{"id":1396569,"date":"2025-11-18T16:42:41","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:42:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/CAGTc5trE48nM5R4imLKY6"},"modified":"2025-11-18T16:42:41","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:42:41","slug":"the-developer-of-80-days-was-once-invited-to-pitch-a-doctor-who-game-but-never-heard-back-from-the-bbc-afterward-technically-were-still-waiting-for-a-reply","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/the-developer-of-80-days-was-once-invited-to-pitch-a-doctor-who-game-but-never-heard-back-from-the-bbc-afterward-technically-were-still-waiting-for-a-reply\/","title":{"rendered":"The developer of 80 Days was once invited to pitch a Doctor Who game, but never heard back from the BBC afterward: ‘Technically, we’re still waiting for a reply’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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80 Days<\/a> may still be the best-known game from narrative maestros Inkle Studios. But the developer’s most ambitious game is probably Heaven’s Vault<\/a>, a sci-fi archaeological adventure about piecing together an ancient alien language.<\/p>\n

Phillippa Warr gave it an impressive score of 88 in PC Gamer’s Heaven’s Vault Review,<\/a> stating it “does a beautiful job of letting you unlock a language, and thus a dialogue of sorts, with the past, via a wonderfully engaging protagonist.”<\/p>\n

Yet had Inkle’s original plans come to fruition, Heaven’s Vault would have been quite a different experience. This was revealed in a Bluesky post<\/a> by Inkle’s narrative director and writer Jon Ingold, where he stated that “Heaven’s Vault started out as a Doctor Who game”.<\/p>\n

Ingold revealed the full story in an interview with Eurogamer<\/a>, explaining how Inkle was approached by multiple organisations about working with their licenses following the success of 80 Days<\/a>. “One of those was an approach from the BBC, who floated several different BBC properties for us to consider working on. As a lifetime Doctor Who fan, that was the one we jumped on.”<\/p>\n

Inkle then spent roughly eight months working on a pitch called The Daedalus Effect. This game would have been set on “an asteroid on the edge of a black hole, where time dilation had you moving slowly \/ inexorably towards disaster” and would have featured an art style with “2D characters within a 3D scene for a comic-book look.”<\/p>\n

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