William Pugh grew up on a diet of shareware Mac titles like 1993’s Scruffy versus the Invaders from Mars, but his earliest PC gaming memory is engaging in annelid antics in Worms 4: Mayhem—his first encounter with online multiplayer: “I remember playing that for the first time with random matchmaking,” he says. “I think it was a 1v1 or whatever, and you’re face-to-face with a complete stranger … I remember that being a kind of door opening for me.”

That door would lead Pugh into the cartoonish arenas of Team Fortress 2, which in turn introduced him to the Source engine mapping community. Eventually, this brought Pugh in contact with fellow modder Davey Wreden, with whom he would write and design The Stanley Parable—2013’s gleeful poke at player agency, and a remake of Wreden’s mod of the same name.

Following The Stanley Parable’s success, Pugh founded Crows Crows Crows, which specialises in comic adventures such as Dr Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald, the VR game Accounting+, and stealth sequel The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe.

Pugh is currently working on his “next big game” with Crows Crows Crows, as well acting as producer on upcoming PS5 exclusive Hunter’s Moon, which he describes as a “historical folk horror game”. But he took a break from all that to guide me along the yellow adventure line running through his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I’m playing a lot of Deadlock. It’s my third job. I’m a recovering Dota 2 addict. I’m mostly off now. But the thing is, I never quite got with Overwatch. I must have a few hundred hours in Overwatch. None of the other hero shooters kind of work for me. But Deadlock is like Dota, but with a load of the pointless crap that’s just accumulated in the MOBA genre taken out. Mana Bye-bye. Creep stacking? Bye-bye.

A lot of the useless rubbish, they’ve done a good job of slicing that out. The characters are fun. Maybe they won’t completely screw it up when they get to monetisation on it. But right now, it’s kind of pure. There’s only one skin per hero. Everybody feels like they’re working at it and discovering it. It’s really fun to play in a duo lane with a friend.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

Me and my friend group are working our way through Big Walk, obviously. Damn! What a game! House House, they’re too good.

It’s interesting—and no hate on anybody involved, I love it, I love every game developer, but as a PC gamer, I saw the Big Walk announce trailer something like two years ago at some games [event], then Peak came out a suspicious amount of time later, and I’ll admit my first [thought] with Peak was like, “Man, this is fucking Big Walk at home, but shipped a year faster.”

The initial premise of Big Walk was, it’s local, play it with your friends, it’s got spatial audio and you’re exploring a world. And Peak just seemed to ape that in every regard. Then Peak spawns the whole friendslop—I mean, I went through walking simulator, so I feel like they have to be called friendslop, you get assigned your name as a genre—but I felt like that all exploded, and I felt like, “Ah, Big Walk’s gonna get left behind in a way. They’ve missed the magic.”

But fuck! What a game! That’s got to be game of the year for real. It’s really special. They took their time with it. They didn’t get spooked by everything moving ahead … it has gameplay that seeps into the way you are talking to each other, and it’s really beautiful.

Don’t get in your head, boys. Make a sequel. Make Big Walk 2! Just make Bigger Walk. Don’t think about it too much. It’s a winning formula.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

Maybe Team Fortress 2. That’s perma-installed on my computer.

Where to begin? I won a Saxxy award that I still have in my Steam inventory. It turns people gold. It’s a replacement for every class’s base melee weapon. So I tend to play Engineer and Spy. Those are my two main dudes. I have 1583 hours in there. I was an idler for the first round of hats. I used the idle program. I admit it. I’ve served my time, and I’m sorry to all the people who played normally and got hats the normal way. If it makes anything better, I’ve never got an unusual hat, despite my 1500 hours and super-limited Saxxy award.

I’ve been playing it since 2008. It’s what got me properly into mapping, which is what got me properly into working on The Stanley Parable. It’s just one of my great faves. It’s probably my game of all time. Loads of people felt this way, and like I said with Worms, this kind of just levelled it up. It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s a whole team of people working together.’ You could speak online. I was part of a community server that did trial runs for maps. So you could make a map, a work-in-progress thing, and they put it on the server and people could play it—that community-based stuff was incredible.

It’s a bit crazy now. They lost something of the art style along the way …. Going back to it, it’s an absolute cesspit. You’ll hear shit on public matchmaking where it’s like, “These people need to be in jail” …. But in terms of games being made as pieces of art that are also spaces for human beings to connect with each other and have fun and to unwind and blow off some steam, it’s a real 10 out of 10 goats for me.

I appreciate what they’re doing with Deadlock. It’s great. But what we really need is Team Fortress 3, and I’ll die on that hill.

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

Dota 2 is 1,603 hours … I want to say TF2, but it’s not true. It’s Dota 2. It’s like a drug.

It’s interesting because there’s no other game that even comes close to this volume of time. But if you ask me, “Did you have a good time playing Dota 2?” The answer is “no”. The answer is “fuck that fucking game”.

My teammates were feeding. They weren’t supporting. When I was supporting, my carries weren’t carrying. There were people who weren’t in position. People who went too far out, people who were diving who had no business diving, people whose item picks were stupid.

Even thinking about it now, I’ve got to turn my fan on. I’m getting a little bit sweaty and a little bit pissed off. I’ll say it—fuck everybody who plays Dota 2. If they’re good at the game, fuck them. They’ve got no lives, and they should just get off it. It’s what started this whole AI shit. If you remember, OpenAI, one of their earliest things was they made a bot that could beat a pro.

It’s not a game made of love. It’s a game fuelled by hate and a desire to conquer. It’s like chess. I played chess as a child, and there’s sweaty people who play chess. But at least you’re not playing chess with people and then when you make a mistake, they get on voice and they’re like, “Yo, this is exactly how you’re fucking up. Stop fucking up and wasting an hour of my life.”

But I was never any good, which is the saddest fucking thing. That you spend 1,600 hours of your life and you’re not actually any good at it. Goddamn, what a horrible game. I bet in your usual interviews, someone’s like, “I’ve spent 300 hours in this game that I love. When I had this personal tragedy, I would play this game and it helped me get through that.” For me, it’s like, “Fuck Dota 2, I hate it.”

This will be my last thing about it. The reason that it’s appealing is that it is so complex and taxing, it takes 100% of your brain power. You cannot be thinking about some other shit that’s torturing you while you’re playing. It’s like you get handed a five-dimensional Rubik’s cube, and you’re sat solving that for an hour. So that is the good thing about it. If you want to be truly distracted, your brain can’t be elsewhere if you’re playing Dota 2.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

Probably TF2. I’m just a Valve fanboy.

What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?

Basically Blender. 10 out of 10 for Blender. [It’s] open source and it’s free.

We need a Blender for literally everything. Like I wish I was on Godot, but I’ve sunk a bit too much time into Unity in my career. The dev cycles on the games I work on are so long that [for] the next thing, I might look into Godot for that, but it’ll still be a long while.

Generally speaking, a lot of software that has found itself in the gamedev pipeline … it’s just this company that’s sat on it and wants to generate revenue in perpetuity through licenses, so anything that I’ve been using that isn’t Blender—in the sense that it’s community run and open source—that’s something that in five years’ time or in 10 years’ time, I want to be off that. I don’t want to use a rare interview to promo something where it’s like “Hey, this is owned by a company that is actively just shit.”

The entire strat of open-source stuff is that you own it forever. If you want to make changes to it, you can. It’s a community-led, grassroots approach. Photoshop’s losing the war, like all the other 3D software packages are losing the war to Blender, and I just want to keep seeing that …. All these big companies, they just want to lock you in and they want to up what you pay, but so long as open-source software keeps fucking getting better, keeps having people who love making art working with them, they get stronger, and the premise of these subscription-based software models gets weaker. And I love to see that, because it puts power in the hands of the people who are actually making art, which is the fucking best thing.

[So it’s] anything that’s open source. I think Blender is incredible. I think the work that the Blender team are doing on Blender is just fantastic.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

Not.

I’ve never been a tidy guy, so my desktop is never tidy … I’m a big ‘New Folder 3’ kind of guy. I used to have all my passwords in plain text on my desktop. It’s just messy.

I’m a weird one in the sense that, I think I’ve got everything that I’ve ever had on a PC since 2005 on physical hard drives. So one day—I wanted to say, “One day I’ll put it all in a museum.” But that’s such an egotistical statement. So instead, I’ll be like, “One day it’ll be used to convict me of all my internet crimes. All the trolling I’ve been doing.”

It’s all my old flash cartoons. All the weird stuff I was making when I was a child, all my old maps, all this kind of stuff. I’d just feel so sad if I lost that …. I think everyone peaks artistically when they’re 17, and you’re just out there trying to recapture it. You’re just wanting to make stuff because it’s cool and because that’s what you’re into. There’s a purity to art you make when you’re a teenager.