So, we all know Gone Home is an emotional game about a coming home after being away for a long time. What we didn’t know was how drastically different the game could’ve been if the team had a bigger budget or had more staff.
In an interview with IGN, Steve Gaynor revealed the original pitch for Gone Home. The game would have taken much more inspiration from Bioshock and System Shock since that’s what most of the team at Fullbright had previously worked on, it would have taken place in the home of a “crazy inventor” where each room was guarded by robots that aren’t too happy to see you. The only way to unlock the rooms was to enter a digital space and progress through it to unlock more space in the physical house.
The team at Fullbright quickly figured out how much work this would be and decided against it, they wanted to keep the simplicity and claustrophobic nature of the house though so they changed the story around and kept the house.
While they took the route of a more grounded game, Gaynor has teased that the game is set in the same universe as System Shock and Bioshock.
Gone Home debuts on console this Tuesday for Xbox One with new features like a commentary mode that provides commentary from the developers as you play.
Cade is a games journalist, Gaming Writer at ComicBook.com. They contributed 108 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, and Xbox news: served as Editor-in-Chief at GameZone before joining ComicBook.com.