One of the most enjoyable stories I’ve been able to tell in this job has been about The Forgotten City, an Australian Skyrim mod that ended up winning a Writers’ Guild award, the first ever handed out for a video game. That led its creator on a journey to turn the mod into a standalone game, and this July that game will finally be released.
If you haven’t played it, The Forgotten City is a total conversion for Skyrim that creator Nick Pearce built when he wasn’t working as a technology lawyer. It was set in a city built on Dwarves’ Law, where everyone in the city will be killed if anyone commits a crime. You discover the city after finding a note from an NPC who’s brother fell down the entrance to the city — and when you get to the city, you discover everyone has been killed. So the question remains: who’s responsible?
After years of development and a few rounds of local funding from Victoria, The Forgotten City is about to launch this July. The setting for The Forgotten City is set in Roman times, so there’s a few changes from the original mod, but the whodunnit premise is well and truly intact.
It’s great to see an Australian project come so far — and from such unusual roots. The original Forgotten City mod had over 3 million downloads, and if the standalone Forgotten City game gets anywhere near that, it’ll be a wonderful story for local game development. The backstory of The Forgotten City is a great read, and I’d fully recommend you go check it out here.
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