Jenova Chen, the co-founder of Thatgamecompany, never seriously considered making video games when he was younger. “Where I grew up, video games were seen as gambling, and oversexualized kind of soft porn, and overviolenced. Nobody respected video games. My parents would be ashamed if I told them I would be making video games.”
When he left Shanghai to study filmmaking at the University of Southern California (USC), Chen’s dream was to join Pixar and direct his own animated movie. But instead he ended up co-founding Thatgamecompany along with fellow USC student Kellee Santiago, and going on to release a string of critically acclaimed titles that changed how people thought about video games, including Flow, Flower, Journey, and mobile-turned-multiplatform hit Sky: Children of the Light.
As the firm marks its 20th anniversary, GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Chen to hear the firm’s journey – pun not intended – from student project to home of multi-million user social platform, the latest event in which introduces a playable journey through the life of one of the world’s most famous artists.
Chen’s game-making journey began with a gaming innovation grant offered by USC. “I really needed the money to be able to pay my tuition, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to graduate,” he recalls. “The idea was the whole school would be pitching an idea to make a video game that was the opposite of what the mainstream media was condemning after the Columbine shooting. And I really needed money, so I was like, ‘What is the opposite of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas?'”
The result was Cloud, developed by a group of USC students including Chen, and released in 2005. It centres on a boy who dreams of flying while lying in a hospital bed. Chen says the aim was to create a video game that makes the player feel peaceful and relaxed, almost a Zen-like experience – the opposite to most games of the time – and it drew heavily on his own childhood memories. “I was sick quite a lot,” Chen recalls. Recurrent, severe asthma attacks meant he was regularly hospitalised. “I think [that] traumatic childhood actually gave me a lot of emotional needs to connect and to not be lonely… But it also forced me to be imaginative about what is outside.”
“Back in 2005, Valve was like: ‘We only publish games with guns. Our players like to shoot'”
Chen and company had a hard time selling publishers on the idea of a video game about emotions. “We pitched to pretty much every publisher you can imagine, including Valve,” he recalls. “Back in 2005, Valve was like, ‘We only publish games with guns, our players like to shoot’.” But the launch of Xbox Live Arcade provided a lucky break, as it left Sony rushing to launch its own digital store and populate it with games.
“They’re like, ‘Oh shit, we have to catch up. We have to say we have our own iTunes for games’,” says Chen, who recalls Sony looking for more artistic, adult games to distinguish its store from Microsoft’s. “Phil Harrison was the one who was really pushing for like, ‘Hey, we’ll be different than Xbox’,” he says. “So we were lucky that they needed content.”
They pitched Cloud to John Hight, then Sony’s director of product development, and now president of Wizards of the Coast. “He said, ‘I’m not sure about this Cloud game, but maybe you guys can start porting this Flow game to the PlayStation?'” Flow was Chen’s thesis project, a Flash game based on the psychology of how sports people get addicted to “the zone,” and centred around dynamic difficulty adjustments. The game also marked the first time Chen worked with composer Austin Wintory, who would later be nominated for a Grammy for Journey’s soundtrack. “I said, ‘Here’s 500 bucks, can you make this?’ The cheapest composer I could find in school!”
“I said to Austin Wintory: ‘Here’s 500 bucks, can you make this?’ He was the cheapest composer I could find in school.”
Thatgamecompany was founded by Chen and Santiago after they graduated in 2006, with Flow launching on PlayStation 3 the following year. The firm signed a three-game deal with Sony, but not long after the company was founded, Chen faced a problem: he needed a work visa to stay in the US, and Thatgamecompany was too new to provide one. He ended up spending nine months working on Spore at Electronic Arts.
During his time at EA, Chen thought about what the next game might look like. “Working in the Bay Area was very lonely, because the old friends I had were in LA, and I knew I wasn’t going to be at EA for a long time,” he says. He also found himself feeling homesick for the metropolis of Shanghai, which was so different from Oakland, California. “So I was thinking about making a game about a walking person in this big city being alone and dreaming about the experience outside.”
His travels back and forth between San Francisco and Southern California also helped to inspire what became Flower. “I always had to drive through the valley, and because I grew up in the city, I’ve never seen a complete 360 of plains surrounded with green grass and yellow flowers and rolling hills.” Using his film school training, he attempted to capture the vista using panoramic video. “And I was like, ‘Wait a second, I’m a video game creator now. Couldn’t I just do this in interactive media?'”
The game, which was released in 2009 and sees the player controlling the wind to blow petals through the air, is an important one for Chen. “It’s my favourite game, because it’s a pure, impressionistic expression through video games about my feelings at the time,” he says.
The third release from Thatgamecompany, 2012’s Journey, had its origins in Chen’s difficult time at USC. “I was working, like, five part-time jobs, because I couldn’t afford the tuition,” he recalls. “English is my second language, and I’m learning how to write screenplays for Hollywood, and it’s one of the most difficult classes to graduate… I was so busy studying and working, I had no time to socialize. I’m a 22, 23 year old man looking for love, and there’s no girlfriends to have when it’s this busy, and you don’t speak good English, and you have no money – like, bottom tier, basically. And so the only social [outlet] I had was playing World of Warcraft in the alpha and beta phase, because my friend worked at Blizzard.”
Chen met people through playing WoW, although often the friendships proved superficial. He played as a female character, and says that when some people found out he was a man, they would stop talking to him. He adds that his strong accent was a factor when it came to voice chat. “Once you expose your identity, you kind of get sidecast. And so I was just feeling like, ‘Man, couldn’t they just treat me as a fellow human being?'”
But one incident stood out in his mind. Chen played as an Orc Rogue, and he started battling with an Alliance Rogue, but neither could get the better of one another. The battle dragged on and on until they both found themselves in front of a beautiful waterfall. “That was the moment where we suddenly just stopped,” he remembers. “We’re looking at each other, we couldn’t speak [each other’s] language. And there was a moment where both of us felt a connection.” The moment abruptly ended when the Alliance player jumped into the water, and Chen had no way of finding them again. “But that was the moment I was like, ‘Wow, I actually like this person. I don’t know this person. I don’t know their age, gender. It doesn’t matter. But there was a moment when we shared the sense of beauty looking at the waterfall.”
“I don’t know this person. But there was a moment when we shared the sense of beauty looking at the waterfall.”
That moment formed the genesis of Journey, a game about connecting with strangers without the need for language. An MMO where status and identity were absent, where people are just simply fellow human beings.
Chen says he spent a lot of time thinking about this concept at university, and pondering what would provide the antidote for loneliness. Around that time, his first girlfriend attempted to commit suicide. “She took a lot of sleep medicine trying to kill herself, but they were able to find out before she died,” he says. He remembers asking her why she did it while she was recovering in hospital: “She was saying that nobody needs her to be in this world anymore.”
The shocking incident helped him realise that loneliness is a detachment from society, and that there’s a need to have dependence on someone else. He imagined a scenario where the players have to guide each other through a dangerous landscape, where people feel the need to stay together. “And so I was like, ‘Can I make a game that captures these feelings?’ The feeling of protecting someone and also being protected by someone.”
These ideas would form the basis for Journey – but the expense of making an MMO meant it couldn’t be realised until many years after Chen left USC. In the end, the expense almost bankrupted Thatgamecompany. “We won game of the year, but we were also, for a period of time, having to shut down the studio, because we couldn’t pay anybody,” says Chen. “We laid off everyone.”
“PS3 was not winning the console war, and there was really no money for this game”
Chen recalls that Journey was pitched to Sony as a two-year project, but the studio knew it would probably take longer. “We wanted the three years, but Sony just would not approve a three-year project at the time. And so we were told you just pitch for two years, and once they see your game is doing great, they will potentially give you additional funding.” But by the time the two years were up, that additional funding wasn’t forthcoming. “PS3 was not particularly winning the console war, and there was really no money for this game,” says Chen. “And so we had to put all our savings that we made from Flow and Flower into finishing the project… We only had enough money for six months, so we rationed it for 12 months. So at the end, we really didn’t have money. I was $200,000 in debt.”
The first royalty payments didn’t come in until “maybe half a year to a year later,” once the game had recouped Sony’s initial investment. “And so during that period, you can imagine how mad the team is. Like, you made a game of the year and you’re [the] fastest selling game on earth on the PlayStation Network, and the company is still out of money. Who’s at fault?”
“You’re the fastest selling game on PlayStation Network, and the company is still out of money. Who’s at fault?”
A team restructure moved Chen from Creative Director to CEO, where he was compelled to think on what went wrong: “Why did a game-of-the-year game not make enough money to keep the studio going? And there’s many different things, like we’re … exclusive to one platform: imagine if we were cross platform, we’d be in a much better situation.”
By targeting expensive consoles, the company was placing a financial barrier in front of its audience, as well as making it harder to reach women and girls, since the majority of PS3 owners were male. “So I was telling the team, if we are making the content, even if it’s the best content, if the distribution isn’t right, you’re only reaching half of your potential.” At the time, smartphones were exploding in popularity: Thatgamecompany decided to target mobile for its next title, Sky: Children of the Light.
The firm raised $5.5 million in funding led by Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky, who Chen recalls was convinced that Apple would feature Sky in a keynote, thus ensuring its success. However, the game took four years to make, by which time the focus had changed from premium games to free-to-play.
“We were told by Apple that ‘you guys have to change your business model, otherwise we don’t think you’ll recoup the development cost,'” says Chen. “And so then we spent two more years changing a premium cinematic experience that’s less than two hours into a freemium game that still tells you the emotional story, but it has to retain the player and somehow make money elsewhere.”
“We spent two more years changing a premium cinematic experience that’s less than two hours long into a freemium game”
Sky eventually launched in 2019, and has since been downloaded more than 300 million times, attracting a devoted audience – particularly in Asia. Thatgamecompany has spent the past seven years supporting the title, which included staging an in-game concert by Aurora that broke a Guinness World Record for attendance, as well as crafting events including a season devoted to the book The Little Prince, which Chen says raced up the Japanese bestseller list as a result. There is even a movie based on the game.
Now, there’s something like an art installation too. The latest venture – launching July 17 – is Dear Van Gogh, an immersive experience centred around the post-impressionist painter which creates a “living canvas” of his most famous works within the world of Sky. Players can explore the landscape of the paintings and learn about his life and background; Chen says the amount of work, assets, and music created for the project is on a par with Journey, or perhaps even greater. “In the old days, this would just be a standard long game,” he says.
The title is the result of extensive research, including trips to Europe to visit the places where Vincent Van Gogh travelled. Chen says that it made them realise the less talked-about heroes of the story are Van Gogh’s brother, Theo, and Theo’s wife, Johanna, who finally ensured Vincent’s posthumous fame, long after he and his brother had passed on. “I was deeply moved by the stories behind the family and the willing support of both Theo and Johanna towards Vincent Van Gogh,” says Chen. “And we wanted to expose the story of the people behind. They’re all Van Goghs, that’s why the game is called Dear Van Gogh, not Dear Vincent.”
Seven years after release, and 14 years after development began, Sky is less a game and “more like a platform,” Chen says. “It’s a space with maybe 20 million monthly active players. We’re just making content, we’re making emotional experiences.” Some of them rely on knowledge of Sky’s universe, some of them are entirely standalone. Chen can even see a future where outside teams build their own games within Sky, although it would first require the team to make Sky’s proprietary engine much easier to use.
For now, Sky is a meaningful community, a platform in itself, and a reflection of how much games have changed in both form and content over the past 20 years – as well as about as far as it’s possible to get from the violent video games that Chen’s parents feared.
