| Hi everyone. Today I've got a fun story about a game with one of the longest development cycles in history, but first... This week's top gaming news: Players are regularly shocked when they hear that a large new video game took five, six or even seven years to create. But for the three-person team behind the excellent action-roleplaying game Secrets of Grindea, which came out in February, that kind of timeline would be a dream. Secrets of Grindea was in development for 13 years. Put another way: babies who were born when Secrets of Grindea started development are now finishing up middle school. Teddy Sjöström, the game's writer and programmer, told me in a recent interview that when they started working on the game in 2011, they couldn't have possibly imagined that it would take this long. "We thought it would be done in one year," Sjöström said. Sjöström, who lives in Visby, a small city on an island off the coast of Sweden, first started making games in college with a student project called Dwarfs!?. The game was "reasonably successful," he said, allowing him to keep paying the bills without getting a job. Then he paired up with artists Fred Ström and Vilya Svensson and set out to make an old-school action game that harkened back to Super Nintendo classics. The trio announced Secrets of Grindea in November 2011 and started a blog to post updates. It was good timing. Indie video games were just beginning to take off, and it was easier for new ones to stand out than it is today. "You could get noticed back then by just posting screenshots," Sjöström said. But as development continued, the game kept expanding. They added new deserts and forests, new dungeons and new skills. They went back and revised character portraits and animations as their artistic skills improved and they realized they could do better. One year became two years became three. "We kept feeling that the thing we were working on, the area we were working on, it wasn't enough," Sjöström said. In 2014, with money drying up and the end nowhere in sight, Sjöström and his team put Secrets of Grindea on Steam's Early Access, allowing customers to buy an unfinished version of the game as they continued to develop it. They put together a series of contingency plans based on how much money they made, knowing that if the game didn't sell enough copies, they might have to cut development short. Then, to their surprise, it sold tens of thousands of copies, earning them enough money to support themselves for the next few years. "At that point, we said, 'Actually, let's throw out all those other plans,'" Sjöström said. "It's just plan A." But there was a downside to the success. Without financial pressure, the Secrets of Grindea team could keep working indefinitely. Every year, the trio just kept creating, tweaking and tailoring. They scrapped bosses and dungeons that didn't work, and they released regular updates, allowing fans to play new parts of the game as it chugged along. Free of strict deadlines, the team felt like they could have kept working forever. Over time, periods of creative burnout emerged, and Sjöström even wrote a primer on how the code worked in case he was hit by a bus and had to be replaced. "My identity got completely entangled with the game," he said. "I routinely had the thought that I had to make sure I don't die, otherwise the game might not be finished." Still, the years kept passing — until January of this year, when the trio huddled and decided it was time to pick a date and stick to it. On February 29, Secrets of Grindea was released for real, allowing players to complete the game from beginning to end. It has been a success, earning critical acclaim and selling more than 300,000 copies, many from fans who bought in during the Early Access years. The team's next step? Working more on Secrets of Grindea, of course. Thirteen years later, they're not ready to say goodbye just yet. "We're going to make a New Game Plus," Sjöström said. "Then after that we want to look into couch co-op. After that, we want to look into console ports." I've been playing the new Switch remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, a classic GameCube roleplaying game from 2004 that holds up quite nicely today. It's charming, hilarious and a lot of fun to play. | 
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