In 2020 our dad died. His name was Kevin and he lived on a yacht in New Zealand.
Why am I telling you this when I'm supposed to be talking about the story for our dark fantasy top-down MMORPG?
Because there's a feeling that comes as you go through grief and start to forget someone, and it's complex. In a way it's a relief, because you're not living so directly with the pain anymore. But it's also frightening, because you're forgetting.
Dad died under pretty mysterious circumstances and we never really got a definitive answer for how, or what happened that night. We're all at peace with that mystery now. But the best advice I ever got was to face the grief head on and never shy away from it. And I did. We both did. (Al had his first kid due in a month, so that was a blessing we all needed.)
When we started writing Mortumus’s quest line and lore, it got us thinking about the opposite. What happens when you don't face it? Where would we be now if we hadn't?
That question is what inspired the first story within Mortumus. It's a journey to forget. To escape something too painful to remember. But if you follow the quest line, you'll be forced to remember anyway, and confront the thing you've been running from. Along the way you might help the world, or you might just decide to leave it the way it is.
Because this "forgetting," we'll call it, isn't only the character's journey. It's the world's. Mortumus is a world that has forgotten itself.
And I mean that literally. The whole world is written in a language no one alive can read. It's carved into everything, the walls, the ruins, the gravestones, the bedrock under your feet. It's been there for hundreds of years and the people living in the world walk straight past it, like it's just weathering on old stone. They've forgotten it was ever language at all.
But it is a real language. We built the whole thing, real rules and all, and you can actually learn to read it. And nobody does it alone. This is an MMO, one shared world with thousands of people in it, and across the whole server players piece the language back together fragment by fragment. As they do, the world starts giving up what it used to be. Directions. Names. History. What this place was before it forgot itself. The world only remembers because everyone is remembering it together.
It's a hard world, too. One place, everyone in it, real consequences when you die. But the thing we kept coming back to while we wrote it is that a whole world full of strangers is quietly, stubbornly helping a forgotten place remember what it was, and most of them don't even know that's what they're doing.
You don't need to have lost a dad on a yacht to feel any of this. Everybody is carrying something they've quietly decided not to look at. The game just turns that into a place you can walk through.
We didn't set out to make a game about grief. We set out to make the game two brothers always wanted to make, on nights and weekends, with nobody's permission. But the story we kept writing turned out to be the one we were already living. A world that forgot itself, and thousands of people slowly remembering it back, together. That's Mortumus. And building it is how we faced ours.
