“To say we had much idea of what we were doing back when we started would be a bit of a lie,” admits Bishop.
Their impetus was simple but clear: “We just wanted a new Dungeon Keeper game.” It took a while to truly get going, as most people were young and inexperienced, and the tools which power so many of today’s smaller games just weren’t ready yet – let alone the new funding models which could make ideas a reality without needing publisher backing. “People were initially talking about it six, seven years ago on this site, and it’s just slowly, slowly grown since then,” Bishop explains. I have little doubt that, even this many years on, the game that Bishop once referred to as ‘Dungeon Keeper 3’ remains this team’s life. Booze, pizza and boardgames abound, there are a host of powerful-looking PCs on the downstairs floor, and it’s a place I’d give my right arm to live in, but at the same time I can see how its being a workplace is preventing it from being a home too. “The entire existence of the team and the project formulated on a Dungeon Keeper fansite,” he tells me in the cavernous kitchen of the enormous Brighton house which seven Subterranean staff (and a few partners) now both live and work in. While he and Subterranean Games’ impending unofficial remake/sequel War for the Overworld is very much a job, it’s also the culmination of a passion project almost a decade in the making. Young, thin, bespectacled, dressed in a Reddit t-shirt with a now-month-old Rezzed wristband and a first edition Pebble watch on one wrist, his manner quietly confident but without evident arrogance, the Brighton, UK resident is about as far a cry from my mental image of the executives who decide the fate of the official Dungeon Keeper as it’s possible to get.
He leads a studio which has reached as many as 20 members, he’s received £200,000 in Kickstarter pledges, he’s had Peter Molyneux’s blessing and an implicit agreement that rightsholder EA would look the other way, he's got original narrator Richard Ridings onboard and tomorrow, all being well, it all comes to fruition. The 22-year-old is on the verge of releasing what is intended to be the first faithful follow-up to beloved strategy/management/Imp-slapping title Dungeon Keeper in 16 years. War for the Overworld creative director Josh Bishop uses the word ‘ridiculous’ quite a bit.
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