The clock struck two the moment I sat down to interview George Morgan, senior marketing manager at Vampire Survivors developer Poncle, and I witnessed the work that goes into a DLC announcement in real time. Hurried text messages, one eye glued to a phone, and the palpable excitement at finally being able to speak aloud four fantastical words - Tides of the Foscari.
This joy was infectious, and it’s easy to see why. Two days previous, the team at Poncle met up in person for the first time as a full group - the company has embraced remote work, and the BAFTAs provided a perfect excuse to meet up. If that wasn’t enough, the awards ceremony would turn out to be a roaring success, with Vampire Survivors clinching not only the award for Best Game Design but also the top prize, Best Game.
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They didn’t expect to win. For some of them, they could seewhyVampire Survivors was nominated and might win, but no one dared to hope they would pick up Best Game. “Last night, hearing [the nominations being read out], I thought, ‘What is going on’?” Morgan says. “This whole thing is some trip, but the most fun trip.” He goes on to express his wonderment at meeting Christopher Judge, who congratulated the team on their successful night after picking up the award for Performer in a Leading Role. “I couldn’t stop laughing; when someone asked how I felt, I just laughed,” says Morgan through stifled, joyous laughter.
The future of Vampire Survivors looks to be steady, with not even two BAFTA wins altering its course. “We see our paid DLC as massive packs filled with lots of ideas that we have, things that wouldn’t fit into an update,” Morgan says. Vampire Survivors is a passion project, first and foremost, and it doesn’t look like its successes will be causing any gazes to get lofty.
Vampire Survivors does a great job of evoking an incredibly retro feel that emulates pre-millennium arcade games. Despite this, it doesn’t feel like a game that could have been made even ten years ago - it’s a mishmash of obliquely modern game design philosophiesblended with old-school graphics. Morgan puts the game’s success down to its incredible level of accessibility, which allows even non-gamers to get some enjoyment from it. Even Morgan’s mother plays it! “She doesn’t play games,” he says. “She knows Monkey Island and that’s about it. But she’s got Vampire Survivors on her phone.”
This devotion to accessibilityextends to the game’s patch notes, with updates coming with frank, explicit instructions on how to unlock everything added. These things are typically obfuscated in other games, but in Vampire Survivors, the goal is to let players have fun exactly the way they want. This goes some way to explaining why there is an abundance of cheat codes, which evoke those old days while also allowing players to avoid the underpowered first hours of the game. Morgan relates that when he first played Vampire Survivors, before he got hired by Poncle, he found the achievements, which tutorialise and hint at the game’s unlock system, very useful.
At the end of the interview, I took the opportunity to ask Morgan if there was any video game he’d love Vampire Survivors to cross over with, and while the answer was initially an emphatic “No comment,” he did let on that in his heart of hearts, having a character from Destiny come over to the pixelated battleground would be his choice. From the sounds of it, everyone on the team has their ideal crossover targets in mind, so it’ll be interesting to see if that’s something they explore in the future. With two BAFTAs under their belt, they certainly have room to play around.
Tides of the Foscari releases on April 13.
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