The Witness Documentary Noclip English Spanish

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Portuguese Bruno

Russian MrLockonS

Vietnamese Alex Vu

Chinese (Simplified) Cara Zheng

Chinese (China) Guanxiong Qi

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Jonathan Blow burst into the video game Zeitgeist in 2008

with the launch of his infamous indie platform Braid.

And last year he released his follow up the Witness,

a first person puzzle game set on a mysterious island.

But despite his influence in the video games world

and how often the game press likes to quote him,

we know very little about Jonathan's life.

So, last month, when we shot our mystery documentary we sat down with Jonathan

in an art gallery a few blocks from his studio in San Fransisco's Mission District.

There, we talked for four hours about his young life,

the multitude of games that his code can be found in,

his decade long career in the industry prior to Braid and how the Witness stems

from a fascinating idea he had long before he ever found success.

My first exposure to video games was the early arcade games,

I think, you know like there would be the deli around the corner form the house

would have Asteroids or something, right?

Scramble, games like that, games that were pretty early

and not particularly good by modern standards.

My parents would keep me busy or something by giving me a quarter

and I'd run down the block or two away and play some game with the quarter

and come back and beg them for another quarter.

I suppose there are better ways to spend my time, I don't know.

But that was pretty early, and then we got an Atari 2600 game console at home,

I just really loved to sit there and play the games on that,

which again, were very primitive by modern standards.

What were some of your favorites?

I liked Adventure, actually, the most.

I think we didn't get that one until a little later,

like early on we had Compad and Air Sea Battle.

I really liked the Raiders of the Lost Ark game,

which a lot of people consider one of the bad games of the 2600.

Because it's just so arbitrary and weird, but I liked it,

I think I liked that it was so long form, you know, in terms of this happens

and then that and then that.

And then, most games on the 2600, they're sort of a one game mode happening

and here's the rules of the thing and then that's it.

And that, and I guess also ET was one of those games that was more structured

but I never really played that one,

because I even I knew that was supposed to be bad, back then.

That was sort of it for consoles, specifically.

When I got into the 6th grade I was lucky enough to be in a school

that had a computer class at that time, which was kind of rare, I think.

This is was in Northern San Diego county.

We had a class there that had a roomful of Commodore Vic 20s, which were again,

not the most capable of computers, but that was my favorite thing at school,

I was just doing like I got it right away.

So my parents saw that I was really into that and so they got a computer for home,

what was known in the US as the TRS80 color computer from Radio Shack,

but I learned to program on that.

I was programming in assembly language on that at a pretty young age.

Messing around, like you could go to Radio Shack and you could buy a book full of like

“Learn how to Program in Basic”

and here's all these exercises, and they'd sell it you by saying,

“This is like a month's worth of exercises”

and I'd do in like a week or four days. Right?

And then there's book number two and then after that there was no more stuff

and back then, it was harder to learn things than it is now,

'cause there wasn't an internet connecting everybody,

and I knew there were books that had other information,

but I didn't what those were.

I made little games and stuff, in high school time, but I didn't have ideas for games,

it more like I wanted to program games.

So I would program things that were my version of something else.

So that the most game-like thing I did was kind of a Pac Man parity game?

The idea was just that the score was really high because I was noticing

like score inflation in arcades and stuff.

And so you'd start eating the pellets and your score would be like

I guess the screens were 28 columns or something

but your score would be like 15 digits all of a sudden for every pellet.

And other than that, it was kind of a Pac Man game

so it wasn't more smart than that.

In an age before the internet Jonathan hoped that his thirst for learning

would be quenched when he started college.

He traveled north to the Bay area to the University of California, Berkeley,

where he double majored in computer science and creative writing.

Perhaps there he would find the answers he was looking for.

You know, in college they teach you a very different kind of programming

than you're gonna develop on your own.

I mean, they communicate a body of knowledge and some of the knowledge

gets you further than you were and some of that knowledge is,

let's say, limiting or wrong ideas that are based on assumptions based on

how things should be, that don't necessarily hold very well in games, for example,

because games they're really complicated to program,

performance is very important for most games,

and so you're just trying harder to get things done,

than you would if you were like making a webpage or something.

And so, ideas, when you try to bring some idea of how to program into games

it gets tested more thoroughly than it does in other kinds of programming,

So, there are certain ideas of how to program, that I kind of eventually learned to abandon,

I was a double major in computer science and creative writing,

I didn't get either degree.

I dropped out before either but--

How much was left?

Probably I had like three classes, so it was less than one semester to finish,

for writing it would have been more than that.

Why did you drop out?

'Cause I was tired of going to school.

And I wasn't happy there. Yeah, that was it mainly.

Disappointed, Jon dropped out of college

and paid the bills at a corporate programming job recommended to him by a friend.

But he didn't last long there, either.

Looking for a job that interested him, Jon embarked on a meandering career of short gigs

and contract work, the first step in his journey was landing a job at technology company,

Silicon Graphics, where he would end up working on one of the biggest games ever made.

They were making like a set top box,

that they were testing back when that was a thing,

but they were testing in Florida and Japan, and it was this big, corporate thing,

but they wanted some games to run on there.

So, I actually Port of Doom and Doom 2 was sort of executable with different data files

at that time, to this like cable set top box.

Which on the one hand was cool, but on the other hand it was like

you were playing it with like a crappy TV controller from 1994,

like it just wasn't, pressing these rubber,

gummy things to try and... and Doom is fast, right?

And it was in my opinion not that playable but it worked.

Did you get all the music and everything in there?

Yeah, yeah. It was fully good.

Yeah, I actually so at the time that I finished my contract

I had actually just put in something that broke multiplayer

and the guy came after me had to fix it.

This guy, we're trying to get away from doing Doom documentaries.

I mean, Doom was a big game at that time, you know that.

Anyway, though after that I then in around February of 1996,

started a game company here in San Fransisco with a friend of mine, from college.

It's a good time to start a game company.

No, no, it was not.

It was the absolute worst time.

I pretty much think we couldn't have picked a worse time.

All the game companies were like,

“Okay we have to be 3D now”

and nobody understood how much harder it was.

Like, everybody knew okay, it's more involved than 2D whatever, but nobody really knew.

And budgets were going way up, and so as a couple of guys walking like,

“Oh, we've never been in games before,

but we're just gonna compete with regular game companies and win.”

It's hard, like we walked in right when it got hard.

And it didn't help that we were doing something a little early,

like we were doing an online only 32 player, drop in, drop out

science fiction hover tank combat game.

It was a challenging thing to do back then,

'cause doing like 32 players over 9600 Bod modems was entertaining,

it was definitely... it was playable in like 97, and then we just kept working to make it better.

And tried to get enough people to play it, that we wouldn't go out of business,

which eventually didn't ever happen.

So, that was not a financially successful game company, ultimately,

but it was, I learned really a lot about being good at programming

and also I just put in the hours.

Like part of being good at programming is you just gotta do it a lot,

so after that company went out of business, we shut it down,

I was a consultant for a while, and I worked at random game companies

for periods of between one and six months each.

So, I was at Odd World, for a little bit, I was actually at Ion Storm, Austin, for a little bit.

And I did some stuff on the engine team,

some little bit of my code may have ended up shipping in like DSX or Thief 3,

I did some weird business stuff?

So when harmonics was going to get bought by MTV,

I like went and reviewed their code for MTV to make sure

they weren't like legal landmines in it or whatever.

I don't know, it was kind of weird, but whatever,

I got to hang out with the Harmonics guys and that was fun.

Yeah, I did programming on Flow, when that game company was starting,

they were smaller than I think they grew to be a little later.

And they were just trying to ship on the PS3 and it's a challenging machine to program for,

that sometimes you just need more people working on it.

Particle stuff, on that game got it running on the co-processors on the PS3,

it was not the main programming on the game,

the main programming on the game was all them,

but I had like the little contribution.

I did a thing in New York that was before the Play Station 3 existed,

IBM and Toshiba and Sony had this cell processor and Sony obviously had a long term plan,

but then those other companies they were trying to figure out what to do with it.

And IBM does servers, and they were like,

“Maybe we can sell servers with this ting in it.”

So we did again like a 3D multiplayer action game,

that was about-- It wasn't a hover tank, you were like a dude in a hard suit this time.

But it was kind of cool technically because part of the idea

was you could justify this being a server based thing,

you actually had the reason for that, and the reason was well,

if you do heavy, heavy physic simulation, if you do that on all the clients,

the clients will have different ideas about exactly what's happening

and they'll diverge and that's no good, so the server has to run the physics,

really, even if you predict it, locally on the client, it has to get corrected by the server.

So, we did this really physics based thing, where we had giant robots walking toward a city

and they were self locomoting, so instead of playing animations

they would like apply forces to their joints and stuff,

and you could like blow up the joint?

And it would like still try to walk, like with the broken... so that was fun,

but it never shipped in a way, we tried to license it to EA at some point,

before the PS3 came out, and they were not interested.

Super forward thinking,

because that's kind of what Microsoft are attempting to do with their Cloud stuff,

and like crack down was like have all the physics happen server side.

Yeah, I actually am not sure it's that great of an idea.

Ultimately, well, I mean, back then I was just doing programming right?

But now that I think about it from a design standpoint,

it's really expensive to be running all that stuff, that extra physics,

versus just letting people do their thing on the client end.

So, result of running that physics has to be really, really good and the idea back then

was that the thing we were doing would have been good,

but we didn't really have the manpower to do... it's two guys,

and then we had some so a friend of ours,

sort of corralled some college students to do the modeling and texturing and stuff,

but it was not what you would call a large team effort.

Since dropping out of college, Jon had become quite the prolific contractor,

building up a varied resume of experience.

But as he worked on more and more games,

Jon was beginning to realize that perhaps programming wasn't as creatively fulfilling

as he would have hoped, and that, his curiosity was pulling him towards design.

Well, I wasn't really that happy,

because I didn't really know what I was doing in life yet.

I was just sort of stumbling forward like people do sometimes,

and doing the best that I knew how to do, which at that time was programming.

I identified as a programmer, right?

I didn't really identify as a game designer there was an idea that

hey, I would do an independent game of my own,

but it never quite happened, for various reasons.

Probably one of the main reasons was because all my ideas

were based on ambitious technology and I would always pick things

that were a little bit too hard for me to really do.

So one of the other many things that I was doing while I was consulting and stuff,

I was a workshop at the game developer's conference every year,

called the experimental gameplay workshop, which was a new idea back then,

of like hey, you know, there's not that many people making little games,

and even when they do they tend to make them very traditionally.

But if you're making a little game, you could actually be deliberately experimental

about what you make.

You could just try something very strange that most people don't do

and because it's a small game that doesn't cost $10 million, you could do that, right?

And so I ran a workshop every year that tried to encourage people to do this,

and that would show sort of the best of what people had done in the previous year,

best according to us.

And so I was thinking about that all the time,

and that was another way of refining my designs, like is this a wacky,

weird idea that doesn't result in something?

Or is this like a nice game?

And there was a trend, back around, I don't know, the early 2000s,

of it was a short lived trend, but of like gestural interfaces,

so there was games like Black & White,

where you would cast your spells by drawing a shape on the screen.

And Arcs Fatalis, which was the RPG version of that,

where you would cast a spell by drawing a shape on the screen,

and then what would happen is the game would introduce new spells to you.

Like, you'd find a scroll and it would have the shape on it, and you're like,

“Oh, I can do that now”

but in both those games, the thing was was there was no reason to really draw a shape,

because all it was doing, it was like if you draw a specific shape, do a specific input,

you could have those things bound to function keys

and like serious players of those games would, right?

If you're playing them competitively,

you definitely would, you wouldn't be sitting there drawing a shape.

So, in some sense that was an idea that was not fully realized, right?

Because it is interesting to draw those shapes,

but if it doesn't-- if it's a worse way of doing something,

you already could do, then what is it?

So, one of the things that I showed at this workshop was I spent some months,

I don't remember how long, but I was doing an experiment

where it was like Arcs Fatalis style spell casting,

but you would actually control parameters of a spell with the shape that you draw,

so you would start and you would draw like I don't know,

you would have a sort of a shape where you have a horizontal line

and then you sort of cut downward and then you have a loop

and that would be like a magic missile spell.

And then, you could control different things,

like you had a certain amount of line length to spend total on the thing,

and if you made the loop like bigger or smaller

that would be like a bigger or smaller missile in terms of how much damage it would do.

Like, you could spend some upping the speed, right?

And then there was another parameter somewhere in the shape

about how much it would track the target.

I had planned out this game, where you would learn these spells,

most of the spells would come in the traditional way,

like you'd be going through a dungeon and you'd find a book

and the book would have a spell in it.

The thing that was gonna be cool, the cool, moment of that game,

was gonna be that there were shapes built into nature, right?

In the environment, and these were the most powerful ones and you know,

you could probably get through the game without discovering them,

but if you discovered them, they were super cool,

so just one picture that I had was you're on top of a mountain,

and you I don't know, maybe you climbed way up there,

maybe you went through a dungeon to get to the top or something,

and but you're up there and you look down, and sort of the path

that you took to get up there looked a lot like one of these spell shapes,

and if you realized that, then you could learn something new, right?

And so that was the whole idea for that game, and could have made that game,

but I felt down enough on the actual spell casting mechanic that I was like,

“Uh, I don't really feel like this is one of those ideas that's really gonna execute well.”

So, what do I do?

And all this was before I did Braid anyway, right?

And so I kind of tabled that, probably did some other stuff and then did Braid.

And then after Braid I was trying to figure out what to do.

So this was the high fuse after that idea or something.

And then I was like, you know I still like that vison of being on the mountain

and looking up and seeing this thing.

And well the thing that I did on Braid was to…

you know, I had some idea about time manipulation platformer

and the thing that worked for me on that was to minimize

everything that wasn’t the main idea.

So the thing, going minimal was very effective for me at that time.

Also with the idea of where the puzzle was, you know the simpler the geometry level

was of that game, the better the puzzle was usually.

So I said well if that’s what I really like, this picture of looking down on of this mountain,

then realizing the significance of something that you didn’t before,

then why don’t I get rid of everything else and start over from there, right?

Maybe it’s not spells, maybe I just need a reason for you to be drawing a line

and then we’ll go from there.

In the intervening years, John would have his game design breakthrough.

Braid - a smart, creatively made puzzle platformer,

which wowed the players and credits alike.

Overnight John went from an unknown programmer

jumping from contract to contract to a game design guru.

In no smart part, due to his prominent role in the documentary film Indie Game The Movie.

So years later when it came to making his follow-up project,

Johnathan didn’t make Braid 2.

Instead he set his eyes on solving this problem he created for himself years ago.

To construct a game around the epiphany he wanted players to have.

The only problem was getting the player to draw a line.

So how did you land the puzzles?

I don’t know.

I honestly do not really remember.

Like it was, I wanted an excuse to be drawing a line

and I guess I thought about solving a puzzle by drawing a line.

I can’t tell you exactly.

Let’s say you knew nothing about game design,

someone came to you and said you’re gonna design a game,

it’s an action game where you shoot dudes and try to avoid getting shot, right?

And somebody might think

“oh well the thing that would make that game good,

is if it’s really hard to fight the guys, then you know it’s really a challenge.”

But the problem with that approach is

you can make them infinitely hard to beat very easily, right?

Just give them a zillion health and a million damage bullets

and they move infinity fast and they can see around... whatever, right?

It’s very—it’s trivial to make an enemy in a game unbeatable, right?

It’s like that with puzzles as well, right?

What makes a puzzle interesting is not really difficulty,

it’s pretty easy to make a puzzle arbitrary.

It’s not really difficult, you just put more stuff in.

Cause more stuff will either obfuscate the real solution

or just make people think through more combinations of things.

Or make the solution require many more steps, right?

So you have to think through a longer sequence of stuff.

And all those make it more harder, but they’re not really more interesting.

In fact they go in the opposite direction of interesting,

because interesting is when...

Well for me, one of the things that makes a puzzle more interesting

is when there’s a clear idea that you come to see in the process of solving it, right?

“Oh these two things have a relationship in the puzzle that I didn’t realize until now

and now I understand what that is”

And so that determines the solution, right?

That idea of what is this relationship between these elements and the puzzle is the good part.

And the better that idea is, the better that relationship is or the more clearer it is,

or more surprising it is determines how good the puzzle is.

Along with some other things, it’s never that clear.

And again, the way I said that sort of applies mainly to Witness puzzles,

but it’s the same in Braid and It’s the same in many puzzle games actually.

For six and a half years John created puzzles.

He built a studio, Thekla with a team of talented programmers,

designers and artists to help him achieve his vision.

They started with a small island and as their ideas evolved,

the island grew to accommodate them.

The Witness as it exists today is a final point of that thought process.

An island full of puzzle screens, cables, shores and castles.

A game about learning without a single tutorial.

Ultimately The Witness is a game about drawing lines.

But what exactly that means to you depends on what island you’re looking at.

This is a place that changes radically without ever moving an inch.

The key to unlocking the islands mysteries is all about perspective.

So there’s an intro area where you pretty much have to do everything inside it.

All of those things are for the most part easy,

except for one thing that the tricks got you.

But once you get out of this tutorial area, then if you sort of see everything,

the next puzzle that you see is supposed to be so hard

that you actually just can’t do it, right?

And so, we show both ends of the spectrum.

Like okay, there’s very easy things and then okay this is really hard,

but like we’re obviously not asking you to do it.

It’s clearly meant to be something that’s like maybe a challenge

that you keep in your mind as you go and come back to later.

In fact, right after you encounter that is this information

that you need in the form of much simpler puzzles again.

So it shows people at the beginning of a little variety of experience,

so they can get more of a picture of what’s happening.

And also says it’s okay if you can’t do something.

And then after that part, you know?

There’s easier puzzles again, so you maybe get the idea

“Oh if I see a hard thing, maybe there’s other easier things nearby”

And so it’s not just that those things are happening,

but the player is building the model in their head of what the game is

that they’re playing this whole time.

There’s already some investment there, right?

Because this understanding that I’m building this thing that I own now, right?

And if I drop it, if I stop playing and drop it,

well that’s a little bit of a waste or something, right?

One other thing about it is the fact that every little puzzle in the game

has its own idea behind it.

Even if it’s a very simple puzzle.

So when you do the puzzle, the idea goes into your mind

even if you don’t totally realize that.

When it works it’s really kind of magical because at the end you can ask someone,

“What were you trying to do when you solved that puzzle?”

And they’ll say, “This and that” and then “this and the other thing,”

and they’ll have some things that they can’t quite verbalize,

because they weren’t shown these things in words, right?

But it was this fully interactive development how these ideas came into their mind.

And I think that is... first of all it’s very interesting by itself to be a subject seeing

these ideas sort of come across.

But secondly, It’s like a super condensed version of a thing that games do generally.

And that’s part of why people play games generally.

That ... —you know you’re playing Mega Man or something, right?

And you get a new weapon and you’re like,

“Oh, what does this do, how does it work?”

“You know what context do I use this?”

You’re building that picture over time and you know?

You push the button and you shoot a thing and you watch what--.

I mean, all games communicate to you in some fashion,

what are the news elements of this game and how do they work

and how do they behave in relationship to each other, right?

And so, a part of the idea in The Witness was to take that kind of non-verbal communication

that happens in all games and boil it down to a very simple form, right?

So, the things that you learn about don’t even move for the most part,

just symbols on a screen, on a puzzle screen that’s embedded in the world.

And interactivity is very minimal, like nothings gonna kill you, right?

There’s almost no action in the game.

You just sit there and think about things and then solve it, right?

For people that don’t like the game that’s one of the reasons they don’t like it,

is because it’s so quiet with nothing happening.

But it’s—I wanted to turn down the volume on that kind of event so that, you know?

So just by virtue of relative loudness’s

is the volume comes up on seeing these ideas, right?

Because if right after you did a puzzle and you had to like dodge

a couple of monsters or whatever, like Dark Souls style you have to whatever.

You’re not really gonna be thinking about the puzzle anymore.

Whereas now you do it and you’re walking to a new area maybe

and you’re like “oh yeah”.

It just sort of sinks in, in a way.

We spend a lot of time just deciding on what the style is like in terms of the textures on things

or what kinds of colors happened.

Or what arrangements of colors can happen,

because I felt that it was very important to be careful with the player’s attention

and not draw the player’s attention to things that are not relevant, right?

If you’re, if you’re in an environment full of distractions

it’s gonna make the game harder to play.

And even if that’s subtle, even if that distraction is subtle,

if the puzzles are subtle it can kind of wreck them, right?

And so again, the quietness like enables subtlety.

During development, a lot of the time people would make stuff that looked cool

and I was like yeah that looks cool but we can’t do that because...

we can't do anything with it and so,

you have to make it more boring otherwise people are going to walk up to it and look round it.

You know you'll have a version of the adventure game problem,

like if it's like a point and click and you have to try clicking on everything,

so it's not my impression that people say that much about exactly how sparse the environments are,

in terms of clutter.

Like, there are rooms in there that don't have anything in them, right?

And the reason is, I didn't want people to feel like they could click stuff all the time,

or that they should be trying to click on thing all the time.

Also later in the design, we ended up with this thing,

only panels ever causing things to happen which is another way of focusing the interactivity.

We used to have buttons and levers and stuff, until I decided that was stupid.

Because the players are looking for buttons and levers everywhere.

Totally and you never know what might be a lever, right?

You know. There's a lot of puzzles in it, you're going to get stuck on a lot of them.

If you're stuck it means you don't even know exactly what you should be thinking about in many cases,

you just don't, the way puzzles here are designed,

it's not like you're stuck on a complex logic problem that you can't work them out,

because you just don't know how it can be possible to do this one.

I felt it important to try and organise the environment, right?

So if you're in a particular zone,

and you don't know exactly what's relevant to this problem you're trying to solve,

if you like leave the biome, you feel like you're going far away,

and you're like okay maybe I shouldn't be out here looking for this thing, okay.

As opposed to adventure games which didn't really have that discipline,

I mean, things could be anywhere, right?

I mean objects that you can pick up in the beginning,

would only be relevant to something toward the very end,

and so I wanted to organise it and make it,

so that you didn't feel like you had to run across an entire world,

to try and find the answer to something.

But The Witness is extremely non-linear because there's a lot of puzzles in it,

and it doesn't really gate you and there are plusses and minuses to that.

The plus is that if you are frustrated with something, you can just go somewhere else.

There is all this rest of this game you can go explore.

The negative is that again if you just want someone to tell you what to do,

well, a linear sequence is a way for a game to tell you what to do,

and the more you blow that out, the more you let people just go random places and do things,

the more you give them the opportunity to have a bad time for themselves, right?

You know, you're just stuck in the middle of these puzzles that's by itself linear,

and you can just turn around and go somewhere else. And you may somewhere else,

find something that gives you ideas about what you're working on.

Or as often happens for, I think our subconscious is always working on things in the background,

and so you just go do other puzzles and be like, "Oh wait, that thing, I have an idea now about that thing."

So one of the things I observed back when doing Grade,

is that different people find different things hard, right?

So some people will find one puzzle very easy,

that other people are stumped on for hours, and vice versa.

There are some things that are mostly universally hard, but they're pretty rare.

Though, I knew going into The Witness that I knew I couldn't really rank the puzzles,

on a difficulty scale and sort of you know, make easy areas, medium areas and hard areas.

You can kind of do that, but it's really a statistical thing,

where different people are going to have a different experience.

So with the audio area for example,

so I knew first of all that people can recognise pitches with varying level of ease.

Just in regular every day life so if you ask them to do an audio related puzzle,

they're coming to it differently.

Because I knew that some people had more difficulty than others at pitch recognition,

that's an area where I didn't make the puzzles just crazy complicated,

with like a million sounds or a million steps.

The direction I went in there it's a little bit more of like being funny,

but also in a way that really annoys people when they try to play, right?

Because it's like now I'm trying to be obnoxious and distract you from the task you're trying to do.

As a designer, I don't know exactly what experience people are going to have.

Some people are going to find some things hard and other things easy,

and then other people will have those roles swapped, right?

If you design such that you kill anything that people find hard,

if you design such that you kill anything that a percentage of people find hard,

then you end up in this subset of what all those people can do, right?

So which might, if your game can be this big mass, you end up getting this nucleus in the middle.

There's all this potential that you killed just because somebody might not have a good time with it.

For some, The Witness is simply an island full of logic puzzles,

complete a biome to unlock a laser, seven lasers open a mountain, and the fire puzzles within.

But beyond the superficial, something else is going on within The Witness.

Its puzzles come in many forms.

If we over simplify for this explanation,

then we could just call every discreet element in the game,

that you could understand or not understand, we'll just call that a puzzle.

There's a set of layers where sort of the bottom most layer is things that are obviously puzzles,

and it's obvious to some degree how you solve them.

So you see this LCD in the environment and you know you have to trace a line,

and it's obvious when you have solved it.

What some people don't like about the game is there's not enough fanfare,

when you succeed or whatever.

- Ode to joy doesn't play. - Yeah exactly it's not Peggle.

Every time you solve a puzzle. But that said, there is…

it acknowledges clearly when you've got the right answer to the thing.

Then there's the next set of stuff where they're not clearly signalled,

but once you've found them,

you know that you've found them and once you solve them, you know that you've solved them, right?

And then the third layer which is sort of more this,

what we think of as visual surprises built into the environment,

where they're not signalled to you in any way,

and there's no acknowledgement,

it's like either you see that and you think something about it, or you didn't.

We have these explicitly acknowledged, very structured things,

and then we have these other less acknowledged, less structured things,

and who knows how many of those are in there right?

And who knows how many you've seen and when you see one,

you're not like checking off a to-do list. If your to-do list has ten things on it,

by the time you come to the end, you know you're done.

There's no unchartered territory there,

whereas if it's just unchartered territory you're exploring it by seeing these things,

and that's pretty cool.

John and the team had created an island of puzzles. Some superficial, others less so.

But the whole reason for the island was in service of that second layer he spoke of,

stemming from an idea of casting spells that John had all those years ago.

To create a world with rules and ideas that the player would piece together in their mind.

All leading them to enjoy a powerful epiphany.

Do you find that many people play the game and haven't unravelled that second layer of puzzles?

Haven't noticed them?

I feel like it is... so I definitely designed it so it would be possible,

or likely that people would finish the game and not find the secret stuff.

I think that happens less often than I expected.

I mean it's hard to predict this kind of thing, but I would have said maybe,

it's 50/50, like half the people who play the game will not see that stuff.

It had to be legitimately likely that you would finish the game and never see that stuff,

you had to take an extra step noticing something on your own to find that.

Yeah it was not handed directly to you like look,

the Nintendo fairy didn't show up and say, “What is that in the left corner of the screen?

Why don't you try clicking there ...”

So there was the idea in it that there would be these things that you would find,

that were not handed to you and then there's always the question, how much of the game is that?

And the triple A decision would probably be that's a very small part of the game,

because you want to get news out about the secret thing, word of mouth and all that.

But you don't want to spend a lot of money on that,

because that's money that's not going into the main game,

and then you'll compare badly with other games,

that put more money into their weapon models or something.

But I wanted it to be a part of the game that could stand up on its own,

parallel to the obvious parts.

That said I didn't expect it to be quite as big as it ended up being,

but I didn't expect any of this game to be as big as it ended up being.

How did that happen? How did it end up growing?

Just the way I design. Starts with ideas to try, and then I try them and see what the consequences are,

and then what would be interesting so I kind of get the ideas working in the game in a simple way,

then play with them and work out what that could lead to.

So where that went with The Witness was okay,

there's these panel puzzles and you could have the symbols inside them,

and there's a whole exploration of what different kinds of interactions,

could you have between these different kinds of symbols.

But then there's also this idea that different information in the environment,

give you the answer in some way, then there's a whole exploration of what are the ways,

that the environment could give you the answer and when I start doing something like that,

I have a feeling for if I'm filling out the idea enough,

or if I'm leaving a big gap that's going to feel weird, right?

So if we do like, shadows that would have felt weird, it would have been…

like if a player plays a game and one obvious thing they think of it,

oh, it would have been cool if they'd used shadows to do the thing,

then we kind of didn't do our job a little bit, right?

All the interesting things that we could think of,

we ended up doing and that just mean we spent forever making the game.

John and the teams vision for The Witness grew over time,

filling the space it occupied, finding its form,

John used up what he had earned from creating this island for ideas.

Even loaning money from a friend to finish the project.

He released in 2016,

as an overly saturated indie market was making it harder than ever to make money,

especially one at this scale.

So, how has The Witness done?

It's done really well and we're going to release it on new platforms.

It didn't have to do this well, it's certainly a very weird game,

that as I said was hard to say why it's exciting without spoiling it, and even if I did say that, like,

it's just highly… you look at the trailer or something,

and you're just like there's some puzzle grids with a line, like why do I want to play that?

It's hard to communicate what is interesting about it.

Were you relieved or surprised?

No I mean I went way into debt to make that game,

and I mean we can make a new game, and that's really great,

so thats kind of all you can ask for.

I mean you can ask for more, but we're doing alright, you know?

The Witness is a game about learning, about seeing new perspectives,

about the journey up the mountain and what we see when we look back.

It might not be an RPG about spell casting,

but The Witness has a certain magic that is so rare in video games.

The pursuit of which is crucial to John's philosophy,

to create games that stay with us even after we've left them.

Make us ask questions of ourselves and the world around us.

There are things that I don't totally understand, right?

Thematically or even just intellectually, you know puzzle wise, whatever,

and if I don't totally understand them,

but I'm interested in them then frankly a lot of people don't totally understand them.

There may be some people out there who do have a very clear,

and maybe this game wouldn't be that interesting for them.

But for most people they would also be in this territory of I'm not sure what to make of this,

or oh that's interesting,

I don't totally see all the ramifications of that at this second, right?

And I really value that a lot and when I design games,

you know game designer is my life pursuit,

so I hope that my life pursuit I become a wiser person,

or a more developed person in all those things, all those good things that we want to be.

So how is game design going to do that if I'm designing little things,

that I have a full understanding of? I mean, maybe that's finer execution of the craft,

but the games we know are on the boundary of a very unexplored territory,

we don't even know how big it is, it's so large,

and I feel like it's a good idea to kind of go in that direction.

And also then, as we go further in that direction,

to not just have that be like, oh that's some interesting abstract game,

but it's not really related to the rest of my life at all,

to somehow let it connect back to what we do when we're walking around every day.

Do you have any old ideas that you're going to resurface for the next project?

- Is it going to take as long as The Witness? - No, no.

We already have stuff in the works.

There is something that I've done some work on that is going to show up, yeah.

Cannot say what it is.

No worries, we'll just play this video back in what…

- Ten years? Fifteen years? - No, it won't be that long.

Three, something like that.

This is the part of the documentary where we say goodbye and see you again in seven or eight years,

that's how this works, there was the movie and then us and it'll be someone else's job and...

Maybe yeah our video documentary is going to be a thing in seven or eight years.

I hope so too but you never know, it's so crazy.

Maybe I'll learn how to program.

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