// PC GAMER — GAMING
Jordan Thomas, director of BioShock 2, played Path of Exile for over 7,000 hours while working on co-op horror game The Blackout Club: 'I was essentially awake all the time'
The co-founder of indie studio Question guides us through the games on his PC.
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Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like "How tidy is your desktop?" and "What game will you never uninstall?"
Jordan Thomas grew up during the shareware era of PC gaming, fed a steady diet of free game demos by his father. "This is embarrassing in a way, but the first one I remember connecting to enough to do drawings at school—and it's so immature—but it's old Commander Keen," he says. "It was a quick segue from that into Wolfenstein and Quake. So weirdly, Commander Keen was a gateway drug into darker games that would then become my focus for a very long time."
Indeed, Thomas' debut in the games industry was dark in the most literal sense, as he was hired by Ion Storm Austin to work on Thief: Deadly Shadows. There, Thomas built that game's most famous level, The Shalebridge Cradle.
Following Ion Storm's closure, Thomas moved to Irrational, where he led the design of BioShock's Fort Frolic before moving to 2K Marin and directing BioShock 2. After working on BioShock Infinite, Thomas founded the indie studio Question, creating games like The Magic Circle, The Blackout Club, and South Park: Snow Day.
Question's most recent game is The Killing Stone, a dark roguelike deckbuilder inspired by Shakespearean drama which has just launched out of early access. "It's set in the 17th century, and you can play it in 17th century authentic dialogue—so it's for the real sickos," Thomas says. "It's a series of very strange, deckbuilder-with-a-twist style challenges, where you're trying to un-curse a family's decks, which is pulling sins out of their souls, sins that they inherited from their matriarch."
Thomas took a break from Shakespearean sin-eating to show me around the water-cooled pleasure district of his Steam library. We talked about Hellraiser's hidden influences, immersive sims' hidden comedy potential, and how Path of Exile helped Thomas survive development of The Blackout Club.
I've spectated my friend's playthrough of Hellraiser: Revival, and now I've just started it myself. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Hellraiser fan from way back, and this is the most lurid possible incarnation of this. But I am really interested in the idea of a decaying relationship in non-Euclidean space, and the people who made this game get that. They're doing it with the chassis of another game that I loved and that fell away. And oddly, I didn't expect that to arrive as a Hellraiser sequel, but that was Condemned.
I prefer melee to shooting for many reasons. I've long since reached saturation point with guns in this country and in my life, so I moved into melee and stayed there. But there wasn't a lot available in first-person [in 2006]. Condemned was right up my alley, and I still would have loved to do a sequel to it or something.