It is 1995. Kaitlin Greenbriar comes home from a year in Europe to the house her family moved into while she was away, and finds it dark and empty. On the front door is a note from her younger sister, Sam, asking her not to worry and not to go looking for her. The front door is locked. The spare key is under a goofy-looking Christmas duck in the cupboard of holiday decorations, and from there the player has the run of the house and nothing to do but look. There is no combat, no danger and nobody else in the house. Gone Home tells its story through what the family has left lying around: letters, school notes, the remains of a father’s writing career, a mother’s day planner, cassette and video tapes, and Sam’s own voice reading from her journal as Kaitlin finds the things that matter to her. Edge called it “a love story dressed in horror clothing”.
Fast facts
- Developer: The Fullbright Company, of Portland, Oregon: Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen and Karla Zimonja.
- Released: August 2013, for PC.
- Setting: 1995, in the Greenbriars’ new house.
- Length: about 100 minutes, by Edge’s count.
- Award: Debut Game at the British Academy Games Awards in March 2014.
From BioShock to a basement
The three founders had worked together at 2K Marin on Minerva’s Den, an add-on for BioShock 2 that Gaynor led. He then moved to Irrational Games to work on BioShock Infinite, and found it too big: “When you’re working on a project that big, and when you’re working with 150 other people… You can only really be responsible for the one little piece of the project you’ve been assigned.” With a year of Infinite still to go, he left to make games in Portland, where he had lived before, and Nordhagen, a programmer, and Zimonja, an artist and researcher, followed him from 2K Marin.
They founded The Fullbright Company in 2012 and took no outside money. To make their savings last, they rented a house together in the north-east of the city and worked in its basement. Gaynor pitched a few ideas, and the one they chose was the one that suited a tiny team: “What if it was just you and no other people, no other characters, you in a single environment and you can explore and find stuff in the environment to reconstruct the story of what happened there, and that’s the whole game?” He called the result a “story exploration” game. Edge reported that he expected Fullbright’s games to follow “in the footsteps of games like Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock”: dense, interactive places that trust the player to be curious.
Why 1995
Gaynor explained the date to Edge before release. The team wanted “an actual time and set of experiences that people playing the game are familiar with”, but “past 1995, stuff starts going into text messages and email. You don’t get to pick up the physical scrap of paper.” Everything in the house is something Kaitlin can pick up, turn over and read: notes in paperbacks, the TV Guide, her father’s writing, her mother’s correspondence with a friend.
The music is part of the period too. Sam falls for the riot grrrl scene, and Gaynor spent hours on the phone with record labels and licensing agencies to get songs by bands such as Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy into the game on a small studio’s budget. Zimonja wrote to Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill about the game’s feminist themes, and sent an early version to Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney, who approved. The game was first shown in public at Grrrl Front Fest, a riot grrrl festival in Portland, on a computer in the back room of a bar.
A house, not a level
Edge argued that the Greenbriars’ house works because it is a home first. Videogame houses, it wrote, are usually “puzzle chambers and well-dressed mazes, not homes”, built to gate the player’s progress, while Fullbright built “a virtual space that’s fit for both a game and a family”. The house, a large Victorian manor, plays on the player’s nerves: red smears in the bath, a locked attic bathed in red light, a secret passage, lights left on in rooms nobody is in. “Gone Home bottles the creepiness of walking through a familiar place in unfamiliar circumstances,” Edge wrote, “like walking through your school after hours with all the lights turned off.”
Small budgets shaped what the player sees. Kate Craig, Fullbright’s first new employee and its 3D artist, later described Kaitlin as “simply an invisible capsule collider that moves through the house picking up objects”, who levitates things in front of her: “The girl’s got no hands.” Craig modelled a pair of flip-flops for a closet, but with the August deadline near there was no time to model any other shoes, and flip-flops alone would have made the Greenbriars “a beachy party time family”. The game shipped with no footwear at all.
The story underneath is Sam’s. Gaynor told Edge that the family conflict at its heart is about whom she falls in love with: “Seventeen years ago especially, a conflict that would arise in a family if somebody falls in love with somebody [undesirable to the family] — that wouldn’t be a heterosexual relationship.” Sam’s voice replaced an earlier idea. A first version had her diary torn up and its pages thrown round the house, and “as soon as we did that, it wasn’t a real house any more”, Gaynor said. Instead she reads her journal entries aloud: “Giving [Sam] a voice and letting her explain herself in her own words makes her much more human.”
Is it a game?
Gone Home arrived as the argument about walking simulators was getting loud. Edge had previewed it in January 2013 as a game that “takes environmental storytelling to new heights”, and in December contrasted its “slender 100-minute runtime”, spent mostly picking up objects and turning them round, with the $27 million it cost to make Beyond: Two Souls: Fullbright’s game was, it said, “a far more emotionally resonant game than not only Beyond, but almost every other game you’ll play this year”.
Others thought there was not enough of it. One Edge reader complained in 2013 that some critics had “effectively dismissed the game because it was short and revealed the vast majority of its secrets the first time around”. The columnist Tadhg Kelly told readers to stop worrying “about whether it’s a game or not. Just play it”, and described it, mechanically, as “essentially a Doom level without the shotguns”. At the British Academy Games Awards in March 2014 it won Debut Game.
Gone Home did not invent the form. Dear Esther had walked players round a Hebridean island first, and Gaynor’s own models were immersive simulations such as Thief and System Shock. What Gone Home did was move the idea indoors and make it domestic, and, as the walking simulator entry describes, it was one of the games that made the form popular. In 2021, describing a study at the University of Glasgow that used games to teach soft skills, the researcher Matthew Barr recalled a young man who played it and realised he had never thought about “what that would mean, to come out, to be in those shoes”.
Fullbright after Gone Home
Fullbright’s second game, Tacoma, moved the same kind of exploration to a space station in 2088, with seven characters instead of an empty house. By January 2021 the studio had announced Open Roads, a road trip with a 16-year-old and her mother. Later that year Gaynor stepped back from leading it and from managing the studio, after former employees complained to the website Polygon about his management, describing him as “controlling” and a “demeaning presence” towards women at the studio. Gaynor apologised on Twitter: “My leadership style was hurtful to people that worked at Fullbright, and for that, I truly apologise.”
Sources
- Edge issue 249, January 2013, pp. 40 and 54–55: Gone Home preview and Q&A with Steve Gaynor (environmental storytelling; the note on the door; 1995; the riot grrrl choice; Sam’s voice and the torn-up diary; the family conflict).
- Edge issue 259, November 2013, pp. 114–117: studio profile of The Fullbright Company (founders, 2K Marin and Minerva’s Den, Irrational and BioShock Infinite; founded 2012; no outside funding; the basement; the pitch; “story exploration”; Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock; licensing Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy; Kathleen Hanna and Corin Tucker; Grrrl Front Fest; Kate Craig; release in August).
- Edge issue 260, December 2013, p. 93: column comparing Gone Home, Journey and Beyond: Two Souls (100-minute runtime).
- Edge issue 261, Christmas 2013, p. 31: readers’ letters on Gone Home’s length.
- Edge issue 262, January 2014, p. 109: “The Greenbriars’ house” (the opening, the duck, the house, the creepiness, the journal entries, “a love story dressed in horror clothing”).
- Edge issue 262, January 2014, p. 120: Tadhg Kelly, “Keeping an open mind”.
- Kate Craig, “Artful avoidance”, Wireframe issue 1, November 2018, pp. 45–48: the Victorian house, pocket doors, flip-flops, the invisible player and the August deadline.
- Wireframe issue 14, May 2019, pp. 19–20: Karla Zimonja on Tacoma.
- Wireframe issue 47, January 2021, p. 24: Open Roads announced.
- Wireframe issue 48, February 2021, p. 72: Dr Matthew Barr’s study.
- Wireframe issue 54, August 2021, p. 21: Gaynor steps back from Open Roads; former employees’ complaints; his apology.
- Liana Ruppert, “Open Roads studio co-founder steps down following toxic workplace allegations”, Game Informer, 4 August 2021 (web, secondary): Gaynor’s move from creative lead and manager to writer; the Polygon report; his apology. https://gameinformer.com/2021/08/04/open-roads-studio-co-founder-steps-down-following-toxic-workplace-allegations-issues
- “The Last of Us high-fives at BAFTA awards, indies do well too”, Engadget, 13 March 2014 (web, secondary): “The Gone Home team went home with Debut Game.” https://www.engadget.com/2014-03-13-the-last-of-us-high-fives-at-bafta-awards-indies-do-well-too.html
- Wikipedia, “British Academy Games Award for Debut Game” (accessed October 2026) (web, secondary): Gone Home as the 2014 winner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Academy_Games_Award_for_Debut_Game