Tweet
Matt Gilgenbach's semi-autobiographic mental madhouse Neverending Nightmares was borne of tragedy. After Gilgenbach and his development partner Justin Wilder spent $140K and four years of 40-hour work weeks on the rhythm-action shmup hybrid Retro/Grade, the game sold so poorly that it failed to break even. This led Gilgenbach into a deep depression, so he decided to make a game about his horrifying intrusive thoughts called Neverending Nightmares. It's a risky proposition to make a game about your darkest, most disturbing thoughts, but by creating it Gilgenbach managed to save himself from the funk that he was in, both mentally and financially."It definitely felt good to express myself and my struggles to the world," Gilgenbach tells me in a Skype interview. "There was a positive reception. I think a lot of people understood where I was coming from, and had similar experiences. So that was really positive for me."
"Also, I've been able to sort of exorcise some demons that have haunted me," he adds. "Due to my mental illness I have these intrusive thoughts of really horrible images of self-harm, so I've been able to put them into the game and I think once they were in the game they sort of lost some of their power, some of the hold they had on me."
Read more…
More...