at a certain point we decided we wanted to charge people for it but also that this is a game that is really based around not knowing what you’re getting into and we didn’t want to have to spoil it through our promotion - through our marketing of it. We didn’t want to have the whole thing be about - to have it just where the experience is being ruined for people and they don’t get to experience it just fresh and organically. So, our solution to that was to make a demo for the game that had no actual content from the game in it - that was a completely separate, twenty minute experience all about demoing Stanley Parable. It was all about the game attempting to show you what it is about but failing and kind of failing over and over and over and in doing so mirroring the themes of the main game about attempting to tell a story but failing over and over and over and over. Um, and it was interesting because what happened was we thought, “Okay, this will be fun. We can do this,” right? “We can take some extra time, create some custom content, make this extra little thing.” So, we went ahead and wrote it and built it and we had it.
We liked it. We spent a bunch of time building - building it and then we put it in front of - of some players and they hated it. They really didn’t like it. And we had to step back and kind of acknowledge that we had maybe missed the mark and we had forgotten what it was about the main game - about the original game that was compelling enough that we would want to try to convince people through this demo that the main game was actually interesting. Um, we just made mistakes like stopping the player for long periods of time and just not letting them move or just like throwing long monologues at them or - or confusing the space that they were in too much to where they didn’t even know - have any idea where they were. And, so I had to go back and like, really figure out why do people like this game, right? What is it that - because it has been years, now, in development. I forgot, you know? I completely didn’t even realize and it made me go back and look at the main game and go, “Are there points in this game where we’re - where we’re not living up to the standard that the game, in general, is setting,” right? I had to, like, really rethink why I thought this was a quality experience for people; why I thought anyone would want to play that. And, in doing so, I went back and rewrote the demo and was able to write it - was able to make it, I think, much better.
