White Paper Games’ first release, Ether One, was all about the unreliability of memory. So there is perhaps irony in asking the team to take us back over a decade, when the studio’s original members were studying at Preston’s University Of Central Lancashire. As Pete Bottomley and James Burton reminisce, one event in particular stands out from the hazy mists of memory: a talk given by The Chinese Room’s Dan Pinchbeck.
Bottomley acknowledges the influence of Dear Esther, The Chinese Room’s own debut, on Ether One. After all, both are short firstperson narrative games – ‘walking sims’, to use the pejorative – set in the kind of low-key British location then rarely seen in games, and both explore topics of grief and memory. This isn’t the event’s only significance, though: it was also the first time Bottomley and Burton met. So, can they remember what words they exchanged? “‘Oh, here’s your ticket,’” Bottomley recalls. “I didn’t see him for the rest of the day, and didn’t talk to him again for maybe a couple of years.”
Not the equivalent of that ‘76 Sex Pistols Manchester gig,
