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I played the game “It Takes Two” with my friend, and realized that: This game is unlike all other games. So now you may wonder, did Josef Fares, the creator of the game, read any books on how to create games before making It Takes Two?
No! 😀
“Well, I never read books on how to design a game. In general, when people tell me, “this is how you make a game,” I see it as a warning sign in a sense. Obviously, there are some rules to follow here and there, but when someone tells me, “ok, here’s this typical design thing,” “I’ll teach you a mechanic,” “this or that feels better,” etc., I’m like, “thank you and goodbye.” It’s definitely too early to say, “this is the way you make games”!”
(source)
Josef Fares doesn’t wanna hear about any rules. Ironically this has led him – and his studio Hazlight – to create one of the most innovative and fun ten-hour experiences ever, which has set a whole new standard for game creation. Breaking rules creates new rules.
Remember earlier that I said I played the game with a friend? That’s because you can’t do it any other way! It Takes Two is “co-op” only which means it has no option for single-player, which is a style few others than Josef Fares himself actually believed in:
“I trust my instincts and what I believe in a lot. And A Way Out was never any doubt, even if many people were concerned. Like, what about the market, will people play this if it’s only co-op … I’m like, No, this what we’re going to do. And we’re seeing that there is a market for it,” Fares says. “I mean, obviously it’s sad that some people can’t play because they’re alone. But I mean, you have forums, and maybe in the future we might make a matchmaking system.”
(source)
Josef: Co-op only
Everyone else: No one will play
Josef: Yes. Here is game
Everyone else: We love it ❤
Now co-op only is a cool genre instead of something you never should do because it just doesn’t work, because It Takes Two and all other Hazelight games proved the whole system wrong by disobeying the system!
Josef Fares is driven by creating crazy stuff no one has seen before (and he also wants his games to fuck you), and in my eyes he’s one of the few visionaries who are aware of how small we are today and how big we’ll be in the future. In the first quote of this text he said “It’s definitely too early to say, “this is the way you make games”!”, which shows how aware he is of that video games still is a very young artform. We’re only in the very beginning, and Josef Fares is making sure we stop believing we’re at the endstation of history and instead strive for an amazing future. In the late 1800s Charles H. Duell said “Everything that can be invented has been invented”, and then came the 1900s. I feel that Josef Fares is the great inventors of the 1900s, and everyone else are Charles H. Duell. Proving such people wrong is hard, but you come a long way by being a dreamer, a bit crazy and a disobeyer of rules.