Welcome to TechTales,
a weekend feature on Digital Tech Explorer
that dives into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. In this interview,
TechTalesLeo
digs into the important questions: how tidy is your desktop, and what game will you never uninstall?
William Pugh grew up on a diet of shareware Mac titles, but his earliest PC gaming memory is engaging in
annelid antics in Worms 4: Mayhem—his first encounter with online multiplayer. That door led him into the
cartoonish arenas of Team Fortress 2, which introduced him to the Source engine mapping community.
Eventually, this brought Pugh in contact with fellow modder Davey Wreden, with whom he would write and design
The Stanley Parable—
2013’s gleeful poke at player agency.
Following The Stanley Parable‘s success, Pugh founded Crows Crows Crows, which specialises in
comic adventures such as
Dr Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald
,
the VR game
Accounting+,
and stealth sequel The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Pugh is currently working on his “next big game”
with Crows Crows Crows, as well as acting as producer on upcoming PS5 exclusive
Hunter’s Moon
,
which he describes as a “historical folk horror game.”
What game are you currently playing?
“I’m playing a lot of Deadlock. It’s become my third job. I’m a recovering Dota 2 addict and mostly
off now, but I never quite got Overwatch. I have a few hundred hours in it, and none of the other hero shooters feel
right for me. Deadlock, though, feels like Dota with a lot of the pointless clutter that accumulated in the MOBA
genre sliced away. Mana? Gone. Creep stacking? Gone.”
“They’ve done a good job of slicing out the unnecessary bits. The characters are fun. Maybe they won’t completely
mess it up when they get to monetisation. But right now, it’s kind of pure. There’s only one skin per hero.
Everybody feels like they’re working at it and discovering it. It’s really fun to play in a duo lane with a friend.”
What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?
“Me and my friend group are working our way through Big Walk. Obviously. What a game! House House
is too good.”
“It’s interesting—and no hate on anybody involved. I love it, I love every game developer, but as a PC gamer, I
saw the Big Walk announce trailer something like two years ago at some games event. Then Peak came out a
suspicious amount of time later, and I’ll admit my first thought with Peak was, ‘Man, this feels like Big Walk at
home, but shipped a year faster.’”
“The initial premise of Big Walk was local, play it with your friends, it has spatial audio, and you’re exploring
a world. Peak just seemed to copy that in every regard. Then Peak spawned the whole ‘friendslop’ genre—I went
through calling it a walking simulator, but now it needs its own name—and I felt like Big Walk might get left
behind. I thought they’d missed the magic.”
“But wow! What a game! It has to be game of the year for real. It’s really special. They took their time with it.
They didn’t get spooked by everything moving ahead. It has gameplay that seeps into the way you talk to each other,
and it’s really beautiful.”
“Don’t get in your head, boys. Make a sequel. Make Big Walk 2. Just make Bigger Walk. Don’t think about it too
much. It’s a winning formula.”
What is the oldest game by release date currently installed on your PC?
“Maybe Team Fortress 2. That’s perma-installed on my computer.”
“Where to begin? I’ve won a
Saxxy award
that I still have in my Steam inventory. It turns people gold. It’s a replacement for every class’s base melee
weapon. So I tend to play Engineer and Spy. Those are my two main dudes. I have 1,583 hours in there. I was an
idler for the first round of hats. I used the idle program. I admit it. I’ve served my time, and I’m sorry to all
the people who played normally and got hats the normal way. If it makes anything better, I’ve never got an unusual
hat, despite those 1,500-plus hours and super-limited Saxxy award.”
“I’ve been playing it since 2008. It’s what got me properly into mapping, which is what got me properly into
working on The Stanley Parable. It’s just one of my great favourites. It’s probably my game of all time. Loads of
people felt this way, and, like I said with Worms, this kind of just levelled it up. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s a whole
team of people working together.’ You could speak online. I was part of a community server that did trial runs for
maps. So you could make a map, a work-in-progress thing, and they put it on the server and people could play it.
That community-based stuff was incredible.”
“It’s a bit messy now. They lost some of the art style along the way. Going back to it, public matchmaking can be
rough. You’ll hear people on voice that are just awful. But in terms of games being made as pieces of art that are
also spaces for human beings to connect with each other, have fun, and blow off some steam, it’s a perfect 10 for
me.”
“I appreciate what they’re doing with Deadlock. It’s great. But what we really need is Team Fortress 3, and I’ll
die on that hill.”
What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?
“Dota 2 is 1,603 hours. I want to say TF2, but it’s not true. It’s Dota 2. It’s like a drug.”
“It’s interesting because no other game comes close to that volume of time. But if you ask me, ‘Did you have a
good time playing Dota 2?’ The answer is ‘no.’ The answer is ‘that game was brutal.’”
“My teammates were feeding. They weren’t supporting. When I was supporting, my carries weren’t carrying. People
were out of position, diving without purpose, or making item picks that made little sense.”
“Even thinking about it now, I have to turn my fan on. I’m getting a little sweaty and a little irritated. I’ll
say it: Dota 2 was frustrating. If you’re good at the game, maybe you should have a life, too. It also helped
start this whole AI debate; if you remember, one of OpenAI’s earliest experiments was
a bot that could beat a pro.”
“It’s not a game made of love. It’s a game fuelled by hate and a desire to conquer. It’s like chess. I played
chess as a child, and there are sweaty people who play chess. But at least you’re not playing chess with people
and then, when you make a mistake, they get on voice and say, ‘You’re messing up. Stop wasting an hour of my
life.’”
“But I was never any good, which is the sad part. You spend 1,600 hours of your life and you’re still not
actually good at it. What a frustrating game. In a typical interview, someone might say, ‘I’ve spent 300 hours in
this game I love. When I had a personal tragedy, playing it helped me get through it.’ For me, it’s: ‘Dota 2, I
hate it.’”
“This is my last thing about it. The reason it’s appealing is that it is so complex and taxing that it takes 100%
of your brain power. You cannot be thinking about other things while you’re playing. It’s like being handed a
five-dimensional Rubik’s cube and sitting there solving it for an hour. That is the good thing about it. If you
want to be truly distracted, your brain can’t be elsewhere if you’re playing Dota 2.”
What game will you never, ever uninstall?
“Probably TF2. I’m just a Valve fanboy.”
What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?
“Basically
Blender.
10 out of 10 for Blender. It’s open source and free.”
“We need something like Blender for literally everything. I wish I was using Godot, but I’ve sunk too much time
into Unity in my career. The dev cycles on the games I work on are long, so for the next thing I might look into
Godot, but it will still be a while.”
“Generally speaking, a lot of software in the game dev pipeline gets controlled by a company that wants to
generate revenue in perpetuity through licenses. Anything I’ve been using that isn’t Blender—in the sense that
it’s community-run and open source—is something I want to move away from in five or ten years. I don’t want to use
a rare interview to promote something that feels locked in.”
“The point of open-source software is that you own it forever. If you want to make changes, you can. It’s a
community-led, grassroots approach. Photoshop is losing the war, and many other 3D packages are losing the war to
Blender. I love to see that. Big companies want to lock you in and raise what you pay, but as long as open-source
software keeps improving and people who love making art work with it, it gets stronger. That weakens the premise
of subscription-based software models. And that puts power in the hands of the people actually making art, and
that’s the best thing.”
“So it’s anything open source. Blender is incredible. The work the Blender team does is fantastic.”
How tidy is your desktop screen?
“Not.”
“I’ve never been a tidy guy, so my desktop is never tidy. I’m a big ‘New Folder 3’ kind of guy. I used to have all
my passwords in plain text on my desktop. It’s just messy.”
“I’m a weird one in the sense that I think I’ve got everything that I’ve ever had on a PC since 2005 on physical
hard drives. So one day—I wanted to say, ‘One day I’ll put it all in a museum.’ But that’s such an egotistical
statement. So instead, I’ll be like, ‘One day it’ll be used to convict me of all my internet crimes. All the
trolling I’ve been doing.’”
“It’s all my old Flash cartoons. All the weird stuff I was making when I was a child, all my old maps, all this
kind of stuff. I’d just feel so sad if I lost that. I think everyone peaks artistically when they’re 17, and
you’re just out there trying to recapture it. You’re just wanting to make stuff because it’s cool and because
that’s what you’re into. There’s a purity to art you make when you’re a teenager.”