Apollo 47 is a one-page RPG with 1,199 additional pages of flavor text

polygon.com:

You know those scenes in movies where people are talking very urgently into a headset? Maybe it’s a heist film and someone’s crawling through an air duct, or it’s a science fiction film and a lonely astronaut is hurtling toward their doom. Whatever the context, that’s the vibe that game designer Tim Hutchings is trying to recreate with his latest project, Apollo 47 Technical Handbook, a one-page tabletop role-playing game with 1,199 additional pages of largely superfluous flavor text. It’s… a bold choice, to say the least.

But Hutchings isn’t just some random developer. He’s the author of, among other things, Thousand Year Old Vampire, one of the most critically acclaimed solo journaling games ever made, a concise and introspective investigation of how the long arc of history weighs on a person’s soul. He’s also an assistant professor of game design at Bradley University, responsible for molding young minds and ushering them out into the larger game development industry. A new game from Hutchings is sort of a big deal, even if it’s a weird one. Well, maybe especially if it’s a weird one.

“I pride myself on being an odd jobs person,” Hutchings told me during a recent interview. “Yeah, I used to have — and this is one of my sad secrets — a pretty vigorous showing-artwork-in-galleries-and-museums life. I still do that. I still do all these things, but in a lesser sense since having a kid. [I’m a] TV commercial and weird high-end video post [production] guy. Last night I was working on opening credits for a feature film for Netflix. [...] All kinds of shit.”

The work he most enjoys, though, is designing games.

“The only reason I make games is because games satisfy a need, the creative need, that art never did,” Hutchings