// PC GAMER — GAMING
One of Kerbal Space Program's biggest inspirations was a promotional Flash game for Top Gear: 'That was the most similar game to KSP that I could find back then'
The creator of KSP talks us through what's on his PC, from Full Throttle to Old School Runescape.
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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?"
Felipe Falanghe got into PC gaming by playing Flight Simulator 4 on his dad's laptop. "I remember having no idea what I was doing," Falanghe says. "Me and my brother, we were just figuring it out and playing it on the keyboard and trying to make it go."
It was through games like Flight Simulator, as well as The Sims, that Falanghe got into modding, which started him on his journey to game developer. That happened in 2010, while Falanghe was working at the marketing firm Squad, a job he disliked and decided to leave during an intense array of projects: "They said 'If you help us these next couple of months, we'll let you make your game here,'" he recalls. "I was like 'That's not true. That doesn't happen to people … but what do I have to lose?'"
The result of this fateful decision was Kerbal Space Program, a unique rocket science simulator that is one of PC Gamer's highest-rated games. "I was always working with this idea that for all I know next week this is over, so let's do anything I can under that assumption," he says. "It would be unthinkable to pitch the entire thing that KSP became to a normal game studio."
Falanghe now runs his own development company—Floating Origin Interactive—where he's working on several projects. But he took a break from those to show me around the digital launchpad of his Steam library. We discussed new remakes, old MMOs, and the triumphant return of a PC gaming legend.
That would be Oblivion, the remastered version. It's actually been really good. I don't remember playing the original back in the day. I didn't get very far into it. Something else probably grabbed my attention and pulled me away. But I remember feeling really stuck. I just wanted to steal everything I could see, and then I became a vampire by accident.
That was problematic. But on the new one, I don't know. Maybe I'm more mature and can understand the story better. Or having played Skyrim and a bunch of Fallouts and Starfield and a bunch of other Bethesda games, going back to Oblivion now, I'm like "Oh yeah, this makes so much more sense now." You can understand the patterns a little better.
I'm a stealth archer, of course. Objectively the only correct way to play. The way I play it is maybe less conventional. I have it installed on my main computer here, but I stream it to the Steam Deck and play it on the couch because it's just so much more comfortable …. On the remastered version, I feel like I've finally got a good control setup that uses gamepad controls, so it's like smooth movement and all.