Jordan Thomas, director of BioShock 2, played Path of Exile for over 7,000 hours while working on co-op horror game The Blackout Club: 'I was essentially awake all the time'

Jordan Thomas grew up during the shareware era of PC gaming, fed a steady diet of free game demos by his father. "This is embarrassing in a way, but the first one I remember connecting to enough to do drawings at school—and it's so immature—but it's old Commander Keen," he says. "It was a quick segue from that into Wolfenstein and Quake. So weirdly, Commander Keen was a gateway drug into darker games that would then become my focus for a very long time."

Indeed, Thomas' debut in the games industry was dark in the most literal sense, as he was hired by Ion Storm Austin to work on Thief: Deadly Shadows. There, Thomas built that game's most famous level, The Shalebridge Cradle.

Following Ion Storm's closure, Thomas moved to Irrational, where he led the design of BioShock's Fort Frolic before moving to 2K Marin and directing BioShock 2. After working on BioShock Infinite, Thomas founded the indie studio Question, creating games like The Magic Circle, The Blackout Club, and South Park: Snow Day.

Question's most recent game is The Killing Stone, a dark roguelike deckbuilder inspired by Shakespearean drama which has just launched out of early access. "It's set in the 17^th century, and you can play it in 17^th century authentic dialogue—so it's for the real sickos," Thomas says. "It's a series of very strange, deckbuilder-with-a-twist style challenges, where you're trying to un-curse a family's decks, which is pulling sins out of their souls, sins that they inherited from their matriarch."

Thomas took a break from Shakespearean sin-eating to show me around the water-cooled pleasure district of his Steam library. We talked about Hellraiser's hidden influences, immersive sims' hidden comedy potential, and how Path of Exile helped Thomas survive development of The Blackout Club.

What game are you currently playing?

I've spectated my friend's playthrough of Hellraiser: Revival, and now I've just started it myself. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Hellraiser fan from way back, and this is the most lurid possible incarnation of this. But I am really interested in the idea of a decaying relationship in non-Euclidean space, and the people who made this game get that. They're doing it with the chassis of another game that I loved and that fell away. And oddly, I didn't expect that to arrive as a Hellraiser sequel, but that was Condemned.

I prefer melee to shooting for many reasons. I've long since reached saturation point with guns in this country and in my life, so I moved into melee and stayed there. But there wasn't a lot available in first-person [in 2006]. Condemned was right up my alley, and I still would have loved to do a sequel to it or something.

[Monolith]'s programmers of the enemies were early pioneers in finding semi-systemic, often designer-aided, smart things for the enemies to be doing, that helped you believe they had an agenda and they were thinking about things before you entered the room. Again, I wish I'd had the chance to merge Condemned with the immersive sim genre, where the spaces were more plausible and you could approach these spaces from any angle. Condemned was a little more linear, though you still had some freedom in their arenas.

You're on the trail of this Serial Killer X character, and you're ripping locker doors off walls, and it's all about breakable melee weapons. And this is where you'll see it in Hellraiser, exactly that formula for the first half.

Also, my friend Xalavier voices the protagonist, so I just wanted to see him put through hell. Strange Scaffold helped out with [The Killing Stone], and [we're] very grateful to him for that.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Just before Hellraiser, I played REPO with my regular crew. Speaking of immersive sim systemic interaction, man, I've never laughed so hard playing a multiplayer game. And even if you account for the friends-as-content success model, which is huge right now, it's still just so well thought out and so expressive that we keep coming back to it.

I tell the story, when I'm trying to sell other imsim nerd types on it, of the moment that a friend was carrying my severed robot head back to the cart to safely resurrect me at some point in the future, and I was controlling a third-person camera around my head, and I'd got just enough battery life to scream at my friends not to turn around and look backwards, because there was a monster behind them that only kills you if you look at it.

I was like, "This game is amazing." I'd never seen a moment like that happen before, where my limited agency death mattered, the camera mattered, the limited communications governed by the battery. All of that came together, plus the enemy design, to create this moment of "Don't look behind you."

The Blackout Club is a long conversation that would eat a lot of our time, but it's definitely true that [in terms of] four friends going into a hostile space and starting out relatively vulnerable and having to improvise—lots of people crack each other up playing The Blackout Club too.

But The Blackout Club also had this live story component, which was so all-consuming. The thing I'm proudest of about that game is that people are playing it when they're not playing it. They were off on the Discord trying to solve mysteries like true crime. Whereas REPO, it's all about the physical … every piece of your body is physicalised.

On Thief 3, I've told this story before, but I got a feature into the game because Paul Weaver, the executive producer at the time, was trying to shut everything down, but he wanted to say yes because I'd built up a lot of good faith, and it was the oil slicks, when they're placed near stairs, would fling guards [down them]. He said, "You can have it if it makes me laugh." We showed it to him and he immediately cracked up.

A little while after Ion Storm Austin shuttered, we were pitching around a comedy immersive sim that's like Burnout with people. It was all about trying to get the most horrific things to happen, and REPO probably would have been very good friends with it.

That's why I'm not particularly devoted to continuing to bang the immersive sim drum anymore … people who took pieces of it are solving things in a way that renews the conversation.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

It might be X-COM, the original.

I played it for research for what would become The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. What I chiefly remember—before the trauma began with such a strange, hand-me-down [project]—was the game Exquisite corpse. That's what we call it here. Where you draw a piece of a monster and then fold it down, and somebody else draws the torso of the monster and fold it down, and you unfold it and get this ridiculous thing. That was The Bureau.

But for pure research, looking back at the original thing, I was reminded that the power of negative space is media agnostic, or genre agnostic, if you prefer. It [had] these very heavily pixelated tiles, but the movement of the enemies, the camera paid attention to it off in the fog of war. I remember people talking about being deeply scared by this game when they played it back in their formative game years because of that movement.

That part still holds up. You are constantly worried about what's out there in the darkness. And it made me think that my love of top-down tactics would not necessarily be mutually exclusive with my love of horror, right? That I could do something like that. Unfortunately, not at the time, not for The Bureau, because the goals were very different. But that's the main thing that struck me about it.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

[For] the entire development cycle of The Blackout Club, myself and Ken Strickland—who was not yet working with us, we were working together when he was still at Ubisoft on the South Park stuff—we played, constantly, Path of Exile.

I was in a rough spot. I was essentially awake all the time during the day, trying to help the team drive the development, but at night running the live encounters and scheduling the next ones and wanting to take notes for everything that I thought players were thinking and what needed to be woven into the live story.

Originally, the thought was I would have more support on that. That didn't happen. All we had was once every week or two, we would have a visit from an actual actor, and I would be Cyrano de Bergerac-style whispering into their ear … but yeah, running all of that, there was this incredible need for stress relief. Path of Exile absorbed all of that damage to the tune of 7613 hours.

The main thing I remember about it is a permanent remark being made in my head over the joy of pruning and also building branches of this ridiculous character-growth bonsai, where optimising for just that one extra point could make all the difference in your build. I really prided myself on not taking builds from influencers or anything, just building my own. Of course, I was collaborating with another [person who is] much more talented than I am at systems design in the form of Ken Strickland. So the dialogue was really wonderful because he understood what the hell I was talking about.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

There are probably two answers. The first is Darkest Dungeon 1, because my family loves it. You can steer Darkest Dungeon 1 in such a way where the really gruesome stuff isn't necessarily there. The power of Wayne June's narration affects everybody regardless of age. So it's become a strange collaboration. I remember hearing a young voice say, "Let's play the torch game!"

The other one is Baldur's Gate 3. I didn't realise this until last year, but the mod scene for that game has breathed life into a thing that I already played beyond playing, right? And if that continues, if it becomes Skyrim-like in its infinite divisibility, then I have no reason to uninstall it.

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

I'll say Audacity, because since The Blackout Club, I had to do a lot of my own audio editing of the often-live or very lo-fi recordings that we got of the actors in their own homes. We had this special provision from the union to go into their homes and set up their ability to invade players right then and there, which was amazing. So we had this crazy tour of various actors' homes.

I'm very proud of that, actually. For a low-budget game, we were very loudly pro-union and we wanted to work with union talent. I'd approach Critical Role and say, "Hey, I think you guys would make good gods. Would you like to haunt players and have them figure out slowly, maybe at some point, who they're talking to in real time?" So they're all union, of course. And Ashly Burch, the main character that you play at the start, is union. So we went to SAG and said, "We're doing something that's never been done before."

Anyway, I had to edit some of what we got from them into what we call god-casts, and it would be a current event summary … so I had to learn Audacity. And even now on the Killing Stone, I'm constantly using it to tweak things here and there.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Terrible. It's terrible. In fact, there was a snapshot going backwards through time of desktops that I had to just completely core dump. It's like, OK, this is horrific, so we're just gonna do a snapshot of everything here in case I need it again, and it goes into a folder which just looks like that previous horrible desktop, and then the new one becomes that bad.

By the way, it's mainly because of Audacity. For some reason, I don't want to organise or store all the variants of this given voice line that I've messed with, I need them all still there at a glance.