If our Kickstarter fails, which could happen, we’ll still strive to make Dreamfall Chapters in some other way, but Kickstarter is the catalyst. How do you think things have changed since then and would this studio be possible without Kickstarter? RPS: We spoke about Kickstarter a year or so back, Ragnar, as something that was changing things. Travelling around and finding team members. So unfortunately, no montage travelling around the world, but that should have been our Kickstarter video. Tørnquist: So it was a matter of striking while the time was right and grabbing a lot of these key people and making a company to make this project. A lot of the people at Funcom also got laid off after The Secret World launched – things didn’t go as well as they were supposed to – and at that point, I knew that I needed to grab those guys straight away before they started successful careers in other industries, or went to LA as you were planning on doing and becoming a soap star! I knew that half the team, the art guys, were working their own company and had their own projects, but they were extremely interested in getting back together and working on this. Tørnquist: That would be a great montage sequence, finding the Dreamfall team members – picking one out of a wrestling match in Mexico, one is a beach boy in Coco Cabana. Tørnquist: We found somebody in the gutter. RPS: Where is the strangest place you’ve found an old member of the team? How many were still in the industry? Tørnquist: This feels like something we can settle into and do for a very long time. It feels good to be back with the people I’ve worked with before and we’re all friends and making something awesome together. I notice when I’m at home as well, I’m so much more motivated and happy. For me, it feels amazing, coming from what I joked about was a grown-up job and now coming back into the industry, it feels great. We have been talking about it for a little while but I had my first day on the job on Friday. This is a new home and it feels very cosy.īruusgaard: For me it’s a very recent feeling. Not that Funcom wasn’t home, but that’s sort of a phase that’s behind most of us now. Scheve: Except it looks so much better now. We’re working in the same universe, with the same people. Just walking down the hall here and chatting with them it’s like we’re back in 2004. It’s the whole core art team from Dreamfall. This includes Christer Sveen, the art director on Dreamfall and a couple of the technical guys on the art side. We haven’t actually revealed who the artists are but I don’t mind telling you because you’re still under embargo! The artists are all basically the Dreamfall veterans and these are guys who worked with us for so many years. RPS: Are you settled in the studio now, with the team back together? Tørnquist: We’re Norwegians, what do you expect! We’ll still have roles, of course, but we try to keep it flat and with a 'do it yourself' mentality.

We’d like to avoid having titles if necessary. Scheve: We do what we can and what we want. We don’t really have any titles either, we just do whatever…

We don’t have a lot of money, we don’t have a lot of resources. And that is exactly how we operate in a way. So, for the projector, Martin is actually borrowing cables from the neighbours. We have about a hundred people coming to basically get a presentation of the Kickstarter and to give them an idea of what this is all about. It’s very convenient that we have a bar downstairs. We’re going to do that at the bar downstairs. We were trying to locate a projector – we have a Kickstarter party happening tomorrow, where we have invited Norwegian gaming press, and some fans, friends and colleagues. Tørnquist: That’s actually something we had to borrow from the neighbours. RPS: I’ll start by asking where that cable was hiding. In this first part of the interview, we talked about cold hard cash, going indie, Kickstarter and the state of the industry.īruusgaard arrives, late, having been sent to find a cable. The studio is new, the premises are new, but the team are old friends and Dreamfall veterans. In readiness, I had a long conversation with Tørnquist, Dreamfall co-writer Dag Scheve and lead designer Martin Bruusgaard earlier this week. As this interview is published, the Kickstarter for Dreamfall Chapters went live a couple of minutes ago. Ragnar Tørnquist founded Red Thread Games with one immediate goal in mind: to finish the story he has been telling for a great part of his adult life.

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