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Lucas Pope turned down Uncharted 3. He found a seat at Naughty Dog during the development of the first Uncharted and stuck around for Uncharted 2, but when Drake's third outing rocked up, he left the studio because he wanted to experiment with smaller, weirder games. Those experiments would eventually lead to Papers, Please, one of the finest games of 2013 and, to most people, Pope's first name. His last name is guy.Today, the Papers, Please guy is hard at work on another experiment: Return of the Obra Dinn. Pitched as a death-fuelled mystery adventure set aboard an abandoned trade ship, Obra Dinn first surfaced in 2014, just as Pope was polishing off the bulk of Papers, Please. It's still not out. It might not be out this year. To understand why, you have to back much further than 2014, all the way back to the '90s, to a small town in Virginia where a young Pope finds himself enamoured with a Macintosh and Quake mods.
"I started out doing skins mostly, because that was easy," Pope tells me over Skype from his home in Tokyo, Japan. "You could just open up a 2D file and draw one and then you could see it in 3D. It was fucking amazing. Then I got involved with a couple guys on the internet who were making small commercial mods. Sony had the idea to make a Quake mod to promote [the film Anaconda]. I hooked up with the guy who was doing that and did a couple of skins for him."
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