Over at Kotaku, Paul Walker-Emig has a wonderful piece on my first game as lead designer and writer, Discworld Noir. It’s called Discworld Noir: The Greatest Detective Game Ever Made, which is very flattering, especially since (as Paul admits) this game is mostly unknown, or otherwise forgotten. Here’s an extract from the start of the piece:

The forgotten Discworld Noir’s greatness hangs on a simple design element: the notebook. All the other artefacts of the hardboiled detective are there in this noir-inflected take on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: the trenchcoat and trilby protagonist Lewton wears, treading through the rain that forever hammers the streets; a femme fatale straight from the big book of archetypes; storylines and characters taken wholesale from the pages of Chandler and Hammett; a cool jazz soundtrack evocative of the golden age of the PI. But it is clues and deduction that define the detective. There is the notebook, and then everything else is superficial.

What’s more, Paul’s piece has flushed out some Discworld Noir fans from the woodwork! Here’s a tweet by Dave Gilbert* (The Shivah, The Blackwell Legacy, Emerald City Confidential) confessing that Noir was an influence:

This means a great deal to me, not only because Dave is a brilliant indie developer, but because I’ve always lamented not having influenced anyone else’s design work. The notebook in Noir, as Paul draws out, was a a big moment for me as a game designer and narrative designer, and I was always disappointed that it sunk without a trace. It seems this was not the case!

You can read the entirety of Discworld Noir: The Greatest Detective Game Ever Made over at Kotaku.

*Not that Dave Gilbert, the other one with the really amazing indie career.