'The Dream Machine' Was Supposed to Take One Year to Create. It Took Eight

When people bought The Dream Machine back in 2010, it launched with two episodes in a six-part saga. But their purchase didn't just entitle them to those two episodes—it was a season pass for the point-and-click adventure, whose unique look comes from everything being hand-built out of cardboard and clay. The plan was to finish the whole game—all six episodes—in a year. Instead, The Dream Machine wouldn't be finished until this past May.

If you've followed my work at Waypoint, you know that I'm endlessly interested in games that take a long time to finish. It's why, for example, I profiled the developers of Owlboy, who spent 10 years trying to finish a SNES-style platformer. The Dream Machine didn't quite take 10 years, but eight isn't too shabby, either.

What keeps people motivated for nearly a decade?

I contacted The Dream Machine designers Anders Gustafsson and Erik Zaring, who'd gotten in touch to promote the release of the game's sixth and final episode. When I first asked to talk, though, Zaring turned me down, citing the marathon-like development process they'd been toiling over since the first episodes.

"This game took us hostage and now we're getting out," Zaring told me.

A few weeks later, their minds in a more coherent state, Zaring and Gustafsson answered some questions I'd sent over about their long journey to make a game.

Here's what they told me.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

When you started working on The Dream Machine, how long did you think it'd take to be finished with it? Not eight years, I'm guessing.

Erik Zaring: I recall one of our first, rudimentary design docs that stated the entire production would span over 12 months in order to produce "three episodes." We we're so young and fresh back then, we didn't have a clue.

Anders Gustafsson: We knew we wanted to make an ambitious game, with a big conceptual idea at heart, but we definitely didn't know how long that would take. We didn't create a long-term road map right off the bat. We'd just gotten a small chunk of money from a film grant here in Sweden. That gave us enough confidence to quit our day jobs. Life was exciting again, and we were just flying by the seat of our pants. "Who cares how long things take? Let's just get this party started and solve all problems as we go!"

If me from the future had come in at that point and said "Guys, what you're attempting to do will take eight years," I would've said "Mister, you're totally killing my pre-production buzz right now," and then I would've cranked the music up to drown myself out.

When I first reached out, you said you weren't ready to talk about your marathon development process. Now, you are. What changed?

Zaring: Yeah, that's right, so here we are. That's a good question. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the completion of our final chapter, six. There's conflicting emotions about having reached the end of the line. I don't know where to start, trying to describe this rather special endeavor of ours.

Gustafsson: It's hard to talk about the process when you're neck deep in it. We just finished the game, and I'm still trying to formulate my thoughts.

I wouldn't recommend a marathon development process, but a good thing about episodic development is that you compartmentalize the unavoidable post-production lull that follows the completion of any major undertaking. If we had worked on this game as one monolithic chunk, then I would probably be depressed as fuck right now. After eight years in development, my life would feel totally empty. But because we've already released the game five times, we've had the chance to distance ourselves over a longer period of time. Maybe not the game as a whole, but at least chunks of it. That made taking this final step far easier.

Episodic development sucks in a lot of ways, but this is one of the benefits.

Can you remember what got you interested in telling this story in the first place? What sparked The Dream Machine?

Gustafsson: The initial spark came while reading about John C. Lilly, back when we were at animation school in 1999. That's where we met, learning how to animate on a small, isolated island far off the coast of mainland Sweden.

I'd been on a Beatnik kick for a while, and then I started reading about all these pseudo-science characters, who'd been big in the northern California scene during the 60's and 70's. You know, all these wonderfully outlandish hippie visionaries. One of the names I stumbled upon was John C. Lilly. He's mostly known for inventing the sensory deprivation tank and communicating with dolphins, but one of his lesser known theories was that we all go to another place when we're subconscious. A world parallel to our own. A place that was supposed to have a coherent geography.

In order to test this theory, he'd do heroic amounts of Ketamin and LCD together with friends, and they'd each keep a notepad next to them, so they could draw whatever they experienced. They'd try to draw coastlines, landmarks and other geographical features—whatever they'd see while tripping. The idea was that with enough of these drawings, they could slowly be able to create a chart—a cohesive map—of this shared human subconscious.

This experiment didn't last very long before it petered out, but I thought the idea was so amusingly bizarre and wonderful, I just felt I wanted to make something of it. In the game, we approach dreams in a similar way.

Zaring: After being unemployed for a while, I suddenly woke up one morning in July 2008 and decided that we had to make an adventure game out of clay and cardboard. I produced a couple of test at my kitchen table and tried to convince Anders that this was actually a great idea to pursue…

How did you remain focused over those eight years, to continue generating the same excitement you had when the projected started?

Zaring: That's a reason for this project taking so long. You inevitably lose focus and productions gets slow after working on something taking this long. What kept us going for all these years? I'd say honor, dedication, and, of course, most important of all: Our fans. Without them we are nothing. All their love really helped when feeling old and tired.

Gustafsson: The story of the game—moving into a new apartment with your pregnant wife—is only a framing device, something to ease into before we start throwing dreams at you, and something to come back down to—in-between chapters—once the dream is over. We show the overarching narrative the utmost respect, but I think it's safe to say that the whole game is just a big excuse to explore character's subconscious, to show you some tripped out stuff.

That's never changed, so that's been our focus, and that's how we've remained excited.

It was mostly just the two of you working on the game, right? What was your relationship like over those eight years? I imagine it must have come under some strain, like any relationship.

Zaring: We've had help from others over the years for sure, but yeah, it's been the two of us doing this for almost a decade together. Any relationship that you care about need that you really talk to each other once in a while. I tend to close up and do the opposite. But at least I know, in theory, how to make a relationship flourish. The fact that we live 300 km apart in different cities makes our relationship interesting, as well.

Gustafsson: There's mostly been the two of us. Sometimes we get help from other artists, who came in and helped us do some music or an animation. But the core team has always been us two. (Or "the sexiest men in Sweden," as our friends like to call us…)

There's always been a very clear divide in who does what. Zaring does the building, and I do the singing and dancing. We don't live in the same city, so we've avoided stepping on each others toes too much. That helps.

Was there a specific reason you decided to develop the game part-time? Was it purely financial?

Zaring: I don't know if you could call our development part-time. Low intensity is a more accurate way to describe it. The Dream Machine has been my first and last and always.

Gustafsson: I've been working on The Machine full time, for most of the development. There's been moments during production when we put The Machine on hold to go do commercials or whatever, but we haven't had to do that for a while. That's been a real blessing, to be able to get lost in the woods together.

Since we both work from home, we have a really low burn rate. And since we started selling the game once chapter one and two had been completed, there's been a slow stream of revenue helping us complete the game. It's not optimal to release a story based game this way. Players tend to forget the story if there are year long breaks in-between installments. But this is the only way a game like this could ever have been made.

Did you ever think of giving up? What were those low moments like?

Zaring: Not really, There have been moments where things felt rough, and I allowed myself to fantasize about having a regular job again. However, we decided early on that this would be for better or worse. We had to create something out of pure lust and integrity. That's easy to say, but I'm quite proud that we managed to get to the end—delivering this baby to the world. Now that we reached the finale, I can't crawl back up in The Machines' womb, to feel snug and secure insulated from the troubles of the world. I'm going to miss that.

Gustafsson: Since we started selling the whole game right off the bat, long before early access was an established term, we never really had a choice. Once we sold people the entire game, we sealed our fate. If we'd bailed after that, we would've been those guys.

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