// PC GAMER — GAMING
William Pugh, co-designer of The Stanley Parable, has over 1,600 hours in Dota 2: 'It's not a game made of love. It's a game fuelled by hate and a desire to conquer'
The founder of Crows Crows Crows 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?"
William Pugh grew up on a diet of shareware Mac titles like 1993's Scruffy versus the Invaders from Mars, but his earliest PC gaming memory is engaging in annelid antics in Worms 4: Mayhem—his first encounter with online multiplayer: "I remember playing that for the first time with random matchmaking," he says. "I think it was a 1v1 or whatever, and you're face-to-face with a complete stranger … I remember that being a kind of door opening for me."
That door would lead Pugh into the cartoonish arenas of Team Fortress 2, which in turn 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, and a remake of Wreden's mod of the same name.
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 acting as producer on upcoming PS5 exclusive Hunter's Moon, which he describes as a "historical folk horror game". But he took a break from all that to guide me along the yellow adventure line running through his Steam library.
I'm playing a lot of Deadlock. It's my third job. I'm a recovering Dota 2 addict. I'm mostly off now. But the thing is, I never quite got with Overwatch. I must have a few hundred hours in Overwatch. None of the other hero shooters kind of work for me. But Deadlock is like Dota, but with a load of the pointless crap that's just accumulated in the MOBA genre taken out. Mana? Bye-bye. Creep stacking? Bye-bye.
A lot of the useless rubbish, they've done a good job of slicing that out. The characters are fun. Maybe they won't completely screw it up when they get to monetisation on it. 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.
Me and my friend group are working our way through Big Walk, obviously. Damn! What a game! House House, they're too good.