Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Master Jonathan Blow has achieved unexpected fame and fortune through the creation of a logistical contrivance called Braid. Glad of this success, he has travelled far from his native San Francisco to take lodgings in riotous London’s Clerkenwell district, so that he might demonstrate his his newest invention – rudely entitled “The Witness” – to the skeptical souls of the old world, including Mister Griliopoulos, unexpectedly standing in for Professor Rossignol. We join the interview at the point where the auteur is struggling with the thinking device hosting his daemonic design.

Now do read on…

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In an antiquarian hotel room in London’s historic Clerkenwell, Braid creator Jonathan Blow is shaking his shaven head. His laptop has decided it doesn’t want to run The Witness, his new game and he’s copying all the files over to his spare laptop. (If you want to know what it says about Blow that he’s the sort of man who carries a spare laptop… go hire a haruspex.) The game, he tells me, has just over a year to go now, with the appearance and sound likely to change; the 300 puzzles, though, they’ll stay the same. As he copies, I watch the file-names flick by: …theater… trees… rocket launcher… caves… wait, rocket launcher? It turns out Blow was making a very different game after Braid, before the Witness and some of the files are still hanging around in The Witness.
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