Jonas Kyratzes

Jonas Kyratzes is a video game designer and the author of video game industry related articles.^[1]

Career

Kyratzes' games are known for breaking with convention and being heavily story-driven.^[2] Several of his games are thematically interconnected, often by the recurring figure of Urizen (first mentioned in The Great Machine) and other themes related to or inspired by the work of William Blake.

He also has an interest in film, and in January 2009 he wrote and directed a short documentary about the 2008 Greek riots called The Greek Riots: Some Basic Facts.^[3]

Jonas was born in Germany to a Greek father and a German mother, and raised in Greece. He has written several articles on video games, often advocating the concept that games are an art form. He is also politically active on the internet, blogging about political issues^[4] and co-founding the Wikileaks Stories game-making initiative.^[5][6][7] He describes his politics as left-wing.^[8]

He lives in Frankfurt, Germany with his wife, Verena.

Games

• Last Rose in a Desert Garden (2000): Fatalistic but very short, which takes place in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
• The Infinite Ocean which deals with the concept of existentialism, centered on a sentient computer.
• The Great Machine: A Fragment, an experimental work of interactive fiction about the horrors of war.
• The Museum of Broken Memories, which also deals with themes relating to war, but is made up of a number of interrelated story fragments.^[9][10]
• The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge, a humorous fantasy with melancholic undertones, set in the Lands of Dream.^[11][12]
• Phenomenon 32, a post-apocalyptic 2D exploration platformer set in an alternate universe.^[13]
• You Shall Know The Truth, a political game about Wikileaks^[14]
• Alphaland, a platformer set inside an unfinished (alpha) game. Terry Cavanagh is credited as a programmer.^[15][16]
• The Book of Living Magic, another game set in the Lands of Dream ^[17]
• Arcadia: A Pastoral Tale, a text-based game^[18]
• The Fabulous Screech, a Lands of Dream installment expanding on the feline character it is named for, whom was first introduced in The Book of Living Magic.^[19]
• Traitor, Kyratzes' most mechanic-based game, a vertical shooter about a mercenary's role in a growing revolutionary conflict.^[20]
• The Sea Will Claim Everything (2012), his first commercial game, involving another Lands of Dream scenario where a biotechnological dwelling called Underhome must face foreclosure.^[21]
• The Talos Principle (2014), hired as a writer by Croteam

References

External links

• Official website
• Jonas Kyratzes at MobyGames
• An interview with Kyratzes at Gnome's Lair
• Kyratzes YouTube account