Blue Prince-ийн хөгжүүлэгч Тонда Рос сүүлийн 20 жилийн шилдэг тоглоомоор UFO 50-ийг нэрлэв

Tonda Ros was first drawn to PC gaming at seven years old, after playing the action-adventure classic, Beast. “It’s kind of like an open, nonlinear Sokoban that’s action-based and not puzzle-based,” says Ros, the creator of 2025’s Blue Prince. “I think it was the next year where we had a 386 PC in the house, and that’s when the floodgates opened … when I played Tank Wars and the original SimCity and Star Control.”

Establishing a career as a cinematographer and visual artist, in 2016, Ros began working on Blue Prince. Inspired by games like Myst, board games like Jewels in the Attic and puzzle books like Maze: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle, Blue Prince was painstakingly created across the best part of a decade. When it released last year, it quickly established itself as a modern puzzling classic.

After taking a break following Blue Prince’s launch, Ros is currently working on tech support for the puzzler, while also experimenting with new projects. “I think the next game will have to be a smaller game, logistically,” he says. But he stepped out of his game development lab to show me around the ever-shifting parlour of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

I’m currently playing Cairn, by The Game Bakers, which is just a gorgeous rock-climbing simulator/adventure game with some survival elements. What’s remarkable about the game is how much it feels like rock climbing, and how simple and intuitive the controls are.

I didn’t even have to do a tutorial to understand, because that’s just how simple and intuitive the controls are—where you control each limb in sequential order. It’s just one of the most well-executed control schemes that I’ve ever seen. And it’s not a control scheme that I had seen before.

I think what’s really interesting to me is how similar the controls are, conceptually, to last year’s Baby Steps, because these are both games where you’re controlling individual limbs [and] climb up a mountainous terrain. But one is incredibly intuitive and smooth and frictionless—in the way the controls are executed at least. And then of course Baby Steps goes to the opposite side of the metric.

I love both games, and I think it’s cool to see such similar design work conceptually, but with just slight tweaks in the game feel, they’re completely different and unique experiences.

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

That would be Big Walk, which is funny because that’s also a game about climbing and walking. But yes, I just finished—two weeks ago—Big Walk with my group of friends, and that was an amazing experience.

I have been waiting for that game since it was announced at The Game Awards many years ago, and it’s fascinating, because it’s the first social proximity chat game I’ve ever played. I had been waiting for Big Walk for so long that every time other ones came up, I was like, “Yeah, I’d like to play this, but I’m waiting for Big Walk.”

It’s fascinating because they started development before this whole social chat scene kicked in. It reminds me a lot of Blue Prince, because I started Blue Prince’s development before there were any deckbuilders. So you kind of get a sense that this is something that was created in parallel to those design trends, and you see the different decisions that they made, in the same way that I don’t think Blue Prince really feels like a deck builder, though you could probably tell we share similar tabletop designs.

I played it with [seven] people. We had been prepped to play this for years … we played it on Thursdays and Sundays, Thursday was a shorter session and then Sunday was a little bit longer. And it was fun because seven people really allowed us to get lost in groups, where two people would be in a conversation and get distracted and fall away, and we wouldn’t see them again for four hours. And that was exciting to me.

I don’t want to spoil Big Walk for anyone that plays, but the ending just blew me away. I will say that it literally shook me. I think for a lot of times, I’m playing as a game designer, and you can’t help but have a little design hat on where you’re like “Oh, I would have done this differently” or “I think I could see ways that they could have improved this.”

And when I played the last act of Big Walk, I was in awe, because there is no way I could have come to a fraction as good of an ending to that game, as the way they did. So hats off to House House, well deserved success.

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

I had thought it would be this, and I’m happy to report it’s Myst, 1993. I have Cyan’s entire catalogue installed. Myst will always be on my PC. It might not always be the oldest, but Myst is not one that’s going anywhere.

There were many, many years where I just liked hanging out in that world, just to listen to the atmosphere while I was working. Hearing the wind and the oceans lap at the shore of Myst island. It has a serene quality. And it has a very deep familiarity because of how many years of my life were spent in that game as a kid, and especially [because] it was my first exposure to an immersive graphical world.

The very first time I played Myst was at a friend’s house, and I was going to check out their Super Nintendo because they had just gotten [one] around the same time, and then he was like “Do you want to play something else?” And he took me to his father’s office, who had a PC on his desk, and he booted it up, and I was just absolutely stunlocked … and I remember the day I got back, I told my parents—I didn’t ask for a Super Nintendo—I told them “We need to get a computer with a CD-ROM.”

I’m glad that my game and Big Walk and these games are finding success … because unlike a lot of other genres that are oversaturated, the first-person puzzle game is really not oversaturated. It’s crazy, because you have Outer Wilds and Obra Dinn and all these games finding success and [being] universally beloved, and the community is ravenous for new experiences … I hope it encourages more people to explore these areas.

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

I’m only looking at Steam here, so thankfully I get to discount Battle.net, and I’m going to disqualify my own game. So the winner would be Mossmouth’s magnificent UFO 50, clocking in at 691 hours. But I’m pretty sure a few hundred of those hours are because of Pilot Quest, which likely won’t surprise anyone familiar with the game.

If you aren’t familiar … UFO 50 is a collection of 50 games—so it’s kind of a cheat in terms of the hours—that all belong to a fictional 1980s console called the LX. And if my hours of play are any indication, these are not 50 mini games. They’re 50 games, full games that have a lot of depth, and they’re as sizeable as any of the games from the ’80s.

There are games across every genre. I remember when I first heard of it, I was like, “OK, that’s a cool concept, [but] I don’t really play a lot of retro nostalgia-driven games.” But when I first saw a clip, the design work I was seeing was like, “Oh, they’re doing some cool stuff.” I think I saw a clip of one of the games called Mortal. It’s like a puzzle platformer where, instead of lives, you have a spaceship full of little men, and each one sacrifices his life to progress everyone else. I just thought the design work was insane, and I spent an entire year playing the game, and I decided to give every title its due.

I think it’s easily my favourite game of the last 20 years. I have golden in every cartridge, and I’ve cherry’d most cartridges. I speedrun a few of them, and one of the titles is Planet Zoldath, so hours can clock up when you’re speedrunning.

My favourite is a game called Minnie and Max, and it’s a game about a little girl trapped in a closet, and the entire game takes place in this walk-in closet. But she learns through the help of her dog—who can talk to her, of course—that she can shrink herself down, or at least use her imagination to pretend she’s shrinking herself down, and so the game takes place at a minuscule scale within the closet …. Without spoiling too much about this game, I have a massive, 100-page notebook for the game where I was just mapping out things to a micro scale.

My official recommendation, as someone who had an amazing experience … is boot it up and just start chronologically. Act like you’re a kid who only gets one game a week, and just play that game until you want to give up on it, but maybe try to play it a little longer than your instincts.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

I think it would have to be something that would be inconvenient to reinstall … there’s a few borderline abandonware games that I remember having to jump through hoops to actually play again. One at the top of my mind is a game called Lighthouse: The Dark Being. I think it’s by Sierra, and it’s a first-person, point-and-click, post-Myst exploration game.

It’s not the most amazing game in the genre. There were a lot of post-Myst point-and-click adventure games of various quality levels. But I was one I was fond of as a kid, and it’s one that was technically difficult to play, at least when I tried to play it.

The work of Michael Brough, actually, his game Cinco Paus is not on Steam, and that’s one of my all-time game experiences. I think you can download it from itch. These are games I used the executable files on, as opposed to using Steam. I’ll say Cinco Paus too. I won’t uninstall Cinco Paus.

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

Adobe Photoshop. It’s the software I know the best, and the one I’m technically the most fluent in, having used it daily since 1999.

It’s the one piece of software I’ve used across all my creative pursuits in my career. It’s my canvas when I paint. I use it for motion graphics, for compositing work. It’s the foundation of all my web design for all the websites I’ve made throughout the years. For game design, obviously, all the graphics in Blue Prince, and even for niche stuff like DVD menus, which was actually my first job when I moved to Hollywood.

I’m not into a lot of the changes over the last few years. Obviously, all the AI integration. I just want to stick on, essentially, because I developed all those skills. I’m really comfortable in the 2019 model, right before they moved to the subscription.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

For my workstation, it’s a bit of a mess. I basically never see my desktop as my monitors are eternally occupied with various game dev software that I never shut down. Unity and Photoshop pretty much have 100% uptime. I don’t shut my computer down when I go to sleep, so when I get back up, I resume exactly where I left off, just get right back into it. So that’s always dominating my screen real-estate, so I don’t have too much incentive to keep it clean.

However, on my dedicated Steam machine, which is a mini PC that I use to game on the couch, that desktop is kept really clean, because I don’t want anything on that PC that’s not software that I need to run games. On that desktop, it’s just a shortcut to Steam, an executable file of Cinco Paus, and one Chrome shortcut to a random Kyle Bosman video playing his Happy Monday song, which I play every Monday for my pet bunny.

I have no idea why, but that bunny gets so excited when he hears the piano at the start of that song, and it’s the only music he’s ever responded to.

Can we see your pet bunny?