- Sumo Digital acquires TheChineseRoom - 14 August 2018
Sumo Digital has acquired Brighton-based developer TheChineseRoom , creator of Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Sumo, currently working on Crackdown 3, made the announcement earlier today. This was followed by a blog post from TheChineseRoom’s co-founder, Dan Pinchbeck, in which he explained the move. “Following the studio’s closure in summer 2017, we were faced with a decision,” Pinchbeck wrote. “We knew we didn’t want to just start over, trying to recapture a time in our history where a we could push out arthouse titles and survive the process. It was an amazing few years, but it came at a cost, one that I knew I wasn’t about to take on again. And it was time for a change—to make different games, explore new ideas and, if TCR was going to reboot, to evolve into something that opened up new opportunities.&#x…
- Sumo buys Everybody's Gone to the Rapture studio The Chinese Room - 14 August 2018
Sumo has bought The Chinese Room. The Crackdown 3 developer said it had acquired The Chinese Room, the studio behind Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, from founders Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry. Brighton-based Pinchbeck is on board as creative director of The Chinese Room, while Curry will continue her career independently as a composer, Sumo said. Pinchbeck added he's now working on new concepts. In a blog post , he said The Chinese Room is talking to potential partners about a new game, "something bigger"... "something that takes a more traditional game genre - no, you don't get to know what just yet - and lets us spin our worlds and stories on top of that. It's going to be very, very exciting." Read more…
- The power of spring in Horizon Zero Dawn, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and The Last of Us - 15 March 2018
After the darkness and dormancy of winter life restarts, almost as if the punishing frosts, snows and winds had never happened. The season of spring starts to take hold, colours reappear, foliage regrows and landscapes transform to offer different looks, feels and opportunities for interaction. This can be truly impactful when it manifests in video games. Where winter revealed the bones of landscapes and their design, spring brings a softer touch, its re-birth and revitalisation draping life and colour back over lands. Spring can empower a landscape to represent and symbolise in its own way. By adding these into games' story arcs and narratives, a whole new side of the landscape can be seen and experienced - one where the land tells stories of recovery, shows an ability to cleanse and has an ability to enhance peace and quiet, all while under the drape of a colourful, full of life lands…
- Everybody's Gone To The Rapture composer to host videogame music radio show - 25 January 2017
Classic FM is a long-serving radio station that's operated in the UK since 1992. As its name undoubtedly suggests, it tends towards classic music and, in-line with its 25th anniversary celebrations, is set to launch a dedicated videogame music show this year.  Scheduled to run for six weeks from April 22 onwards, the show will command the broadcaster's 9pm-10pm Saturday evening slot and will be hosted by The Chinese Room co-founder Jessica Curry—the BAFTA-winning composer responsible for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's wonderful soundtrack.   "Fourteen years ago, Classic FM became the first station to broadcast a weekly national radio programme dedicated to film music," says a note on the Classic FM website . "Now, we’re launching the UK’s first weekly radio series dedicated to symphonic video game music." Popular videogame series suc…
- Patch notes v. 1.01 - 23 June 2016
General Performance Graphics settings have been tweaked to improve performance. We have also fixed a bug that would change some settings upon loading after the initial run. SLI performance We have identified an issue with NVIDIA SLI setups related to cloth meshes in the game, which were causing GPU stalls during geometry updates. This is now fixed. 21:9 Ultra-wide resolutions We have now added support for ultra-wide 21:9 monitors. Field of view We have added a command line variable which allows the default field of view to be changed. To do this, edit the following line in the 'system.cfg' file, located in the root of the install folder (by default: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Rapture\): Cl_fov=X (where ‘X' is a value between 25 and 80) Please note that the game was designed with a default FOV of 52, and changing this setting may cause some minor clipping issues within…
- Patch notes v. 1.01 - 23 June 2016
General Performance Graphics settings have been tweaked to improve performance. We have also fixed a bug that would change some settings upon loading after the initial run. SLI performance We have identified an issue with NVIDIA SLI setups related to cloth meshes in the game, which were causing GPU stalls during geometry updates. This is now fixed. 21:9 Ultra-wide resolutions We have now added support for ultra-wide 21:9 monitors. Field of view We have added a command line variable which allows the default field of view to be changed. To do this, edit the following line in the 'system.cfg' file, located in the root of the install folder (by default: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Rapture\): Cl_fov=X (where ‘X' is a value between 25 and 80) Please note that the game was designed with a default FOV of 52, and changing this setting may cause some minor clipping issues within…
- Now Available on Steam - Everybody's Gone to the Rapture - 14 April 2016
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is Now Available on Steam! Featuring a beautiful, detailed open-world and a haunting soundtrack, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is non-linear storytelling at its best.
- Everybody's Gone To The Rapture confirmed for PC - 1 April 2016
has at last been confirmed for PC after a long stint on PS4. We suspected it was on its way: the first hint was Rapture's appearance in a SteamDB listing —an entry that was updated as time wore on. All but confirming things, a recent AMD Radeon driver update listed Rapture support. Now we have the news direct from The Chinese Room: everybody's coming to the PC. What we don't have is a release date, but if AMD is tailoring drivers to Rapture, it can't be far off. To prove that this isn't April Fools' lies , we hit up creative director Dan Pinchbeck for the story behind the transition, accompanied by delightful 4K screens from the PC build. Dan Pinchbeck: We always wanted to get it onto PC as it's kind of our home turf and we've got a lot of really passionate, supportive fans on PC. We kept making sure all the way through development that Sony knew that we could do it, and that we r…
- AMD outs Everybody's Gone to the Rapture on PC in Radeon driver update - 28 March 2016
, which came out last August, would be exclusive to the PlayStation 4. Say what you will about walking simulators, but I thought Dear Esther was a powerful piece of work, and I was looking forward to seeing what the studio could do with that success to build upon. But then a few months ago came hope: The game turned up in a SteamDB listing , and then a month after that, the entry was updated with banner art . Even with all those clues, the possibility that it was a hoax remained, but now AMD has erased any doubt. Not with a big reveal or a GDC presentation, but in the highlights notes for its latest Radeon driver . The new driver, it says, includes support for the Oculus Rift SDK 1.3, and updated Crossfire profiles for Hitman and— ta-dah! —Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. I've reached out to The Chinese Room for confirmation, but given the accumulating evidence, it seems alm…
- New evidence for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture on Steam - 8 January 2016
In December, database spelunking by SteamDB revealed an entry for PS4 exclusive Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, suggesting a port was in the works. SteamDB can't offer proof—any third-party developer might have called their app Rapture—but now the entry has been updated with Everybody's Gone to the Rapture banner art. Specific packages that include the Rapture app are being updated almost as I type: 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture for Beta Testing', which is the typical pre-release label, and 'Everybody's Gone to the Rapture Developer Comp' have been edited today. If it's a hoax, it's thorough. Thanks, Destructoid .
