World-building with Scythe Dev Team’s Jon of the Shred

destructoid.com:

One of the titles that had the greatest impact on my consciousness in the past few years was Happy’s Humble Burger Farm. What seemed like a novel concept on the surface turned out to have a lot of beef underneath. Centering a horror game around cooking is engrossing enough, but it then gets tied up in interesting ways and dunked into an unconventional world full of mystery and horror. The narrative tells the story of trying to escape from an obvious simulation, but the world in which this simulation exists is an entity worth exploring on its own.

Immediately after stepping into the game, you’re hit from all sides with flavor lore. The TV plays an almost unending list of shows, the coffee table prominently displays a book on the history of the Barnyard Buds, and a Walkman sits nearby to fill your ears with radio skits that inject fat into the world around you. None of it is necessary to understand Happy’s Humble Burger Farm’s main plot, but actually digging through it is a trip on its own.

It’s obvious someone really loves the lore and creating it because there’s a lot more of it than a five-ish hour game really needs. That’s because the Scythe Saga Universe is a sprawling concept originally dreamed up by Jon of the Shred (Jon Reilly) back in 2005. I wanted to get to know more about where this came from, so I got in touch and talked shop. Now I’m sharing that shop with you.

The Scythe Saga Universe didn’t actually originate as an idea for a video game. It was a world to base a rock opera in. “I’ve been developing all of this stuff personally since 2005 when I was just a teenager developing a rock opera,” Jon told me. “I kinda wanted all my music to be set in its own world. That ballooned out into a record label in 2012.