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No matter.
Try Again. Fail again.
Fail better."
–Samuel BeckettOvernight success rarely happens overnight. That moment in which everything comes together is often the result of a long period of hard work, constant re-evaluation and several healthy missteps that help determine an eventual successful direction.For Failbetter Games, the creative process has meandered this way and that over the past five years. The team size has fluctuated with its seesawing fortunes as it has chugged away industriously on exploratory forays into unknown territory. But while its recent story is one of success, momentum and forward thinking, its past is one of tentative steps and hesitant beginnings, where progress was measured in far smaller increments and output was determined as much by constraints as it was determination and ability."Everything the studio did in the early days was entirely dictated by the things that I could personally do," remembers Failbetter Games CEO and creative director, Alexis Kennedy. "[That meant] writing and coding, while my visual abilities—or anything to do with art or animation—wasn't something that I could get anywhere with, and so I wanted to do something text-based."At the beginning, it was a product of necessity. I was looking around at what was happening in the game space and back in 2009 people were still saying with an entirely straight face that casual Facebook games were the future of gaming. There was this idea that they were going to evolve magically from being cheap viral tricks to become more sophisticated, in the way that XCOM eventually evolved from Pong, and I bought into that and so the thing that I created looked a lot like that in lots of ways."
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