thatgamecompany turns 20: Chen Xinghan on two decades of Sky, Journey and emotional play

Chen opens by returning to the same question that shaped the studio’s first projects: why do games so often limit emotions to tension, conquest and victory? He points to a mismatch between other art forms and mainstream game affordances — films that make you cry, music that calms, literature that helps you see yourself — versus many games whose emotional palette skews toward adrenaline and win/lose feedback. Chen says that from flOw onward the team has pursued a different emotional register: moments of healing, tenderness and shared presence. He adds a practical corollary: you can’t ask someone who doesn’t believe in this kind of emotional work to make players cry; the studio has always hired people who still believe these experiences are possible.

On accessibility and audience, Chen rejects the simple story that the team merely lowered barriers to reach non-gamers. Instead, he points at a different variable: emotional language. Many games lean on immediate feedback loops — danger, score, trophies — while Chen and his designers built systems where the most meaningful satisfaction required time and another person. Sky’s social mechanics are built so that the deepest rewards come from other players, not the UI. Newcomers last longer when a stranger takes their hand; some of Sky’s three hundred million registered users were people who before never played games, and Chen says the game gave many of them an emotional experience they already wanted rather than teaching them to “be better” at play.

Scaling up from a small, indie studio producing closed narrative arcs to a live game that updates weekly and seasons annually brought a new set of problems Chen describes bluntly as “scale.” Where single-player titles arrive, run their narrative arc and reach a clear ending, Sky runs every day. That lack of a defined endpoint forced the team to relearn how to design emotional arcs that can live inside persistent operations. Daily tasks, Chen explains, must not feel like work. If day-to-day mechanics become pure checklists, player motivation shifts from visiting friends to ticking boxes — and the emotion dies. So the team treats each season more like a short film than a content patch: every season needs an emotional beginning and ending and at least one memorable moment beyond cosmetic rewards. Internally they ask, “After this season ends, what will remain in the player’s heart?” If the answer is only ‘I got an outfit,’ the season is not finished.

The studio’s collaborations provide concrete examples of how Sky tries to do things other media cannot. For the “To Van Gogh” season the team flew to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, studied the physical light, scale and letters between Vincent and his brother Theo, and chose to focus not on the trope of the isolated genius but on the network of care that sustained him. Chen says the season places players inside Van Gogh’s light, color and emotional brushstrokes while they experience those works together with others — an idea he calls “shared presence.” He contrasts that presence with the museum spectator stance: rather than standing outside a painting, players move through its textures with companions. Past crossovers — The Little Prince and an Aurora virtual concert — were selected because the source creators carried “a voice that is still warm,” to borrow Chen’s phrase: works about care, vulnerability and persistence rather than spectacle alone.

Nonverbal interaction is a deliberate design choice backed by social psychology, Chen explains. The team experimented with typed chat early on and found it made harm inexpensive and frequent: a two-second aggressive message can wound immediately. In Sky, kindness has a higher activation cost — you spend time holding someone’s hand, lighting their candle, guiding them — and that investment changes behavior. The game purposely makes certain actions impossible to complete alone: holding hands to fly farther, relying on others to keep your light burning. Those constraints do not exist to raise difficulty but to create genuine need between players. Chen frames many of Sky’s social mechanics as ways to encourage “we did this together” memories rather than counting words exchanged; shared physical action anchors trust more reliably than information exchange, he says, and that’s why many emergent community traditions — like helping newcomers or rituals born from technical quirks — have taken root. The team even kept some player-discovered behaviors, such as a slope-clipping exploit nicknamed “ground-walking,” after seeing how communities turned a small bug into a novel form of exploration.

The interview also touches on the human responses the studio has received over two decades. Chen describes folded notes and letters handed to the team at events and emails from players who say the games helped them through painful periods in life. He emphasizes that the team never tries to instruct players to behave a certain moral way; instead, they build an environment where showing vulnerability feels safe and where the mechanics make helping someone else the easiest, most natural action. Looking back, Chen reflects on the loneliness of the studio’s early years and on what he would tell his 2006 self: the solitude of those first efforts was larger than necessary. The studio intends to turn twenty years of accumulated experience and resources outward, providing funding, mentorship and practical support to independent creators exploring emotional interaction — the kind of support Chen says his own younger team would have valued. He confirms that new projects are in development: not merely more titles, but work that builds on the studio’s creative language while moving into unfamiliar creative territory.