The Forgotten City - Nine-Year Journey @ IGN

The Forgotten City will be released soon, IGN tells it's story:

Skyrim Mod to Standalone Game

Rome wasn't built in a day. But Forgotten City's devs virtually rebuilt it in nine years.

Nick Pearce has spent the last four-and-a-half years working 80-hour weeks on The Forgotten City, so it's not the strangest thing to hear that, at one point, he began hallucinating about being in a Mario game.

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"When you start an indie game studio you're constantly running out of runway," Pearce said when asked if there was a moment during the game’s development that he felt like throwing in the towel.

"It feels like one of those subterranean levels in Super Mario Bros. where you're running along a row of bricks, and they're disintegrating under your feet, so you just keep running forward and jumping into the unknown, all the while knowing that you have exactly zero lives left, because if you fall, it's over."

Pearce hasn't fallen yet, though. And neither have his collaborators in the tiny three-person studio known as Modern Storyteller. Their first game, The Forgotten City is a time loop mystery set in ancient Rome based on Pearce's incredibly successful Skyrim mod of the same name, and it’s all but finished for a launch later this month on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. Reaching this point has been quite the journey, one that began around a decade ago when Pearce first started working on the mod in his spare time. He estimates he devoted about ten hours a week, every week for three years, to the mod. Transitioning to full-time development has enabled Pearce and the Modern Storyteller team to rebuild The Forgotten City from the ground up, using the Unreal Engine and overhauling every aspect of the original creation. As the project wraps, Pearce is quick to acknowledge it's remarkable he hasn't taken a tumble and lost that last life given the level of crunch he's willingly put himself through.

"I've spent the last four-and-a-half years working 80 hour weeks with no real holiday, which I guess is about nine years worth of work," he said, notably without giving the impression that he is boasting about it.

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