Bennett Foddy, designer of QWOP and Baby Steps, is obsessed with friendslop games and won’t uninstall Baldur’s Gate 3, even though he’ll probably never finish it: ‘It was too big and so I stopped’

Bennett Foddy first encountered games on a ZX Spectrum at the age of five, an experience that made him “ravenous for games on all platforms”. Graduating to the Commodore Amiga, Foddy eventually encountered PC gaming through getting lost in Zork on a loaner computer brought home by his parents from work, and playing NetHack with his sister. “My sister had printed out all the game FAQs on dot matrix paper,” he says. “That was a formative gaming experience for me.”

In 2006, while pursuing a career in academia, Foddy began teaching himself programming. Two years later he released QWOP, the ragdoll-physics running game that became an online sensation. The unusual control scheme and physics-based slapstick of QWOP would become a signature of Foddy’s games, further explored in 2011’s GIRP and 2017’s Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

Foddy’s most recent game is Baby Steps, the open-world hiking simulator co-created with Gabe Cuzillo and Maxi Boch. A six-year-long project that painted the ideas behind QWOP onto a much larger canvas, it was a creative risk that has ultimately paid off for Foddy & co. “We were worried that people wouldn’t get the ideas we were putting in there, that it would come off as a rage game,” he says. “[But] it definitely resonated, so I feel creatively happy with that.”

Foddy is currently exploring ideas for his next project. But he took some time out to guide me through the rugged virtual pathways of his PC. We stumbled along the unfamiliar slopes of gaming history, before collapsing at the apex of modern CRPGs.

What game are you currently playing?

I’m in this period of time [where] I guess I’m still recovering from burnout from a pretty intense six-year project. I’ve been dipping in, I’ve been playing a lot of stuff as it comes out, but not much is catching my attention or engaging with me long term.

The thing that I keep coming back to, where my gaming hours are going at the moment, is I’ve been playing Brogue, which is an open source roguelike game. It’s getting on in years, but this is an exciting week for roguelikes, because NetHack five just came out, the first point release for NetHack in fifteen to twenty years or something like that.

Brogue is different than NetHack in that it’s heavily automated. You can press X on your keyboard and it automatically plays itself until there’s a decision to be made. And so it’s kind of like a slot machine … and I find that’s really good if I’m in a low brain [mode, and] don’t have a lot of effort to bring to playing a game.

I don’t think I’d ever make a roguelike. I made a little mod of Brogue that was for two players simultaneously. But it’s bad, so it will never get released. Turns out waiting for the other person to move—or like, you can let people move whenever they want, but then the other player is advancing all of the monsters—is not a good idea.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

There’s a website that I love called weloveit.io, which I recommend to people. It has a visual list of every single Steam release, along with some screenshots and a one-line description, and you can just see a firehose of everything that’s coming out. And you can filter it … I like to look at games that have really positive reviews, but only less than 100 reviews, but also games that have more than 15,000 reviews.

Yesterday, I played a game called Subfloor. It’s like a friendslop horror game—I use that term with love …. You’re going into a dark space and trying to get trash and bring it back for selling it and taking pictures. It was kind of interesting. I enjoyed playing it with a friend, but now I’ll move on to the next one.

I’m interested in big trends right now. You definitely feel that friendslop is still very big, and I think it has a lot of room in there. I don’t actually think it’s a genre, it’s more a production style, or a production constraint. Friendslop, to me, is a multiplayer game that’s made scaleable because you make technical choices that put very little strain on servers. You don’t need dedicated servers because you design the game so it’s played with friends.

Then, if you have to scale it from zero players to 20 million players like they did with Peak or Lethal Company, you’re not screwed. You look at these competitive shooters, like triple-A releases. If they’re not making a certain amount of money right out of the gate, they have to kill the whole project.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

Another thing that I got interested in lately, I was thinking about Tetris. I was reading about the history of that. And one of the things that’s interesting is that after Alexei Pajitnov made Tetris, people don’t know this but he’s an incredibly prolific designer.

He’s made so many games, and it’s gonna sound egotistical to say this … but I can’t help as a game designer, identifying with his problem, which is that he made this little game almost by accident, Tetris, in ’85 or ’84 or whenever it was made, and struggled to really recapture that.

[So] I’ve been playing a game called Shawl. Its original name is in Russian. He made it in 1986 and it’s a DOS game you can find on free websites. It’s the closest in intent to Tetris in staying very abstract and trying to look for that compelling gameplay again.

I definitely sympathise. The oldest game I’m known for is QWOP, a game that I made almost as a gag, or very quickly anyway, in a week or two in 2008, and it took me years of reflecting to be able to understand what resonated for people about that. Because I wasn’t setting out to make something like that, that would work in the way it did work.

I love some of his old games that are not Tetris, but Shawl is not good. But to me, there is something fascinating here. And I would love one day to hear the full history of these designs.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

I was looking at this. It says I have 300 hours in Dark Souls 2, and it says I have 300 hours in Elite Dangerous. But I think those are both fake numbers because I used to leave my computer on at my office at NYU … the first one that I think is correct, it says I have 280 hours in Noita.

Every now and again, somebody makes a game that’s like ‘Oh shit, that’s for me.’ Right? It’s got an aesthetic that feels like the old freeware DOS games that I used to love. It’s obviously inspired by the Japanese falling sand games that were on the web back in the day. But I think it’s also inspired by that game Liero, which I think also may be Finnish.

I really, really love it, and I’m so impressed by it. Petri [Purho] has given some talks about this, but it’s such a hard thing to do. When there’s so much chaos in the system, it’s so hard to control that as a designer. I played an early version of Noita, maybe 10 years before it finally came out. And it was like ‘You’re a wizard, you’re casting spells that turn every piece of dirt on the screen into flammable gas and then everything catches fire.’ To be able to make a game that’s not just always blowing up out of that is an incredible achievement.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I’m not sentimental about this stuff, but if I look at my actual Steam, I can see a game that should have been uninstalled, but is not uninstalled. It’s Baldur’s Gate 3.

I liked that game a lot, but here’s what happened to me. Got a lot of enjoyment out of Act 1 and 2. Then [in] Act 3, I got daunted. It was too big and so I stopped. And that was a really long time ago now, but I also don’t feel like I can be done with it, right? I’ve got all these characters, I’ve got all this progress, and it doesn’t feel good that I’m leaving it there, so it’s probably going to stay installed on the computer.

What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?

The one that I’m most fond of is Substance Designer, which is a piece of software that’s designed for making materials that you then paint onto photorealistic characters. That’s the point of it. But what it actually is, is a 3D oriented visual programming language for making an image that you like. And to me, it’s been useful for so many different things.

Weirdly, Photoshop and all the other Photoshop competitors that are out there are annoying to use for games purposes. In trying to cater to visual designers and photographers, it’s just not technical enough for a video game … you need something that’s nerdier. And so nerdy Photoshop for me is Substance Designer. It’s not meant for that purpose. But it’s just fantastic.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I used to care about this a lot, and [it] was either really organised or it was fastidiously empty. But I feel like both Windows and Mac have, over time, de-emphasised the desktop massively. You don’t use it for launching programs. You certainly don’t use it for accessing files. It’s not really for anything.

And so Steam becomes your desktop. Or the Start menu becomes your desktop. Or the search bar is your desktop. It’s very much a residual part of an operating system. So I can’t really tell you how tidy my desktop screen is because I don’t see it.