He Made a Game About a Joyous Journey. He Also Got a Bit Lost.

Anthony Tan’s hands shook as he took his seat in a dark Los Angeles theater. The neon green lights sporadically illuminated the 7,000 faces around him.

Tan, a solo video game developer, was just 20 years old. Yet a trailer for his game, Way to the Woods, was about to share screen time with dozens of other coming Xbox titles, including those from mega-franchises like Gears of War and Halo. Unlike those games, created by teams of hundreds with eight- or nine-figure budgets, Tan had built his alone in his spare time, buoyed by grant funding.

By the time he sat down in the theater at Microsoft’s annual hype-building event, in June 2019, Tan had watched his trailer more than 100 times. He knew every note, every camera pan. As the lights dimmed and the screen faded to black, he was too nervous to look. Everyone else watched his game’s stars — a deer and a fawn — appear onscreen, pushing a railway handcar across a golden plain.

Even before the event was over, Tan’s phone blew up with Twitter messages from strangers. Millions of people had been watching the livestream online. Some praised the game’s art style, which Tan said was inspired by the Studio Ghibli movies “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away”; others were intrigued by its unusual main characters.

Tan was now shaking from adrenaline, not nerves.

“It was absolutely exhilarating,” he said.

Tan’s game about animals navigating an abandoned world had struck a chord. The final seconds of his stylish, mysterious trailer made a promise, or as close to one as the world of video game development allows: “Coming 2020 … for real this time.”