Disk Cleanup
Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend column delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every Saturday to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “how tidy is your desktop?” and “what game will you never uninstall?”
Dan Marshall first got into PC gaming at around eight years old when he visited a friend’s house. There, he laid eyes on Wolfenstein 3D, a moment that changed his life forever. “It was just such a generational leap from anything I think I’ve seen up to that point,” he says. “My brain just did not comprehend what it was saying. It was violent and it was 3D and it looked exactly like real life.”
Size Five’s latest game is Earth Must Die, a stylish comedy adventure in which you play an alien dictator hellbent on destroying Earth. “I think comedy is better when there’s a serious heart to it. And the serious heart to this was like ‘fuck fascists’,” Marshall says. “We felt like it was a frustration that we needed to get out.”
I asked Marshall to give me a guided tour of his PC and Steam library, a journey that led us from the rugged landscapes of the Lake District into the endless void of space.
What game are you currently playing?
Quite unusually for me, I’m playing Atomfall despite having just completed it. Normally, when I finish a game, that’s it, I’m done. And I put it down and I don’t really go back to it, doing a load of mopping-up stuff.
I sort of dismissed Atomfall as being a British Fallout. And I wasn’t massively interested in it, but then I grabbed it in the sale and fell in love with it really hard, really quick. It’s basically: Here’s a quaint British village and one of the most satisfying first-person shooters I’ve played in a long time”. And it’s just a constant string of lovely little mysteries to get your nose stuck into.
Dan Marshall, Size Five Games
Marshall is a veteran indie developer with a penchant for designing adventure games, including Ben There, Dan That!, Earth Must Die and the adventure-platformer hybrid Lair of the Clockwork God.
There’s a couple of big mysteries going on, and then a couple of little mysteries going on, but it’s not all side quests and levelling up and all that sort of shit that I assumed it was going to be. It’s a lot smarter than that. Every encounter you have, every room you go into, every building you go into, will have clues as to your larger objectives, and you have an investigations tab that sort-of puts it all together. It’s actually a lot more focused than I thought it was going to be.
I had the best time with it, just tense and horrible and creepy and funny and all the right ways. It just scratched so many itches for me. Genuinely, it takes a lot for me to really love a thing these days. You know, would I buy a t-shirt with this on it? The answer is generally no, it will take a lot for me to wear—at 46 years old—it’ll take a lot for me to wear a t-shirt with a logo on, right? But it’s one of those things where I, yeah, I probably would [do that]. I loved it so much.
What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?
The previous game I played before that was Into the Restless Ruins. It’s still installed, because I’m cribbing off it for my next thing a little bit. Well, I’m not cribbing. I’m interested in some of the stuff it did.
It’s like Tetris, in a way. So you’re building dungeons, right? You get cards which have dungeon pieces on. You build the dungeon, and then you explore the dungeon. You’ve got to go to the end, and it’s got that amazing Tetris like thing where “Shit, this is all going really badly, and my dungeon is a mess and that’s all my fault.”
And I really fucking love that. It’s something we did in The Swindle a little bit. I really like the fact that I’m in a pickle now, and I don’t have to be in this situation because it’s my choices that have led me here. I really respect it for that.
What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?
I’ve still got Fallout installed, Fallout 1, which must be early ’90s. I never played it in the ’90s, because I didn’t like turn-based games when I was a kid.
So I skipped Fallout at the time, and then I was like “I should play it” because I do hear really good things about it, and I can see I lasted twenty minutes. I think it’s just about long enough to get out of the Vault and die in the desert, and then I think “Urgh, maybe not.” It’s one of those games where, remake it, and I will be all over it.
Now, I just see actually, X-Wing is installed as well, which I think is slightly older, like 1993 I think. But that was astonishing. I think I bought a joystick for Wing Commander, and then I think I played X-Wing afterwards.
Generally, in video games, levels get harder and harder and then it ends. I remember one of the reviews talking about X-Wing being like “Oh, the difficulty is sort of all over the place”, but it works in his favor, because you’re a third of the way through the game, and there’s a really difficult level, and then the next thing you’re doing is just escorting some chaps, and then there’ll be something else that’s slightly more challenging.
And it really does feel like you’re a jobbing pilot, because it stops it from feeling so much like a videogame and just having linear progression.
What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?
The answer to that is XCOM 2, which is 218.9 [hours].
Which is embarrassing in so many ways. And to be clear, there’ll not be anything else on my hard disk that comes close to that.
Incredible game. The reason why it’s so high is XCOM has this thing where you finish a mission, and it goes “All your troops need upgrading. And you can do all this research stuff.” And you say to yourself “I’ll just mop up the base stuff,” And you just do the base stuff.
And you fast forward time. Time goes on as you do that. And then it’ll come up and go “Got a new mission for you!” And you go “Ah, I’ll just check to see what the mission is.” And it goes “Oh, there’s a load of Chrysalids giving people hassle.” So then you go “Well, I better go and check that out.”
Before you know it, like four hours have gone by. It’s incredible. It’s one of the most deeply satisfying games I’ve ever played.
What game will you never, ever uninstall?
[XCOM 2] is the answer to your next question as well. I’ll never uninstall that one. It’s staying on for emergencies.
What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?
It’s Snipping Tool. Snipping Tool is like, it’s a pair of scissors that grabs a screenshot of what you’re looking at or a video. And if I see something that needs—I use it for work and for socials as well—cropping and scrolling over, I use that. I use it every day.
And when I said Snipping Tool and you looked at me vacantly, I genuinely cannot believe that everyone doesn’t use Snipping Tool. This is it, all day, every day. Like, how do you live without Snipping Tool?
How tidy is your desktop screen?
Impeccable.
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