Not anymore. It had collapsed. This is nightmare fuel for a climber. This is how you're going to die. I remember being so scared that I was negotiating with myself. If I got any more scared, if it got any worse than what I just been through, I was just gonna cut the rope and just kill myself.
And I was serious. It was the sense of being glad to be alive. And that sentence doesn't do it justice. I don't think anything has been quite as terrifying - not Everest, not anything in the army, not plenty of near-death experiences. Hall was literally scared to death - a kind of fear so overwhelming that choosing the moment he died felt preferable to the threat of it.
But when the thing you're fearful of comes from within you, it's so much more terrifying. I don't mind being scared. I like being scared. But not that kind of scared. And we kind of are. Icarus creates co-op sessions for up to eight players and asks them to scavenge what they can within a time limit.
If they make it back to the pods before that time is over, they escape with their goods and can use those goods to unlock new tech that makes subsequent runs easier, but without ever losing that thrill of the first few hours.
Each time they leave, the world state resets. By breaking into sessions, you have all those base survival mechanics - [hunger, oxygen, shelter, etc] - as well as the usual stuff like bleeding and all sorts of modifiers and buffs and debuffs. But we give you a way to sort of repeat it again and again and again. By sessionising it, it means we can throw things at the player that otherwise, we might not have been able to. One of these things is destruction. When a storm rolls up in Icarus, you better hope your shelter is fortified because a violent alien wind can rip a building apart.
Icarus physically models its structures so anything you build needs to also be able to support its own weight, and you better hope that bridge you made can handle you driving a vehicle across it. Working this way also helps RocketWerkz deal with what Hall considers two of the biggest issues with the survival game genre. Sessionising it helps us address that, breaks the world and chunks, breaks what you're doing into chunks. And the second one is the progression breaking in terms of scale.
So there's the game economy and your survival game - Minecraft or Ark. And after a while, they take you across that tipping point, and it's just not fun anymore, because you're not surviving. And that was really the mass driver behind sessionising. The biggest challenge with this approach, however, is that the game needs to make those initial footfalls onto a planet feel fresh each time.
Rather than using procedural generation - Icarus opts for hand-crafted, tailored maps inspired by good level design in other genres - the hope is to make those early actions feel satisfying each time. Cutting down a tree needs to feel good, hence that dynamism and risk with a felled tree potentially becoming a thing you need to survive.
The same goes for mining, building, and any other action the player is asked to repeat with each drop. If the team can make the mundane feel satisfying while wrapping it up in an intoxicating progression loop, it could potentially work. Hall cites Escape from Tarkov as an example of something similar in terms of structure. Tarkov takes the battle royale formula and gives it purpose. Icarus wants to be the Tarkov of survival games, and sessionising is key. And they tend to do that because gamers want content.
How can we really make the sense of chopping down a tree enjoyable? Balance is obviously very important, but it has to feel right. In Icarus, you can still unlock the means to make life easier in those early hours. But if you miss the window to escape, all the equipment you took down will be lost along with your character, unless someone else in your session brings it back for you.
But why trees at all? This is a survival game about landing on an alien planet during a sci-fi gold rush - a setting that could allow for all sorts of weirdness. The further you push on, the richer you can get, but the more crushing your defeat becomes if you fly too close to the sun.
However, there are things that are much harder to replicate on a flat-screen. But waiting out a storm in a game? Don't do it. It's really boring. When he returned after his short army sabbatical to start work at Bohemia, "I'd already made most of DayZ," he says.
He played for 30 minutes and then we saw a 'such and such is dead'. It was awesome! I wonder who that guy was. He would have heard nothing about that game. He would have known nothing about it, and he played for 30 minutes! It was just the feeling you got from it. I hadn't had that feeling doing other stuff, and it was so much more powerful than I had thought it was going to be. Hall had been building DayZ in the evenings and at weekends, sacrificing any spare time because he only believed he'd be at Bohemia for six months.
Online friends helped him test it, but it was only after that almost imperceptible launch he told Ivan Buchta about DayZ. Buchta was busy making Arma 3 so he put it, initially, to one side, until his curiosity got the better of him a day or two later. DayZ was blowing up, and I was tipped off that Hall wasn't happy. He wanted to capitalise on the mod's success, and build it quickly into a standalone game that didn't require Arma 2.
But for whatever reason, Bohemia wasn't backing him, and I heard he was thinking about taking the game elsewhere. The issue was, Bohemia was full on, deep into developing Arma 3, and every time we would make a plan, the plan would be based on what it looked like then. Nobody guessed, and nobody could have guessed, that it would have reached the ridiculous heights that it did.
As the numbers changed, so did the offers, from working full-time on the mod to working with a couple of other people and building it into paid DLC. By July there were half-a-million players, and by August more than 1 million. Arma 2 was one of the best-selling games on Steam, and Hall was negotiating from a position of power. They approached me about buying the whole concept, so I actually assigned the whole rights to them, tied in with royalties and all that kind of stuff.
They signified something more than contractual obligations, too - they were Hall giving himself over to the whirlwind of DayZ, something he couldn't hope to control. DayZ obliterated that life - like, just gone. It's totally different," he says, "and my whole life is tied to this one thing. The relationships with my friends, family: all different. From that moment on, never the same again.
He had ideas coming out of his ears - brilliantly wacky but realistic ideas such as disease spreading through players' vomit and faeces. Then he said something he'd go on to regret: "It has to be out before the end of the year.
It wasn't; expectations were set but not met. All the work under the hood wasn't amounting to anything tangible. That's just morale-debilitating. It was getting to him. The paranoia of a copycat beating him to the punch almost turned to reality. Every passing month the DayZ standalone wasn't released, the pressure mounted. He'd tell his Reddit community he was sorry and that it was his fault, and he'd blame himself and heap yet more pressure on.
I didn't care how Arma was done: this is how we were going to do it. That was hard for everyone. Hall took a break from it all in his own style, taking a two-month sabbatical to climb the dangerous and iconic Mount Everest in April Even so, when DayZ standalone missed that original December deadline, he began to have second thoughts. Sure, it's bad for the project, but you've got to live your life, otherwise there's no point in doing it.
His way of dealing with it was by not thinking about it, so he didn't train, didn't prepare, and he bought all his equipment days before leaving for Kathmandu, while attending the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
After that, it was a plane back to the Czech Republic, wait 20 hours then out to Kathmandu. One member of the DayZ team, a climber, was genuinely convinced Hall would die up there. When the world found out about the Everest sabbatical there was backlash. DayZ was already late - was it also in trouble? Hall packed a satellite modem so he could work on the game from base camp, costing him a fortune as did the trip, incidentally , and DayZ dominated his thoughts always.
He thought he was hallucinating one day during a rare hold-up on the mountain, high enough to be wearing oxygen masks. Not only did he say that and recognise me, but he didn't even stop to talk!
He just took his mask off long enough to make some smart comment, the kind of thing you get on Twitter or Reddit, but he actually did it! It wasn't all fun and games. Hall passed a climber hanging, "dead or dying", from his rope, on the way to the summit. Hall himself started bleeding from his old Singapore injury on his ascent to the summit.
His toes numbed and he feared frostbite and, in all honesty, he imparts, he was prepared to sacrifice them. Had it been his hands, however, he would have turned back. He finally reached the summit in the early morning, at 4. But where better to get fresh perspective than on top of the world? I felt like I was more about the message than the result, because the message was easier to deal with than the result. I needed to refocus my priorities. I realised that I needed to just get it done, to not be so scared of failing with it.
He returned, scrabbled something together for E3 two weeks later, and with the clarity of fresh eyes said, "It's not fun.
We've still got a lot of work to do. He had a plan at last, and in December, he says, "it was finally fun". There were a couple of false starts, first on 4th December - the original internal launch date - and then for 10 days after. Right now? Hall had a phone call from Valve not long before I arrived telling him DayZ had been the only non-discounted game to dominate - "strongly" - the Steam chart during a winter sale.
And to think that Hall had once hoped DayZ would manage , sales - to date, it's sold more than 1. He hadn't missed the boat, hadn't messed it up - it was success at long last. The success has transformed Bohemia, a somewhat sleepy company now thrust front and centre on the gaming map. The DayZ project, not long ago a one-man mod, today has a person team - as well as a recently acquired 25 person studio and counting in Slovakia - most hired in the last year.
Significant investment has gone into laying the foundations for a long future for DayZ, but the bloated size of the project bothers Hall. And I'm obsessed with making a better game all the time. I always want It's the natural human Once you have something, you don't want it any more. I wanted to be better. But I already knew this. No matter what happens with DayZ - the Queen could come here right now and proclaim DayZ king of the universe, and I would still be unhappy with it.
His vision for DayZ has materialised twice. He doesn't have to convince anyone of the idea any more - it's out there, it's successful and it just needs tidying up, tweaking. Developing DayZ today isn't about forcing a vision into being, it's about picking which of the millions of features the vast audience want and implementing them. That's why he's walking away. The news that Hall would leave Bohemia and his active role in charge of DayZ, by roughly the end of the year, caused quite a stir.
The explanation he gave me, which I've already shared with you, was given during this same long interview. I don't think he expected, to a degree, some of the backlash he received. In his head it was no big deal, he'd moved on, and after all, he just wanted to go home and set up his own studio there. He's not abandoning DayZ; he'll always be involved to some degree, although naturally over time, and as his new pursuits occupy his mind, I'm sure he'll begin to slip away.
It caused a stir because to many people, me included, Dean Hall is DayZ - an association he'd orchestrated from the beginning, making sure he was front and centre every time the game was mentioned. Look at how he bulldozed the standalone deal with Bohemia, and look at the position he's in now - his name is almost as recognisable as the game's.
Financed and famous, there's an exciting future for Hall and the ideas he says he's already had for multiplayer, survival-themed video games. It's almost like a sickness, some of the games you want to make, you want to make them so bad you can't stop thinking of them, and I have to distract myself.
I really want to make those. He's certainly a chaotic influence at Bohemia that I don't think the studio can live with, nor as successfully without. But is he the pocket-Rocket of chaos he's so readily painted as?
I'm not so sure. I picture him as a man who's always had a plan - a blinkered horse with a course clear before him. A lonely horse, I sometimes think, but how could he run such an extraordinary race if he had life's little distractions in the way? Marek Spanel once told a Wired reporter that "Dean is part crazy".
But is he actually crazy? I'll leave you with this: "I'd quite like to do K2. But I'd probably only do that after I'd done a bunch of other things - so that if I died, I wouldn't be too bummed out. Sometimes we include links to online retail stores.
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