It’s a miracle this game exists — and maybe fate

polygon.com:

The origin of Humanity (the video game) sounds like the end of humanity (the concept).

Visual director Yugo Nakamura and his team of creatives asked a simple question: “How many digital people can we put on a screen at once?” To find the answer, they created Humanity: a sterile, brutalist world in which infinite streams of humans marched up, down, and around towering structures before falling into an abyss.

At this point, Humanity wasn’t much of a game. Nor was it being made by game developers — not in the traditional sense.

The designers are part of tha, a Japanese creative firm that does a bit of everything, from a reimagining of the Tokyo public toilet and Uniqlo’s blocky branding, to experimental fashion and experiential art installations.

Their jobs sound fun, but even the people who get paid to conceptualize futuristic bathrooms need a distaction. Every job is, after all, still a job. Or as Nakamura says, “It’s important to always have something else [to focus on], not just the day-to-day desk assignment. Something to have fun and be curious and push things to lead to future projects.”

And so the side thing, back in 2017, was to put as many people on screen as possible. And in most versions of the story, Humanity would remain just that — a side thing tucked away in a folder on some office PC.

But Humanity is what happens when you have time to experiment, when you share your ideas with the world, and when you get lucky (or touched by fate) and have the support of one of the most prestigious video game producers in the history of the medium.

Unsure what would come next for their visual novelty, and unwilling to compost it, the team at tha presented a visual demo at the Unity Festival in Tokyo before a panel of