By Ronald Gordon

Sam Barlow, the director behind Immortality and head of Half Mermaid, is an compelling man to interview. I got the chance to sit down with him over Google Meet for our Halloween Week series to hear about how he got his start in gaming and what Immortality meant to him as his most recent project. As an avid fan of movies and games early on, Sam was more than excited to talk about his experiences working on parts of the Silent Hill franchise, what inspires his works, and even Half Mermaid’s partnership with Netflix. I was enthralled during our conversation, hearing his words about what his Full Motion Video games are meant to achieve. After our talk, which you can read below and view on our YouTube channel, my appreciation for hard working game developers like Sam is even higher than it already was. 

HG: “Hey folks this is Harold Goldberg from the New York Videogame Critics Circle, and we have this awesome partnership with the people who make Immortality. We’re gonna have four or five big stories about the making of Immortality over the course of Halloween week and into Halloween. We’re with the head of the studio Sam Barlow and Sam is gonna be interviewed by our awesome senior intern Ronald Gordon. So guys I’m gonna sit back and enjoy the talk and we hope our folks at home enjoy the talk too. So whenever you’re ready Ronald, go for it.”  

RG: “So first off, Hi Sam! Name’s Ronald as you might’ve already known, and I’ll be the one conducting your interview and I’ve been taking a look at a couple of your social medias. Your LinkedIn, your  IMDB, your Twitter especially.”

SB: “Uh oh. I’m in trouble.” 

RG: “It’s okay, you’re not in trouble. I’ve been finding a bit of a common thread. Before we talk about Immortality I wanted to talk about your love of Movies, because you make that very apparent on your Twitter, and a couple of other places. So I wanted to ask if you have any favorite Directors/Actors, who might they be?” 

SB: “I mean yea I’ve always loved movies I think. I went through phases as I grew up, the constant has always been video games. Like I was lucky enough to be kind of first generation to have a very basic computer in my school but then I was really into painting and at some point I realized that people weren’t buying paintings anymore. And then I got really hung out into movies. I remember for the longest time I kept like a movie log, like a movie diary. Which maybe, that might’ve been on like a very primitive computer word processor at the time, and was like seriously into movies. Which was a lot harder back then because I was in a small village in England and so we didn’t have a cinema or an out cinema and we had three channels, maybe it was four, four channels on British TV back then and you’d have to set your video recorder going from the sort of Midnight to Three AM slot would be when they showed the weird movies. Growing up then, coming out of the 70’s, through the 80’s there was a run of British Directors who were particularly prominent and wild, or kind of known for being wild. So people like Ken Russel, Nick Rogue, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, and they were all extremely excessive visually and like with the stories they were telling and how they made their movies. All of these movies were just too much. Everything you know, being Ken Russels greatest movie The Devils is still pretty much, I don’t think it’s officially banned but it’s pretty hard to get hold of because Warner Brothers just don’t wanna release it. Cause they’re like, this movie is too much. Too dangerous.” 

RG: “That seems like a running theme of old movies. Of them being, oh yea they were something for their time but now? No.” 

SB: “Well The Devils is a great example where it was, at the time they didn’t want anything to do with the movie. And so it’s just continued. It’s one of those where you feel like “It’s 2022 guys, come on just put this up on some streaming site.” Like just let us get hold of this movie and they’re like “Urgh” But yea particularly Nick Rogue, who most famously made Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Bad Timing, he’s one that with the kind of games I’ve been making, he’s kind of the one I’ve gone back to most. Just the way he deals with, like most of his movies have this very nonlinear structure. It’s not just like Pulp Fiction where it’s like we’re gonna jump around at a few points, it’s like constantly from cut to cut, he jumps around in time and creates these very fragmented narratives. His obsession was with creating movies that would feel like how we would remember things, and he also got like quite intensely spiritual about it. Like he thought that through making movies and watching movies, if we get it right it could kind of access a deeper truth about our existence and kind of warp reality. So he was like really into it. I know when I started out in games, I’d talk a lot about [Alfred] Hitchcock if you wanna go kinda more old school. He was a Director who I took a lot from him when I was making games, even very traditional games, because as a Director his whole technique was understanding that the story of the movie was not the plot, it wasn’t the dialogue, it wasn’t the story of what happens in the movie almost. It was “what was going on in the audience’s brain?” so like his kind of mastery of suspense was all about playing the audience, giving the audience bits of information, setting them up, knowing what the audience would desire, and then surprising them or playing with that, and that was kind of something I took directly into video games because if you’re making a game-”

RG: “You should make it for the players.” 

SB: “Yea you’ve gotta be thinking, even more than like a movie or a book, what is the player trying to do, what are they thinking, what do they want, how do we make them want what we want, or how do we react to that. That to me is where the magic lies. I wanted to make a talk called “Alfred Hitchcock was the World’s First Video Game Designer.” Never got around to it.” 

RG: “Wow, that is interesting. You unironically answered one of my other questions which is how you got into gaming through movies and such, so it’s interesting how you had started off with the perspective of building up projects and ideas based on how the person experiencing them would do so. It’s interesting that you learned that from movies and Alfred Hitchcock. Steamrolling into games I noticed that your career led you to, at the beginning, work on Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and I haven’t seen much of it but I know a good bit about the Silent Hill franchise in and of itself and how influential it is in games and horror games especially, so I wanted to ask if you had any fond memories of Shattered Memories. What it was like, what the process was, whatever.”

SB: “Shattered Memories was a fun one. So I did two Silent Hill games, the first one, which was Silent Hill: Origins, was a project we were brought onto kind of halfway through, and it was not going well. We were tasked with trying to fix it quickly. So that is a game which is thoroughly mediocre like that is a straight up 6 or 7 out of 10 game and as someone that loves the Silent Hill Franchise, it’s not necessarily the truest and most beautiful expression of that franchise. BUT, given what we started with that was a phenomenal achievement. If I look back at every game I’ve made, the one where I’m proudest of the team was probably that one. And the world will never know, cause the world just sees the game that shipped and they’re like “Well that was a fun game”, and it’s like you have no idea we had six months or something to fix that game. At the time getting to work on Origins was incredible cause as someone who was interested in story telling, to Me Silent Hill was one of the top few gaming franchises. The opportunity that fell into our lap of getting to work on Silent Hill was incredible, but it was balanced out by the fact that we were having to make a not great game in that franchise. It was awkward because it was, before we came on, it was conceived of this being a prequel, which was a really really silly idea because Silent Hill 1 as a game tells its story through flashbacks. So there’s nothing to do with a prequel, everyone knows what happened, you don’t need a prequel. And they added this like they invented this character who was a Trucker, who because it was a prequel, we had to kind of introduce the idea that this Trucker that no one had every heard of is somehow integral to this core lore of Silent Hill. So that was like, on one hand it was a dream come true, on the other hand it was slightly uncomfortable. So after we’d shipped that because the people internally knew what a good job we’d done, we had the chance to do another Silent Hill game. There were a bunch of ideas that got bounced around, and lots of fun bits and pieces that I’ll skip for now.  The cool thing for Me with Shattered Memories was, because of some of these contract negotiations and things, it actually ended up that I had about six months before we pulled the team onto it to actually kind of design this game. At that time, and I imagine it’s still the case now, a project of that scale just kinda kicks off and everybody’s working and you have a full team or a reasonably full team and people are building things, level designers are doing stuff, everyone’s kind of rushing to make things. So as a Director and as a Writer it’s very hard to harness that and that’s all happening whilst you’re writing the story. So if you’re trying to tell a narrative game, and you’re writing the story as they’re actually building the story it’s like Urgh. Beautifully, with Shattered Memories, we had this period where for six months I got to just design this whole game. So everything that went into it attempted to be cohesive. We knew we had this very special ending that we wanted to deliver, and for that to work everything leading up to that had to kind of slowly build up toward that ending and contain the little clues and the little pieces. Because we had this space, I got to lay everything out and say look this is what’s gonna happen here, here, here, and here. Here are why the game mechanics work, this is why this game mechanic is gonna tie in to how we tell the story. So that was like an incredible, it was the only time in a larger development situation where I’ve had that freedom to be that thorough upfront. It’s something I’ve tried to replicate with my indie games. So that was great. And executing it and making it was fun. Funny memories I guess, these are not the deepest or most profound memories. One was when we did the motion capture, we had all sorts of fun with the motion capture, I remember we had an actor show up and he walked into the room, this was for auditions I think, walked into the room and I was kind of amazed. He looked just like our CGI character, down to the hair and everything. This was incredible. And then afterwards the Casting Director’s like “No no, he saw the concept art. He went out and got his outfit so that this wasn’t a coincidence, it was all deliberate.” He was a massive over actor so he didn’t get the job. I remember there was a sequence that there was a lot of, I’m trying to remember which movie we were inspired by. In Silent Hill the appearance of Wheelchairs is almost a cliche now, Silent Hill 3 did a lot of it. But I feel like if someone’s making a cheesy Silent Hill ref, they’re gonna put lots of abandoned wheelchairs around. So we wanted to run off on how the wheelchair would integrate, we had a sequence in which the main character has been in a horrific accident and wakes up in a wheelchair and actually turn it into gameplay. So there was a sequence where you’re pursued by monsters whilst operating this wheelchair which was using motion controls and it was a whole fun thing. One of our coders got really into it and he actually created a full physics simulation of a wheelchair. You were actually having to properly manipulate this wheelchair, and it was zero fun. You’d put people in this and be like now get through this hospital in this wheelchair and there are monsters coming and everyone would just panic. Panicking and trying to use this thing is-” 

RG: “It never works out.” 

SB: “We ended up putting invisible rails and actually guiding you which was very disappointing for the coder but worked better for people. I remember we had to motion capture the sequence in which at the end of it the character falls down some stairs on this wheelchair. In my head I’m like “look it’s CGI, it’s motion capture. When we get to that point we’ll just cut and they’ll animate this thing happening.” But the Motion Capture Director was really excited that day, he turned up and was like “We built the stairs! We’re ready to go! We have the wheelchair!” And I was like “What? Why are we throwing a guy down the stairs in a wheelchair?” 

RG: “For authenticity!” 

SB: “Yea it’d look better, it’d be easier to animate. Actually the actor that was doing, this was kind of back when you would have a body actor who would do the motion capture, and then you’d have a voice actor who would do the voice, and they were separate. So the actor who was doing the body performance also did stunts. I think he was also in the uhm he was at like Disneyworld in, you know the big shows like Waterworld? Those things? He had a regular gig doing that. So he was excited because he knew if he did a stunt he would get double pay. He was like “I’m happy. Throw me down those stairs.” I just remember standing there and being like “This could go horribly wrong and someone could get hurt.” But there were a lot of people on hand to make sure it went down well. I have vivid memories of throwing a guy down some stairs to get some authenticity.” 

RG: “Well from your oldest game, featuring a guy falling down the stairs, to your newest I wanted to finally move onto Immortality. I’ve played a little bit of a it, I haven’t fully finished it Harold has as well, it’s very interesting. I’ve taken a look at your other games, Telling Lies and Her Story, and I noticed that the scrubbing mechanics behind the FMV format is a big thing but Immortality is a much bigger game. So I wanted to know what, if anything, did you do differently with Immortality than the other two, in terms of the format. 

SB: “It’s a weird thing where, if you make something as weird as Her Story and then you do things that are in the same ball park but quite different. To my mind, Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality are significantly different. Each one has it’s own thing and structurally, story wise, mechanic wise, they tend to be quite different from each other. But because Her Story is so weird and out there, it looks like they’re very similar. If I was making a first person shooter and I was like, when Halo came along and they were like “It’s a First Person Shooter but you can only hold three weapons.” Everyone was like “Oh my God, game changer.” or Gears of War was like, “We’ve changed how the reload works,” It’s like “Oh my God, game changer.” It’s kind of interesting because if you have one of these bigger more mainstream genres where there are tons of games in it, you can tweak little things and that feels quite different. When I made Her Story, it was very much about having this idea of a new way of telling a story in a video game, and really this idea I think was there back then, but this idea of exploring a story as you would explore a map or a world. I love Zelda games, Metroid games, in those games you have your little character and you’re exploring the world and there’s a lot of freedom to where you can go. In Metroid its slightly more gated but you might get abilities that will unlock new parts of the map. There’s a lot, in both games, of backtracking of returning to areas, finding new things, having a different perspective or ability to navigate those things. So really with Her Story I was pushing myself to get rid of the idea of a controllable main character and then say what does it look like if we take a lot of those ideas and put them into the story itself. So people are exploring the story of Her Story in quite a free form way, they’re revisiting and rewatching things, they’re building a mental map of this story. As they unlock ideas and names and concepts, that is essentially like keys, or abilities that give them access to the deeper story. Then when I made Telling Lies I kind of allowed an amount of time to pass so Telling Lies was not or it didn’t feel like I’m making a sequel straight away or that I’m attempting to iterate on this idea. It was really coming back to Her Story and being like okay, now that I’ve forgotten the making of it, from the outside looking in what’s interesting about this game. I was really interested in that idea of exploring the story, specifically the idea of exploring video. What does it mean to make the act of exploring video more interactive, give you more control, kind of make it more expressive. With Immortality, early on we decided we wanted to tackle this idea of movies. Both previous games were not at all cinematic, they were not like movies. The kinds of footage, the way the footage was presented was very non-cinematic. When we started thinking about movies and the idea of deconstructing movies, of making people pay close attention to movies and how they’re made and why they’re made and these sort of things, the big thing we wanted to tackle was the idea of the Cut. What distinguishes movies as a medium really is the magic of the cut, that you can cut from a character’s face to something else and you’re inferring immediately what they’re thinking about that thing, where you can jump in time and space. That to me is the Magic of Cinema. And we wanted to make that into a game mechanic. Early on I think it was well this can’t be Final Cut: The Game. We don’t want to make a game that is about editing footage cause there’s something slightly tedious and prosaic about moving these things around, and if you were creating the cuts explicitly, putting two pieces of footage together, then there wouldn’t be the surprise and excitement as an audience member that you would get in a normal context. So we came up with the idea of this dynamic match cut where, at any point, the player could stop the footage, click on something and it will then cut to another piece of footage, another scene in which that person or item or idea kind of recurs. It’s a very expressive and powerful and free mechanic. You’re saying to the player “You can stop anything anywhere and click anything-ish.” Which is very personal. What do I think is clickable, what do I think is interesting to click, what do I think is aesthetically cool to click. I might kind of rewind slowly to get a nice freeze frame before I do my click. Then the game gets to surprise you by showing you where it goes. There is some logic to it, if I click on Marissa it’ll take me to a scene with Marissa in it but it might surprise me with what that scene is. That to me I think is very interesting in that this game, more than the other two, feels more like a dance between the player and the game. The player has a lot of control, “This is what I want to click on, this is what I want to explore.” then the game’s like” Ok, well here’s something else.” So this kind of back and forth is quite interesting and I think that’s definitely the biggest departure from the previous two, the extent to which it’s a little bit more unpredictable.” 

RG: “I can definitely tell that, playing through the game, it definitely seems like a very big mashup of something that’s meant to be a puzzle, finding where Marissa Marcel has disappeared to. I wanted to know if you have any favorite games or puzzles like that, where it really makes you think about how to unravel this task at hand, and any examples of that.” 

SB: “My go to references that I quote for this project a lot, on one hand there’s Zelda: Breath of the Wild which is a very different game.  But the fact that that’s one of the few Open World games that I think genuinely cares about its open world, when Nintendo says “Hey here’s this game. You can go anywhere.” They genuinely mean it and they want you to actually have fun going anywhere. Whereas so many open world games it’s like “Hey you can go anywhere but here’s a hundred map markers.” and in going from A to B, you’re almost on autopilot cause the thing that matters is the objective at Point B. Whereas for me the experience of the more paired back interface of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and just the implementation and the understanding that Nintendo has of game feel and the way they add frictions to world. That’s a game that’s genuinely you an interesting freedom, genuinely it’s rewarding your curiosity. That in an abstract way is definitely a quality I try to plug into. On the other hand, the thing we referenced a lot were the books of Gene Wolf. Gene Wolf is arguably, if I say it here then it’s a fact, the greatest American Fantasy writer, very unique. He wrote these books which were generally to some extent puzzles. I think his most famous book is “The Book of the New Sun” which is like a full volume, huge thing, thousands of pages. And when you read it, you’ll get to the end and you’ll be like “Okay, I think I kind of half think I know what happened in this book I’ve just read. I enjoyed myself, I half understand what happened, I’m not pissed about it because I feel like the author knew what was happening.” It’s there somewhere, it’s like an iceberg, you sense that it’s there under the surface, that there’s some logic to it all. If you see interviews with Gene Wolf he says “Yea I write these books and you need to read them like three or four times to truly get them and I think that’s a fun thing. I think books should be re-readable and that they should have these deeper mysteries.” And I love that for him. Gene Wolf is also the guy who invented the Pringle machine, so the little man with the mustache on the Pringle box is Gene Wolf. I love the idea of these things, my challenge in 2022 is I don’t have enough time in my life to read a four thousand page book and then read it another three times to understand it. So what we tried to do here is have the kind of layering that you get in a Gene Wolf novel, have this sense that there is a surface story that I’m understanding, but there is a deeper mystery and there are deeper questions about the character. Because it’s interactive, because you can jump around freely, rewatch stuff you watched before, obsess over it, it’s making it a bit easier. You’re not having to re-read all four thousand pages, you’re kind of in it. But definitely there’s a quality to a Gene Wolf book, what it feels like to be reading it where you’re kind of swept up in it but you always have questions. There’s always a little bit of confusion or questions that you have, but there is this sense that it’s there below the surface. That was definitely the thing we were trying to plug into.” 

RG: “Okay, that’s fully interesting. I don’t have a lot of time on my hands either, but I will try my best to investigate what Gene Wolf has done, because I’ve only heard about him here and there. Haven’t gotten into a lot of literature. 

SB: “You gotta read Fifth Head of Cerberus. That’s the, it’s not teeny it’s three novellas, I think it was his first big hit. But if you enjoy that one then that’s a good starting point for Wolf.” 

RG: “I’ll take note of it. Speaking of writing and scripting and things like that, I wanted to ask about the movies within Immortality. Ambrosio, Minsky, and Two of Everything, it seems very well put together. Did you have to spend a lot of time putting together a full synopsis and script for each of the movies?” 

SB: “Yea. Early on we kind of knew that there are quite a few TV Shows or Movies about the making of Movies or TV Shows, and a lot of them the fictional movies are always a little bit cheesy or played strongly for laughs. You never quite believe that that’s actually a real movie and that it completely makes sense. From the start we were like “We wanna try and make these movies feel like real movies” and part of that is doing all of our research, speaking to people who made movies at the time, so that they feel like authentic movies of their time. It was obviously a lot of the technical stuff that we were doing that is accurate. But the big one was well these need to actually be real movies, so we should have a full screenplay for each movie. That was a thing, early on mapping everything out was making sure we had essentially at one point a loose outline for everything. We had within that outlines for the fictional movies which we then shuffled around to reflect the shooting order cause we were making sure that the story of what’s actually happening behind the scenes is happening in parallel with the shooting of these movies. So it might be that the first or last scene of this movie do not happen in that order, so we had everything jumbled up to make sure that it all fit in properly. Played around with that and we would kind of unpack it to the writers of the movies handed off an outline as a guide of “well this is what should be in a fictional movie.” and they went away and wrote the full screen plays. I remember, some of the writers when we first spoke to them would get excited. They were like “Oh I don’t really know much about video games but the idea of writing for a video game is really exciting. It must be so exciting with all the choices and all the gameplay and everything.” and we were like “Woah woah stop! We shouldn’t have said video game. We just want you to give us a movie. Just do what you normally do, this should be a ninety page movie.” That was the ask and we really wanted it to feel, even for us, like these were found movies. As if we had just found these screenplays, found these movies lying around so we wanted that to always be buttoned up, so yea that was a huge part of the prep.” 

RG: “I honestly expected that, because the movies themselves seem well put together like I’d actually find those if I looked through a bunch of old VHS tapes or something. I noticed that it’s very easy to get lost in the game, especially when you start getting a lot of the scenes together and you’re trying to find the deeper meaning behind Marissa Marcel’s disappearance. So I wanted to ask what the overall thought process was behind the structure and if you started out with the player should be at least 90% lost and 10% figuring it out as they go along. 

RG: The game itself seems like a mashup of genres and plots, very easy to get lost in. What was the overall thought behind it when first putting the scenes together? Did you want the player to feel lost?

SB: “ I don’t know if it’s that precise, I think even going back to Her Story, the feeling I was going for was understanding that our brains-

RG: “They will wander.” 

SB: They are optimized and get excited by pattern recognition and making order from chaos. You can just throw random stuff at people and they’ll start to make a story out of it. Start to make a pattern. So I knew that that was interesting, Her Story started with the premise of it being a detective story or a police investigation and obviously those start with very broad questions, excessive information and possibilities, it’s all about giving shape to it. So that’s always been the flavor. I think a big leap I took with Her Story that I think paid off that often isn’t taken was to respect the audience and assume the player is smart. Not just smart but like, I think anyone right now, logging in and playing a game, probably has enough media literacy and experience of watching TV and Movies and stories and reading books and graphic novels, just so much experience of consuming stories that they have a high degree of ability to put these things together. For me it’s always about how much can we load up on the player. Because there’s a sweet spot where, to ask a lot of the player is to make them feel very involved. A good part of it as well is we don’t punish the player too much. A conventional video game, if you’re not getting it you’re gonna die and you’ll have to restart the level and it’s tedious. If you get lost in a Zelda or a Dark Souls, it can become quite punishing because you’re like “Urgh there’s so many places to go. Just tell me what to do next.” Whereas with these games generally even if you’re lost or confused you can make some kind of meaningful progress and we’re not gonna kill you or restart the game or be too punitive. I think that’s always been an important part of the technique here is to ask a lot of the player, push them to a point where they are very confused and have a lot of questions, but also be generous with the amount of content in a game, be generous with how little we’re gating them or punishing them.” 

RG: “I can very much tell that Immortality is a lot more open to a general public than more precise gamers who can flick a controller thumbstick. I wanted to ask since it’s known that Half Mermaid is partnering with Netflix and I wanted to know how important that was for Immortality in general being more open to people who can pick up a game and start playing. How much broader this can elevate the game to more people. 

SB: “It’s really exciting. Particularly as well when Her Story came out, part of the reason for me making it in the first place was seeing phone gaming explode. What was exciting even going back to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was we made that game on a Wii, and at that point the explosion in popularity of the Wii  meant you just had a lot more people playing. A lot of those people didn’t play conventional video games and that was exciting to me because there is a point where the games industry and gamers become very entrenched in specific genres “This should play exactly like this,” it becomes limiting. So it was exciting on Shattered Memories that we had all these people that didn’t have those expectations, that we had a control scheme that was more accessible. When I made Her Story, that was partly in response to phones. You just suddenly had millions of people who wouldn’t normally play games or identify as a gamer, had access to these devices and the control scheme was much more straightforward. Since then, phone gaming has kind of collapsed in on itself, and the experiences become very limited. Your ability to sell games if they are premium or story driven has really declined, so there was part of me that was really sad that it didn’t feel like there was gonna be a moment for Immortality to be on phones. So the fact that Netflix have come along and they’re attempting to put their stamp on phone gaming, that just alone was exciting. What I was really excited by was the cultural equivalency. Netflix saying “Well if you open up our app, it’s gonna say Movies, TV, Games, all on the same page.” and its gonna say “If you enjoyed the Jeffery Dahmer show, maybe you would like Immortality. Or you watched a bunch of David Linch, or you watched a Nick Rogue movie and you watched Stranger Things, you might like this game.” That’s really exciting, because for the longest time even if you go, Apple talk about games being art but, on an Apple device it’s still giving you a tab that says games and has a picture of a joystick. It’s very segregated and if I send people to download my games on Steam, to people that are not gamers it’s a very weird, different experience, “It’s all games and explosions.” So the idea that something like Netflix, which is very understandable to most people, as a place where I go to get stories, a place where I go to watch something entertaining, it’s a place where I might watch my favorite TV show or movies. For them to also be “Oh there’s also this interactive thing. This is Immortality. That looks kinda cool.” That’s very exciting to me. It’s very different from when I first started out playing games, games were a weird thing that existed in their own shop, and you had to get this specific specialist game magazine if you wanted to read about what was happening with games, to now be in a position where if I meet someone on the street likelihood is they play games. They watch TV, they watch movies and they play games, they’re on social media, it’s all part of their general entertainment dyre. So continuing to see ways to break those walls down is exciting.”  

RG: “Okay, that’s great. You unironically answered the most important question, that being how important a mobile version of Immortality is, and it does seem like Immortality being on phones opens it up to explore a lot of what it could have as an audience. I’m glad to hear that Immortality is spreading to a lot more people. I for one am hopeful that a lot more people play it because it’s such an amalgamation of a game and I enjoyed my experience with it. Unfortunately I can’t ask you more because we are out of time, this is the last minute. Thank you so much for the interview though, this was very enlightening getting to talk to you here about the inner workings of the game and what got you started beyond Immortality even in Silent Hill, learning more about you. Not a lot of people know about the people behind the game, you play the game and it’s cool but you never know the full story as you might uncover while playing Immortality.”

SB: “Yea. A lot goes on behind the scenes.” 

RG: “So yea, I will sign off for Harold and say this has been the Interview with Sam Barlow. Thanks everyone for coming to watch and thanks so much to Sam for being open to this interview and I wish you nothing but good luck in your future ventures, whatever they may be. Maybe FMVs, maybe something else I’m not entirely sure but I’ll be watching. 

SB: “Thanks man! This was fun! Thank you.”