Jenova Chen, the co-founder of Thatgamecompany and creative director of Journey, played a lot of World of Warcraft during grad school. And he always knew that he wanted to make an MMO one day – a form of games that are synonymous, rightly or wrongly, with scope and scale.
And yet when Chen started to make games, the games his studio turned out tended to be small – or at least they seemed small, before you got properly into them. In Flow, you are a tiny amoeba or some such, swimming about in the watery deep. In Flower, you are a handful of petals riding the winds. These games are beautiful, but, they remain compact – nothing like the sprawl of a Warcraft.
Scale is only one aspect of an MMO, though. “What we were taught in school is to push the boundary,” says Chen. “Everyone was saying that the future was social games, but the games weren’t really social.” Chen had seen a few Zynga money-spinners, for example, but while he grasped the game part, the social aspect of something like Farmville didn’t seem to move beyond the purely mechanical. You go to your friend’s farm to click something, but so what?
Source: Eurogamer How Journey only truly made sense when almost everything had been cut