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I get the impression that Eric Chahi can never sit still for too long. Speaking to the veteran games designer from his flat in France over Skype, there's an energy that's bursting out of the little video window on my MacBook, his head dancing this way and that as he gets caught up in his own enthusiasm and occasionally sidetracked by his own thoughts. Listening to the audio a short while after to transcribe it all, I can hear Chahi's smile throughout. Chahi's not sticking around, either. The day after our chat he's heading out to the island of Réunion, an overseas region of France in the Indian Ocean that's just east of Madagascar. It's where he is right now, in fact, observing Piton de la Fournaise, an active volcano that's been erupting for some 60 days now. It's not exactly my idea of a holiday. Chahi, though, loves volcanoes. You might have got a sense of that if you played From Dust, his last commercially released effort, which rendered Chahi's fascination with volcanology in brilliantly malleable, playable form. He explains why volcanoes are so fascinating.
"Because it is the earth in motion," says Chahi, his French accent imbuing his already lofty words with a dash more poetry. "It's the birth of the earth in a way. It's beautiful, it's powerful and it's dynamic." There's a short pause while he gathers a pocketful more thoughts. "It puts you in a relative place to the earth. It's like thinking of a billion stars or galaxies. There's the same vertigo."
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