Amnesia Postmortem Tells A Scary Story

The developers at Frictional Games let it all hang out in a huge postmortem on their hit indie horror title Amnesia over at The Escapist. By their account, the studio was on death's door a half-dozen times during the game's development.

Amnesia began – no joke – as a conscious effort to adapt the structure of Mario 64 to a bite-sized, easy-breezy "torture porn" game in the vein of Saw or Hostel. Frictional's ideas were interesting enough to win an investment from the Nordic Game Program and keep the studio running at the time.

The whole story (all five lengthy pages of it) is a fascinating tour through the rough waters of independent game development. At various points during the creation of Amnesia, Frictional was saved from insolvency by the Humble Indie Bundle, a separate Steam sale, Paradox Interactive, and Russian publisher 1C. The very building blocks of the game's design changed radically several times in the process. The team was down to a single month's salary in the bank once.

And yet, Frictional pulled through and released Amnesia to massive critical success – though commercial success was longer in the making. Still, as of now, the game has sold nearly 350,000 units. Not bad when your baseline goal is 24,000 sales.