amazed me. I went home. I used my crappy computer I had at the time to make, like, a Flash prototype of Thomas Was Alone. I was making a few things with different friends, but Thomas Was Alone kind of got very big on Kongregate back in the day, and that opened that door to me a little bit.

And then from there it was just like, okay, people like this. I can do this. And then things like Indie Game: The Movie came out, where it was kind of giving a little bit of a structure to how this could work. And yeah, and then I just kept plugging away with it.

But I was working on that for, like, three or four years, Thomas Was Alone. It's fucking rectangles, so it shouldn't have taken that long. But it was kind of a hobby thing, and by the time I was ready to release it, the indie scene had really coalesced.

I've said before, just to go back to Transformers for the second time, I wasn't Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, but I was like Rodimus Prime. I was kind of not quite there at the start, but I was there close enough to the start that the opportunities were there for me.

Those pioneers, the people in Indie Game: The Movie, they blew the doors open, and I think I was one of those people, and among many others, who ran in after that and just found that opportunity.

So yeah, amazingly lucky with the timing. I think as well, amazingly lucky that no one else had bothered to do it before, releasing a game that essentially is just prototype reference. What was a practical reality that I wasn't an artist became like it was an artistic choice, and it was interpreted as this kind of very deep and interesting intellectual celebration of the potential of video games, but actually was like, "Mike can't fucking draw."

And then the voice work as well, I think that helped.

Again – lucky, right? I didn't have any story in the game, and then a mate of mine, Daz – we were chatting about it because he's an artist, so he did the colour palette. He told me what colors to make the rectangles to make it feel harmonious and nice. And he's done concept art for me on lots of games since.

At that time I was calling it Friendship Rectangles or something like that. He's like, "No one's gonna buy. You gotta be pretentious. You gotta call it something dickish that sounds clever, like, you know, James Was Sad, or, like, Thomas Was Alone or some shit."

I was like, "That actually kind of worked." And then I put that name on the Flash prototype, mainly just to make it seem more highfalutin than it was. But then in the comments, people were like, "Oh, I love the second level where Thomas jumps on the box." And it's like, I didn't tell you that particular rectangle was Thomas. You just assumed he was Thomas because he was the first one you saw.

And I was like, "Okay, I can see how you could actually tell a story." And then it was going to be text, but then making the text animate was taking too long, so I was like, "I'll get a voice actor," and I think I tweeted, like, "I need a voice actor who sounds a bit like Danny Wallace," and then he replied saying, "Well, I sound quite a bit like Danny Wallace. Can I do it?"

It's like you say, genuinely – and it doesn't diminish it at all – I got very lucky in a sequence of events. I took advantage of those opportunities when they came up, but I was very lucky. I was just in the right place at the right time, with the right attitude, I suppose, to take advantage of it.

You're doing a mix now. Like you said, you do your own projects, your own IP, and then you're doing licensed stuff as well. How do you choose what to do at any time, and how do you decide that you want to do licensed stuff? Like, is it just something that you find cool that you wanted to work on anyway, or do you have a concept first?

It's kind of pragmatic, and it's a bit different every time. Like, it's about what the opportunities are that are around. It's about what I'm interested in. Every game has a different origin story.

John Wick was, I had the idea of doing a strategy combat game, and Nick Tringali, who I co-designed John Wick with, had specific ideas of how they thought that should work as well. We were talking around this combat thing for a while, and then John Wick just landed because a friend of mine that was a scout was approached by a publisher who was like, "We need to find a dev who could do a John Wick game," and he said, "Well, my mate Mike is pretty good, and he's been making this weird prototype for a while. Do you want to?"

And we literally took the prototype we were already making of the combat game, and we just changed the image of the character up in the health bar area to just be a picture of Keanu Reeves, and we sent that to them, and they're like, "Yeah, that sounds great." Then obviously that evolves from there and it goes in different directions.

But with Tron, it was just that Disney – we've been chatting back and forth. I've had a good relationship with Disney for a while, and the guys at Pixar, and I had conversations, but we'd never really found the right thing to do.

And then, yeah, Tron was something they were thinking about because they were doing the movie that came out last year. They were playing with Tron and they wanted to do things with Tron. It felt like a, "Oh, you're the guy who makes the glowy games. Yeah, that'll work," and we kind of put that together.

But yeah, no, generally, generally for me it comes from I have an interesting idea for a game or a story or a world, an experience, basically. With Vampirium, I really think vampire action is interesting and cool, and I want to play with that. And then things just evolve from there, and you build stuff up.

I was just chatting to someone actually this morning, a dev whose game's about to come out. I was like, "How many ideas have you got for the next game?" And he said, "30." And he wasn't being sarcastic. He literally has a list of 30 games.

And you do. You just have these ideas in the back of your head. I've got five or six games in the back of my head that I'm umming and ahhing. There's, like, one person at Develop I want to talk to next week because their last game had some ideas in it that's similar to one of the things I want to do. I want to grill them on how that worked.

You're always thinking about other games in the back of your head, and then what happens usually is you find yourself finishing a project and having a certain amount of money in the bank account, a certain number of people who want to work with you or not, and a certain amount of opportunities to follow, and then one of those games fits into the shape of whatever your situation is, and it's not always the one you think it's going to be.

You’ve talked before about how Subsurface Circular came about. What was the situation that led to making it?

We were kind of stuck. We had pitched a game years ago that had a really good prototype — a game I can never fucking talk about — and we shipped it around. We had a publisher who was on board and we were going to make this game, and then that fell through because of some politics at the publisher.

So we were just stuck. Basically, we had an artist, a couple of artists, a programmer and me.

Subsurface Circular was literally me sitting down with a Google Doc and going, "Okay, I have this number of people. I have this many months' worth of money. What can we actually make that might sell?"

That game was the product of that, basically. And then that gave us enough room to breathe that we could start pitching around. That's when John Wick came in and landed.

But the John Wick contract negotiations took months, so I made Quarantine Circular because we had the team just sitting there. We were like, "Well, we should do something while we're waiting for lawyers to lawyer."

It must be quite a shock, going into the industry wanting to be a creative person and then having to become a business person as well.

It is. I'm lucky. I have a really good business partner, Alexander Sliwinski, who I joined up with in around 2014 or 2015. He's a genius at the business side. He understands business as intuitively as I understand computers, and that kind of works well for us.

So I can't take too much of the credit for that because he's done an amazing job building all that up over time.

But yeah, obviously there's being a manager, helping people, doing six-month check-ins with your teammates, working out interpersonal relationship issues that people have with each other. There's a lot of other bits and pieces that come in.

What's nice about games, though, which I think is probably better than a lot of jobs, is that you have these very specific long-term goals. It's like, "We are taking three years to make this thing," and that keeps it all on point. It always feels like you're moving towards a goal.

Whereas I imagine if I had a job where the objective was, "I need to get a video up and survive," that's not a long-term rolling thing. That can be quite stressful.

I like that we always have a north star to be rowing towards. That makes sense for us.

On the flip side, though, when you're doing a long project, surely there comes a point where you just don't want to do it anymore?

Yeah, that's true. Most games we've worked on, I've been sick of them before we shipped them.

I don't think I've played any of the games I've put out until three or four years after they came out. It's usually quite nice because by then you've forgotten all of the stress and you've forgotten what you did.

I had to play Volume recently to capture something, and I laughed at one of the jokes. I was like, "Oh, that's fun. I've forgotten that joke and I quite like it. Daddy delivered it well."

So there is that little bit of postpartum depression. You put something out and you do need to step away from it for a little while before you go back to it.

You mentioned the politics that killed that earlier project. How do you deal with losing something you're excited about?

I'll be honest. Part of it is — and this sounds like a brag, and I guess it is — I always have three more ideas I really like.

You're trying not to get too attached to them, though?

No, I'm really quite good at not getting attached.

I think part of that goes back to working for other people. I worked at Blitz. They had an internal pitch team, so you had all these little 20-person teams and you had to keep rolling projects onto those teams.

They had a small team of about six people who would put pitches together, take them to a publisher and try to get the money. I'd work on a pitch there. There were three designers on the team and we'd each get maybe two weeks to put together a pitch document for a game, and then we'd send it off.

Of all the games I did in that job, I think two of them came to life.

One was a SpongeBob surfing game for the Wii, which me and Daz actually did the pitch document for in a day. That ended up creating jobs for a team of people for a couple of years. We're quite proud of that.

Then there was a Michael Phelps Kinect game.

I got into work that morning and one of the directors of the company was like, "Right, Mike, me and you are locking ourselves in a room and trying to work out what the fuck is fun about swimming."

The first thing you realise when you sit down trying to design a swimming game is that there is no strategy or tactics to swimming. It's just about being genetically weird and training your muscles up over time until you can swim really fast.

So we had to invent this entire strategic layer to swimming to justify a video game.

It was a fun day. That ended up existing, which was a weird game to work on. But again, those were two days that created another year of my time.

None of those games will ever see the light of day, and that's what the job was back then.

I think that does inoculate you. Everything I've worked on that's never come to actual release was a stepping stone. I learned something.

There is that one game I specifically reference where I still think it was a cool game. But ideas from that game have found their way into three or four other things I've done since.

So even if you can't use the game itself, the mechanics and ideas can live on?

Oh yeah. To be fair, the game itself was a weird situation. We had a game with its own story and its own world, and we were making that. Then part of the politics with the publisher was that they wanted to put an IP on it. They had an IP and wanted to make it in that universe.

Technically, I guess I could go and make that game still. There's nothing stopping me from doing that. But I've moved on. I've got different things I'm making now.

I don't know. I'm a bit more workmanlike. I'm not really — I don't think of myself as an artist or an auteur. I'm a get-it-done kind of guy.

I just make the thing I'm making, so I don't feel like it's a great loss.

Tell us about your new game. It sounds a bit far-fetched. It's about blood-sucking rulers in the UK.

As I said on Bluesky, any political allusions people make about my game about an awful aristocratic class who drain the blood of the people of society have no basis whatsoever.

It was — yeah, it's cool. It's a vampire assassin sim game, but it's played largely through UI.

If you think of Hitman or Deus Ex or an immersive sim, and then you transplant that gameplay to an almost board-game or tabletop-RPG kind of interface.

You can do all the things you could do. You can find interesting interactions and make cool shit happen, but it's much more achievable to produce on an indie budget.

That's going along really well. We've been in playtesting for a while, and people are finding cool Hitman-style ways of taking out the bad guys in the level, working out how to do things completely stealthily, or going on massacres as a vampire.

It's fun.

Vampires are really interesting mechanically because they're a really fun balance of mega-strength and absolute weakness. You can do a lot of game-design stuff with that.

"This guy is a bullet sponge unless you've got a silver sword, or some garlic, or a steak."

It's fun to play with those kinds of states and interactions.

I put in fire propagation the other day. That was fun. It's all gone a bit far, probably too far. You find a lighter and you can really mess up the whole level.

It must be interesting to work out how to explain the game to people.

Yeah. It's one where we have to be very smart about how we tell the audience about it and explain it.

But I think it's going well. We announced it yesterday and people are getting it. There was a trailer and a nine-minute gameplay video of me playing it, and I think the combination of those is working really nicely.

People understand where we're coming from.

What do you think it is about the industry where everything seems to come together at once? Titanfall 2 had that level where you change through time at the same time as Dishonored had one, and now you've got this vampire game coming out while other vampire games are coming out.

I think convergent evolution is the main thing.

You know what convergent evolution is? A dolphin's basically a shark, right? But they got there through completely different evolutionary tracks because the environment's the same. They're both underwater, they eat the same thing.

There's a natural form for that animal to take when it's living in that place in the ecosystem.

I think it's similar here.

One big theory I have is that vampire games are popular right now because vampire fiction was really popular when we were teenagers, 25 or 30 years ago, and a bunch of those people are now in positions to make choices about what games should be made.

Look at the '90s: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys. It was one of those weird moments where vampires were everywhere.

When I was first building this stuff, I knew it was going to be a game set in 1997. I put together a playlist, and one of the weirdest things I found was that when I looked up what topped the charts in 1996 and 1997, there were so many songs about immortality and vampires, or lyrics about eternal life.

I was like, "Oh. Everyone was just really into vampires at this moment."

So that's my theory. It's cyclical.

And then you've got popular fiction. The new Interview with the Vampire show is amazing. That's probably getting a lot of people thinking about vampires.

Zombies have held their ground for about 15 years. Maybe it's time for vampires to come back.

Yeah. It was about time we got back to vampires.

Or werewolves. Werewolves might be on their way back. There's a couple of werewolf movies coming up.

It's a weird one.

What specifically made you want to make a vampire game?

For me, the interesting thing was that vampires being secretive doesn't make sense to me in the modern world.

Bad guys aren't hiding anymore, right? They're not trying to sneak around.

I don't believe in conspiracies anymore because they're just doing everything out in the open and doing whatever they want to do.

So the idea of doing a vampire story that gets rid of one of the big standard things of vampire stories — that they're secretive, that they're hidden — was interesting.

What if there was just a world run by vampires?

What would that be?

That was an interesting angle for me, story-wise, to figure out. That's a different vampire world from what you often see.

Who do you admire most in the industry?

My genuine, proper hero is Tim Schafer. At every turn, that guy does not let me down.

He's who I want to be when I grow up. I love the way he treats his people. I love the way he's maintained a creative voice.

Obviously, the news from this week — they're having a tough time over there. But he's consistently someone I admire and kind of want the career of.

I want to be pottering around making my games for as long as he has.

He's also a very sweet man. He's been very kind to me over the years as well, so I like him very much.

What's the most important skill for success in the industry?

Being born in 1985.

I think it actually plays into the same thing. I think genuinely being decent is a big thing.

I've been around a while now, so you do see people's careers play out. The people who last and manage to have good careers are generally — this isn't always true — people who are respectful of other people and kind and thoughtful of others.

Everyone knows if you're a dickhead as well, because everyone talks. It gets around fast.

Don't get me wrong, there are dickheads who've hung in there. But I imagine they have a harder time of it than the people who are decent.

In terms of having staying power, that seems to me to be the shared quality of everyone I can think of who's still here, who was here before.

If you could ban one thing from the industry, what would you ban?

Gatekeeping in all its forms.

I think that's an easy one.

There's definitely a lot of insecurity in the industry. There's insecurity among players with console wars and all that nonsense, but I'd say we're a bunch of nerds who grew up.

There's a lot of trauma being expressed through decision-making by adults.

There's a lot of people who want to assert themselves by putting down other people, and I think that's something we could all do better at.

Do you think that comes from everyone being picked last on the sports team?

Yeah, 100%.

It's a pattern of people who carry a lot of frustration from not being in charge when they were kids, who suddenly get power. Bad things can happen because there's a lot of pent-up bullshit there.

I'm not saying it's just the games industry that has this problem, but there's a problem with people getting power who really shouldn't ever have power.

And that's the dark side of what you were saying about being kind and respectful.

Exactly.

If you can fake that, you can get phenomenally far in the games industry.

The number of people who have public personas of being lovely human beings who are actually horrible — if you can balance that trade-off, you can do very well in this industry.

They get found out eventually, though?

Generally, yeah. It does come around eventually.

What's the most underrated role in game development?

I don't know if this is maybe too showy, but marketing.

I think genuinely the lack of respect you sometimes see towards marketing from the audience, but also from people who should know better in games, is strange.

Good marketers are excellent designers and writers and artists as well.

I've always tried to bring marketing people into conversations as early as possible, not because I want to brown-nose them, but because genuinely their job is to be paying attention to the audience and thinking about that.

Don't get me wrong, there are idiots in all jobs. But generally, marketers deserve more credit for often being the voice of the player in the room.

I think if you work with really great ones, you can get a lot out of that working relationship.

You've created a successful indie studio, but you've also been around long enough to know that you did it at the right time. There's a lot of sentiment at the moment that people who've been laid off can just go indie. It's not that easy.

It is tough. It is really tough.

I've got lots of friends and acquaintances who've been laid off, and the ones who are doing best months or years later have basically gone and found a fulfilling job — but not necessarily a games industry job.

I think trying to chase the intrinsic thing of "What do I want from my job?" rather than the extrinsic thing of "I want to be working on only awesome AAA games" is a better career choice.

Think about what you love doing and where there is a place where you can be paid to do that.

When I think about people in my life, a lot of them aren't in games anymore. That sucks for games — games are worse off because those people left — but in many cases they're better off because they're doing something they find more rewarding, frankly better paid, or just better for them.

So I think following what you want is important.

A lot of people have come to this conclusion, and this isn't advice because I think it's very obvious: this industry isn't going to care for you.

This industry will discard you when it doesn't need you.

A lot of us come in as wide-eyed game nerds who are like, "Sorry, you're going to pay me to have an Xbox controller in my hand? That's insane."

Then people go through these experiences and realise, "Well, we're kind of taken advantage of when we're younger, and then often we're cast aside when we're older."

Reclaiming that relationship to work and going, "I want what's right for me," I think is good.

The institutional knowledge loss from all these layoffs is crazy, though.

Oh, we are, as an industry, going to make worse games more expensively as a result of these people leaving.

It's difficult to understand, even from a cold, pragmatic CEO perspective.

That's because you're thinking foolishly and ignorantly about a company as a thing that makes stuff and sells stuff, not stock.

It's actually really interesting if you look outside the history of games.

There's this really interesting thing where layoffs and downsizing in general have a massive mythology in the stock market that they're good — that they'll increase productivity, that it's "trimming the fat", creating efficiencies.

In the short term, obviously, the market responds because you're paying fewer people, so your profits have gone up.

But time and again, it has been proven statistically that those companies do worse over the long tail.

I would have assumed it's obvious. They can't make as much stuff. They can't make good stuff.

It's a very good short-term win.

And the answer to why a CEO would do it is because a CEO needs to make the number go up for the next quarterly statement. That's ultimately what they're incentivised to do.

How the fuck is a company like id Software going to make the next Doom with 70 people?

They won't.

I'm sure there are lots of very talented people who will make cool stuff, but yes, they'll have a harder time of it.

That's the disconnect that exists.

You and I look at it and go, "Well, I want to make more games with my company, then I'll sell those games and kids will like those games and I'll make money."

But that's not the game that's being played.

It's foolish and short-sighted, but it will go exactly the way you're thinking it will go.

There'll be a resignation from someone high up, they'll get a golden parachute, and that will be the circle of life continuing.

It sucks.

What's the best bit of life advice you've heard?

Definitely being told not to take myself so seriously.

That's one I often go back to.

But genuinely, the one that has probably had the best, most constant, active positive effect on me, my life, my relationships and my work is:

Don't take anything your brain says after 9pm seriously.

It's such a safe, glib little statement that's totally like a fucking Facebook post.

But time and again, if I'm pissed off about something, or I want to call someone and yell at them, or I'm not happy about something, or I want to post something controversial on social media — sleep.

I look at my watch. If it's after 9pm, I don't do it.

That has always worked out well for me.

So in terms of constantly keeping me in a good place, that's probably the one.

What do you dislike most about yourself?

Perversely, I think it's probably the same thing that's really helped me career-wise.

I'm a massive show-off.

I don't like that I'm drawn to trying to impress people and show off.

But I've monetised that incredibly successfully and built a career off it, so it's one of those things where it's a double-edged sword.

On a personal level, I hate it.

I'll catch myself name-dropping, like, "Oh, I was out with so-and-so."

When I mentioned that Tim Schafer was a hero earlier, I didn't need to mention that he'd been nice to me in person. But I did, didn't I?

I let you know that I've met Tim Schafer on more than one occasion.

I had to include that.

At least you're self-aware.

Yeah, but I don't like it about myself.

When I'm after 9pm and getting stressed out, those are the moments I'm remembering: "Did I need to mention those three people I've hung out with in that conversation quite as many times as I did?"

Or just showing off about my work.

I've taken it to the extreme now where I'm very deliberately not talking to people about my work outside of work often.

I'd much rather have a conversation with them about their kids, you know what I mean?

Do you have a party trick?

I do origami.

What's the most impressive thing you can make?

Do you know what I've found is genuinely the most impressive? The most obvious one: just doing a simple little crane.

The thing everyone learns to do when they're a kid.

I'll just be sitting at a conference — I'm very fidgety — and I'll be folding bits of, usually, marketing for AMD or something. I'll tear something off and make a little crane.

People are always impressed by that.

It's not a very interesting party trick, but if my hands are idle and there's paper nearby, I'll make a bit of origami.

You can't say Transformers for this one. What books and movies inspired you the most?

I don't know. I'm really — I think genuinely my media consumption is pretty mainstream, pretty boringly mainstream.

I wish I was better read than I am. I wish I was watching more highfalutin movies than I do.

I'm a big musical theatre nerd, so I'm very into musicals. One day I will make a musical.

Musicals and theatre in general, probably, because that's a hangover of being a theatre kid.

I think a lot of my stuff actually does play like a play, or reads like a script, like a stage script. So I think there's a little bit of that.

But honestly, I'm pretty basic in terms of my media consumption.

When I made The Solitaire Conspiracy, I did that right at the start of the pandemic, and it was literally just because I thought, "I just want to make a comfort game."

What's my comfort food? Marvel movies and Mission: Impossible.

Cool. I'll make something that's a bit Marvel, Mission: Impossible. That's fine.

So yeah, I'm a bit basic.

There's nothing wrong with being basic. I love vanilla milkshakes.

I'm a vanilla milkshake guy as well.

There's a reason vanilla's popular. It's only a default because we, as a society, decided to make it the default because it's really fucking good."

What's the best game you've played recently?

I really liked The Drifter. That's one I've been recommending to everyone.

It's a point-and-click game, like a classic LucasArts-style pixel-art point-and-click. It's really good.

It has a really good sense of humour, but also a really good sense of tone. It very specifically nails an aesthetic in a way I liked.

I was also mega-late to the party, but I played Cyberpunk 2077 recently with all of the updates.

I sat it out when it came out. Obviously I was hyped for it like everyone else, but it hit that brick wall with all the bugs and issues people had.

I was like, "No. We've been here before. I remember The Witcher. I'm going to wait."

Then I only played Cyberpunk about six months ago.

It just feels like playing a game from the future.

I genuinely feel like it's one of the best games ever made.

It kind of ruined all other games for me for a couple of months because it just nails so much.

Did you play the expansion?

Yeah, with Idris Elba.

It slots so nicely into the game as well.

For anyone who's paying attention to this who's not played Cyberpunk because of the stuff at launch: it has aged like a fine wine.

Did you play it on PC with all the sexy ray tracing?

No. I'm a console boy usually.

When I'm playing a game like that, I want to sit on my sofa.

Although I'm getting very into the Steam Deck, so assuming PC pricing goes in a better direction at some point, I'll probably end up playing my next few games on a TV PC.

If you could travel back to an important point in history, where would you go?

I was a dinosaur kid, so I'm going to have to go look at some dinosaurs.

It would be nice to know what colour they were. 

And whether they had feathers.

They definitely had feathers.

And, to be fair, a lot of recent palaeontology means we know what colours they were as well because they've found skin pigmentation.

So some species, we do know the colour.

My little joke was scientifically inaccurate, and I never like to make a scientifically inaccurate joke if I can help it.

But yeah, I'd probably just go all the way back to the dinosaurs and see what's up.

It would be cool because even just seeing them would help you imagine what comes after we're extinct. There's going to be some fucking weird thing living on Earth when we're gone.

Wondering what the hell a spoon is.

Yeah. Or Thomas Was Alone.

Thomas Was Alone is definitely surviving an extinction event.

If you could go back and tell your younger self something, what would you say?

I think I would go back to that nerdy, picked-on kid and just be like: "It's all going to be fine."

The exact set of interests that are making you get picked on right now are going to give you a very nice life and a very nice, happy life.

When was the last time you cried?

Definitely during a movie.

It might have been Superman. I wept the entirety of Superman.

I was sat in the cinema with my wife holding my arm because I think that's the most beautiful mainstream movie I've seen in a long, long time.

Is it the music?

I think for me it's that I'm not a cynic. I make a lot of cynical games, but I'm not a cynic. I'm very much someone who believes in humanity. I believe we're fundamentally good.

I think it was just watching a film aimed at a mainstream audience that said, "You know what? People are great, and we can be great."

The intensity of that, the performance of the guy playing Superman, the fact that basically goodness is a strong choice — it's a strong, masculine choice, as well as just being a good way to be.

Seeing that validated on screen, I found it really moving.

I'm just so used to hard-boiled, grizzled guys where the world's going to shit and we've got to lower ourselves to their level.

Whereas Superman just aggressively commits to, "No. Just be good to each other."

I found that very moving.

Optimism feels quite rare these days.

It does. I think over the past 10 years we've all become a bit nihilist.

There's lots of good reasons for it, to be fair. How do you want to be remembered when you die?

I've never really thought about it.

I'd like to be remembered well by the people who knew me, and not at all by anyone else.

I'd like to be remembered in fun stories by people who are smiling.

I have no interest in fame or visibility or being remembered as a figurehead of the games industry. None of that is interesting to me.

As long as people who met me say, "He was a nice guy," I'm happy.

What would you have on your gravestone?

I've always joked that I like The Royal Tenenbaums thing of, "Died freeing 20 children from a burning orphanage."

I think that would be good.

The one I've genuinely told my wife is: "Here lies Mike Bithell, and he's not happy about it."

That one's probably what she'll betray my wishes over if the time ever comes.

The best gag would be a gravestone that's just a blank rectangle.

That's perfect.

But then the future species that evolves after us won't know what Thomas Was Alone was because they won't have the historic site.

They'll work it out. They might just worship the obelisk, you know. 2001-style.

Yeah. I've changed my previous few answers.

I want my legacy to be someone misunderstanding and celebrating a blank rectangle that was meant to commemorate me, but then turning it into an entire religious system based on this monolith.