Today we have the pleasure to publish this extensive interview with Tale of Tales, creators of The Path and the Graveyard, among other things. When discussing them, many would argue that the word (video) game in its “traditional” sense does not apply to them. However, one can not help the feeling that this would not bother much the duo from Gent (Belgium) consistently trying to broaden the boundaries of the videogame medium.

: How can we present you to our readers? Is “Independent Belgian game developer team” a correct “term”? Please introduce the team.

ToT: We call ourselves an “independent games studio”, or “independent games development studio”. Or sometimes also, cheekily, an “artistic duo posing as an independent game developer”. Tale of Tales is two people most of the time: Auriea Harvey, data director, and Michael Samyn, process director. We have been collaborating for 10 years now, first on web projects and now on games. We come up with the ideas, design the games and do most of the work. Laura Raines Smith is the unofficial third member of Tale of Tales. She has animated all of the characters in all of our projects so far. And then there’s Gerry De Mol, who made the music for The Endless Forest and The Graveyard, Jarboe, who made the music for The Path and Kris Force who created the sound effects for The Graveyard and collaborated on the music for The Path. Additionally, we sometimes hire other freelancers for specific tasks. Like Marian Bantjes for the calligraphy and Hans Zantman for technical work in The Path.

: By the way, where did your name come from?

ToT: The name comes from the title of a late medieval Italian collection of fairy tales that we were studying when working on our first project, 8, which was based on the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty (more information here). Later we found out that “Tale of Tales” was also the name of an animation film by Yuri Norstein. And oddly enough, the style of that film is strangely similar to our own: working with a technical medium in a sort of clumsy, artistic, very manual way. Of course, after a while a name starts meaning its own thing. The name Tale of Tales illustrates our interest in multiple layers of storytelling. When we’re telling a story, we also like to tell a story about that story. A story about its history and its multiple interpretations, a story about your relationship, as a player with this story. We think this potential to work in multiple layers is one of the strong qualities of the interactive medium.

: Tell us about how you got the idea of doing what you are doing now.

ToT: We did not grow up playing videogames and thinking “I want to become a game developer when I grow up”, like so many of our peers. We played some games, for sure, and they influenced us, yes, but for some reason we never seriously considered making them ourselves. And when we started it was more out of necessity than anything else. In the second half of the 1990s, we were incredibly comfortable working on the World Wide Web. It was an open zone where everyone could be creative and where you could have direct contact with your audience. It was also a computer-based medium, which meant that you could play with interactive and generative elements. It felt quite ideal to us at the time, and we had high hopes for a kind of “cyberspace” utopia. But all of that fell apart when Web 2.0 happened. Suddenly the web was all about old media again. About sharing pictures and movies. About chatting. The idea of an immersive virtual space had disappeared from the web. But we felt we weren’t done exploring this idea and when we were looking around for a way to continue working, our eye fell on videogames. Lucky for us, at that time the first artist-accessible interfaces to create videogame content were starting to appear. So we jumped on the medium, did a lot of research in the industry, and started with our first project. Only to find out after two years of hard work that we wouldn’t be able to make it because it was too original, didn’t fit into any exisiting genres, and therefore was too risky for anyone to invest in it. That’s when we started being independent developers, without really realizing it at first. Now we continue to make smaller games. We don’t want to depend on publishers to be able to make our work. Or even on other people. We design our projects so that they are small enough to produce with the two of us. And if there is some more budget, we hire more people. But we are not interested in running a big game development studio. Because we wouldn’t be able to concentrate on our work anymore. And there’s a lot of work to be done!

: We have to admit that when we first heard and read about the Graveyard we were skeptical. The idea of an old lady wandering around in a cemetery isn’t precisely appealing to a community which is largely more into kill things, escape from things, fit or match things, or drive, fly, navigate things and so on. How did you come up with the concept?

ToT: We started to make games because there were certain aspects in them that we really enjoyed: roaming around in virtual worlds, encountering fascinating characters, exploring strange landscapes, etc. We wanted to make games that focus on those aspects. We don’t care much about gathering points or shooting enemies. In fact, we often wish for a “skip game” button, because we want to get on with the exploration and the story and don’t like to be stopped by some puzzle that takes us out of the experience. We also believe that many people share our feeling about this and that this is one of the main reasons why videogames do not expand their audience to the level of cinema, literature or music. So, in a sense, we make games for people who don’t play games (yet). Games that are concerned with other things than driving and shooting or challenges and rewards. We want our games to be about something. In fact, we design our games around their themes and content. While most videogames design stories around a gameplay mechanic. With the Graveyard, we wanted to create a sort of tool that allows us to contemplate old age, to get a sense of what it feels like to be old. To think about death when you are surrounded by life. There’s an ironic dimension to the game as well, because it deals with a subject -death- that is omnipresent in videogames. Game characters die all the time. and many of them respawn too. And all of them die in spectacular circumstances. And nobody sheds a tear. So, with the Graveyard, we wanted to talk about death as it occurs most often in real life: a non-spectacular dimming of the light at the end of life. We want our games to be about you, the player. About your life. They are not just disconnected escapist fantasies. They say something about life on this planet, and hopefully they help you enjoy it more.

: the Graveyard is distributed through Valve’s Steam.  Did Valve contact you or vice-versa?

ToT: When the Graveyard was finished, we asked Valve if they wanted to distribute it. But they turned us down. Later, when our bigger, more commercial game The Path was done they asked if they could distribute the Graveyard as well (which had then been nominated for the Independent Games Festival). We thought it was just perfectly funny to have our little “anti-game” presented on this very traditionally hardcore platform. But even among the Steam audience, the Graveyard has found its fans. It is a heart-warming to realize that the gaming audience is in fact composed of many different people with many different tastes. Not all gamers need to drive and shoot all of the time. We’re very happy that Valve has the courage to distribute our games. And we hope that will encourage other game developers to create more artistic games that offer different kinds of experiences.

: Comments on the Graveyard range from “Marvelous” to “piece of junk”. How do you feel about them and people’s perception of your work?

ToT: Well, the fact that there is such a wide range of comments is very flattering to us. To us it means that we’re on the right track. If we were doing something that everyone loved, we would be concerned. We would think we didn’t go far enough, the explore the medium deeply enough, weren’t original enough. It’s sometimes difficult to hear such negative criticism. And we’re often inclined to talk with such people and try to explain why we made the game this way and sort of beg for a little respect. But that’s futile. Also, because on the internet there’s many reasons for talking about hating something… So we embrace the controversy rather than try to convince everyone.

After all, wouldn’t the games industry be terribly boring without people like us?

: Recently The Path has been ported to Mac Os X. In a related press release you said “We think Mac users are really the natural audience for our work….”. Why do you think so?

ToT: Because most of our friends use Mac computers and they are always interested in our work and were never able to play it because it was made with PC-exclusive technology. It felt like another case of “making games for non-gamers”, i.e. making things that would appeal to the typical Mac user but releasing them for PC only. Of course this is a gross generalization and there’s many many PC users that appreciate our work as well. It’s just a proportion thing. Show our work to 10 PC users and one of them will like it, show it to 10 Mac users and 3 will like it. But of course for every 10 Mac users, there’s 100 PC users, so in the end 10 PC users like our work versus 3 Mac users. Anyway, that quote is from a press release announcing the Mac version of The Path. We were obviously exaggerating a bit to make a point. But you know, many gamers buy a PC for their hobby. And that hobby is playing violent shooter games. We don’t make those.

: Are you thinking in other platforms too?

ToT: Yes. We’d love to develop a game for Wii or Playstation. But those platforms are often not accessible to artistic developers like ourselves. Because, as opposed to the corporations that own the consoles, our main interest is not making money. Our interest is in advancing the medium as an artform and broadening its appeal. And capitalist corporations tend to be too shortsighted for that. But we keep trying. Maybe one day, we will get a chance.

: What do you think about the iPhone phenomenon? With more than 35.000 applications, 2 billion downloads in 9 months, 80% being games….do you want to get into it? Can you imagine the Graveyard on the iPhone?

ToT: Never thought about the Graveyard on iPhone. Seems weird. Might work. We don’t use mobile phones ourselves, so we are not fully aware of the artistic potential of the iPhone as a game platform. But we do have plans to make a small experimental iPhone game next year. As a business opportunity, we have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand , it does seem to be an open platform with easy access and lots of users. On the other hand, its enormous success also makes it very difficult to stand out. But we must admit that we were disappointed when the one game we would have really liked to see on the iPhone, was rejected by Apple (it was also designed by a Japanese designer, called Yoot Saito).

: In comparison your games/works are short, more like poems than novels. Do you plan to create long, epic story-driven games too?

ToT: No. Our first game, 8, got close to that. And we were never able to finish it. Because at the time we couldn’t find funding for its production. But in retrospect, we’re actually happy that we didn’t. We would have had a team of 30 people on the project and would have had to become managers more than designers. And that would have probably been detrimental to the quality of the game. Since then, we have decided that we want to remain a small company. We do not wish to grow. Instead we want to focus on our work. We also see a lot of what we do as research. This can be done on a small scale. And other people can then later, perhaps, do something with it on a larger scale. So we’re quite comfortable with the idea of making small games. It makes us happy. We also feel that real-time 3D is a poetic technology, more than a prosaic one. When you try to hard to tell a story with this medium, you are almost forced to deny some very nice features like non-linearity and emergence. While those are excellent tools for the poet!

: What are the advantages and disadvantages of small team development in your experience?

ToT: One of the greatest advantages for us is that we don’t need to work in an office. We can just sit at our desks in our pyjamas and work all day long. We work a lot more and a lot more intensily than anyone in any office probably does. Between the two of us at home, we probably do the the work of 8 people in an office. So that’s the biggest advantage for us: to be able to work harder. Another advantage is that we can be dictators of our design without making enemies. In larger teams, you always need to make sure that everyone feels comfortable with what your making. This often leads to watering down ideas and too many compromises. If there are only two people making decisions, your ideas can remain sharp and focused. The disadvantage of this is that your work runs the risk of becoming too obscure for anyone outside of your home office to understand. A larger team can represent, to some extent, your audience and their concerns. So the “watering down” that occurs can be beneficial too: it can make the work more accessible to a larger group of people. Another disadvantage of being a small team is that often larger corporations don’t take your seriously or don’t trust you. We hope that will change one day.

: Technically speaking: what development tools or environment you use?

ToT: The Endless Forest and The Path were created with Quest3D, a real-time visual programming application made in the Netherlands. And The Graveyard and our new projects are made with Unity3D, a Danish design tool for games. Both applications allow artistic people like ourselves to play with machines that were originally built by and for engineers. These are highly essential tools if we ever want to see this medium mature. As creators, we need to be able to focus on the content of our work and the experience of the player. The technology should become better and more accessible to allow this. Or it will ultimately fail and disappear. We really don’t need to know how an engine works. We just need to know how to drive the car.

: What can you tell us about the Belgian gaming situation (community, developers, distributors, etc)?

ToT: We can tell you this: ha ha ha. Or “what Belgian gaming situation?”. Seriously, Belgium is a very small country. And a very conservative one when it comes to technology and especially games. There are not many game developers in Belgium. There seems to be a thriving gamers community but it still seems to consists mostly of teenage boys and men who refuse to grow up. Sometimes it feels like the nineties all over again. That being said, there is also a lot of opportunity in such virgin territory. With our two head studio, we can become an important company in Belgium (we’re definitely one of the best known Belgian games companies world wide). So that’s amusing. And there’s also a growing interest for games from outside of the gaming culture. It’s almost like they’re trying to force a new games industry into existence. And that could prove to be very interesting. We’ll see. There’s a lot of really great art being made in Belgium. Not just beer, chocolates and fashion. But also music and dance and theater and fine art. Slowly but surely, some of this talent is turning towards games technology. They’re still a bit shy at the moment and try to mix computers with performance. But maybe something good will grow out of that. The games industry desperately needs a bit of fresh air. And maybe Belgium will be able to offer some.

: Europe has gained a reputation of producing high quality audiovisual works and artistic contents in several media, even too artsy for some. How do you think this environment inspired your works?

ToT: As artists interested in exploring new possibilities of a technological medium, we are naturally drawn to a lot of European film makers (though we also admire the work of American Hal Hartley and Chinese Wong Kar Wai a lot). But actually being in Europe probably also helps us feel more comfortable about “going there”, about making art for the sake of making art first. It helps that you can actually get government funding for art creation in Europe. We can afford to work with less commercial considerations than our American colleagues for instance. We think this is actually very important for the development of the medium. Videogames may be successful at the moment. But they have not penetrated in society the way that cinema, literature and music have. Games are still a marginal medium. They can remain so for a long time. Or they can disappear altogether (it has happened before). It would be a shame if this wonderful interactive technology would be limited to the current types of videogames, or disappear if videogames stop being successful. We consider our work to be important for the medium. Not many people are exploring this medium. Partially because of commercial constraints. There’s a very high tolerance for artistic innovation in Europe. There’s even places where innovation is the norm – that can be tedious as well, sometimes. Almost anything can be discussed. There are few taboos. We often have to self-censor our work or what we say a bit because we know the Americans are watching and couldn’t handle it. And we still get in trouble once in a while.

: Let us say goodbye to Europe. Based on what Japanese folk story/myth would you like to make a game/interactive piece?

ToT: We don’t know many Japanese folk tales or myths, I’m afraid. Maybe working with something from Kwaidan would be fun. It is interesting because it’s a compilation of folk ghost stories translated by an outsider. We feel we are not sufficiently familiar with your culture to do much with Japanese myths though. We don’t think taking things from other cultures is something you should do lightly. Though mutual influences often lead to great results.

: Japanese horror movies/games are quite popular, in and out of Japan: take for instance The Ring and Silent Hill respectively. We have the feeling that you like creepy stuff. From non-Japanese perspective: what do you think make them uniquely so?

ToT: As far as we have experienced, Asian horror movies tend to be more psychological and mysterious, while contemporary Western horror movies are more action-oriented, violent and gory. We tend to prefer the the kind of horror that slowly creeps under your skin and deeply unsettles you. We can also thoroughly enjoy a movie by Rob Zombie… But it’s not what we want to make ourselves.

Silent Hill has a special place in our hearts.

(moment of silence)

Silent Hill 1 and 2 (and to some extent 3) are fine masterpieces of interactive storytelling, superb graphics and great music. We’re not entirely certain, but we have a feeling that part of the reason for this is that Silent Hill is a game that takes place in an environment unfamiliar to its creators. Maybe it’s a bit as if the Japanese designers infiltrated American culture in a ghostlike manner. Something is just very wrong about the way in which a “normal American town” is portrayed in those games. Even without the monsters, Silent Hill is just very strange and creepy.

: What (horror) games from Japan are your personal favorites?

ToT: Of the horror games, Silent Hill 2 must be our favourite. But we also enjoyed Silent Hill 1 and 3 a lot and all of the Project Zero games. We never got into Resident Evil. It always felt to much like a shooter game. We also really enjoyed a non-horror game entitled Shadow of Memories. And of course, Ico and Animal Crossing and recently Noby Noby Boy. So we’re not escaping the trend: our short list of favourite video game designers is dominated by the Japanese. You guys are just very good. Hats off.

: If you had the opportunity, which Japanese artist would you like to collaborate with? What kind of joint project would you like to be a part of?

ToT: We would like to work with Takayoshi Sato on a project about a certain dancing girl who had a certain prophet beheaded. It would be great to make a game out of any of Studio Ghibli’s creations, or perhaps offer Fumito Ueda a chance to just make a nice interactive thing without having to design boss rounds or puzzles. Maybe Hideo Kojima can do a sabbatical with us to finally make a game without soldiers in it (you know you want to!). To have Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo design costumes for the characters in a game would be nice too.

Very nice…

: Finally, do you have a comment or message to the audience over here?

ToT: We have a message for Japanese games developers and publishers. Don’t try to appeal to the West on purpose. We already love you. There’s no need to put more guns and explosions in your games for us. And don’t -don’t ever!- hire American studios to make games based on your horror IP!