For some reason I believed that I had made a post about this already, but apparently I haven’t.

A few weeks ago, deep in the development of Way Too Scary Game, I took an afternoon to make a Laika. 

It comes from a really weird place. I made the game because I saw the kickstarter project for Laika Believes and I immediately balked. There’s something about the story of Laika (you should read the wiki if you’re still confused) that I think is uncapturable on any level other than an affective one.

She was the first animal to orbit the earth. She died up there, alone. Language utterly fails when I try to explain what that means to me and how it makes me feel. So I made a game about it, about my helplessness at the past, at reading about Laika, at thinking about what she went through.

On some level, making an action game about Laika shooting her way through some generic laboratory feels wrong to me. It is like making an action game about Walter Benjamin or the the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Big thanks to Tara Ogaick for making the music very, very quickly for me.

In any case, you can play my helplessness simulator called Laika here.