When game developer Robin Hunicke told me about Journey, the acclaimed 2012 game she produced that's finally available to play on the PC via Steam, she mentioned an interesting origin story: It was conceived at first as a kind of MMO/virtual world experience. I just heard from Journey director Jenova Chen, who shared these amazing images he created, from when Journey was first conceived:
"It's 2006 I did these paintings imaging an MMO where nameless, genderless, and ageless characters are all searching for the promised land that is unknown," Jenova tells me. "You can see many of these robed figures are traveling in pairs and groups, which later influenced Journey and Sky: Children of the Light." (That's Chen's new game; more on that another time.)
I've long had a pet theory that Journey's gameplay, in which the player must travel up a steep mountain, was inspired by Philip K. Dick's Mercerism in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I.E.:
The trend of increased empathy has coincidentally motivated a new technology-based religion called Mercerism, which uses "empathy boxes" to link users simultaneously to a virtual reality of collective suffering, centered on a martyr-like character, Wilbur Mercer, who eternally climbs up a hill while being hit with crashing stones.
Chen says otherwise, when I ask if that was an influence:
"[I]t's based on Joseph Campbell's Heroes' Journey monomyth story arc structure," as Jenova Chen puts it to me. "Mixed with the Confucius seven stages of aging and growth, from infant, childhood to teen, adulthood, and eventually to aging, death, and rebirth."
And while many have drawn some religious significance from Journey being set in a desert, at least part of that was for technical reasons:
"The original vision for the game is to happen in the forest and mountain," says Chen. "But we didn't have any artists and tech to make many types of trees and it makes it difficult to see other players, so we decided to go with desert."
If setting it in a desert does make Journey seem more like an epic, mythical quest, creating gameplay where players must help each other has made it treasured:
"We were trying to prove that games can be emotionally impactful and can touch adults at a human level," as Chen puts it. "It's also the year game industry says the future of games will be social games. Yet we don't see meaningful emotional social interactions and connections happening among players in any AAA multiplayer games. Therefore we set out to make a game where players long for each other rather than trying to win over each other."
Many thanks to Jenova Chen for sharing his art.
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