Interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity.

Adi Robertson: My first question is how you bring something new to the genre of cyberpunk. It's a style that's defined a lot of our science fiction for decades, to the point of being often sort of tired and cliche. But I was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked in Valhalla.

Christopher Ortiz (design and illustration): One thing we’ve been always looking for is telling stories outside the usual point of view.

For example, most works of fiction work around the life of the hero, or someone who is special, with something that sets them apart from the rest and are always responsible for the resolution of a larger conflict.

Video games by nature are always focused on this point of view, since the medium is usually focused on putting the player as the center of the universe, with everyone else with a supporting role.

So what we did in this instance to bring something new and fresh to the cyberpunk genre was to take a common trope and shift the spotlight; in this case to the bartender who’s always there in the background ready to take questions from the hero.

The cyberpunk genre is capable of allowing the creation of amazing worlds, and they shouldn’t be limited to just one way to live inside it, we should get to see what the common citizen in a corrupt cyberpunk dystopia is going through, to better understand the effects of what we’re very close to live. Every faceless extra we see in cyberpunk movies has a life, same with video game NPCs, and we wanted to tell their stories.

AR: How did you come up with the bartending mechanic for shaping the game's plot? Was there a period where you wanted the protagonist to outright select dialog in the conversations?

CO: It was very risky, since what we wanted to do was a game where the choices are not terribly obvious and make the player experiment with the possibilities.

Many games don’t allow you to stray away too much, they’re afraid of the player getting lost or whatever, so the mechanics in Valhalla are made in a very specific way to tease the player’s mind into doing things out of the box.

"Presenting the player with a number of choices on the screen rendered everything else meaningless."

I said it was risky because many players didn’t get the memo, and they kinda played through Valhalla like a machine, always serving what the patron wanted and never questioning what they were doing, so they just assume it’s a linear affair without much depth. However, players like that were a very tiny minority, and I’m extremely glad everyone else seemed to enjoy what we did.

Sure, we can do a better job to make these players understand that they should play around more with what they have, and based on the feedback we got from the game’s release, it looks like we’re about to hit a sweet spot.

Was there a period where we wanted to select dialogue choices? Of course, but only when we got cornered by the limitations of the game’s mechanics, but we never gave up, because presenting the player with a number of choices on the screen rendered everything else meaningless, so we just worked around the already established flow.

AR: How do you balance nods to present-day events and issues (like an Anonymous analogue and some modern slang) with creating a fictional world that stands on its own?

CO: I think we reached certain balance by isolating those modern issues to a bubble of sorts.

I mean, we can’t really predict the way we’ll communicate in 50 years. I don’t think people in the ‘70s imagined something like an emoji-filled conversation between 2016 teenagers, so we just took the most… universal and cyclical things, details that could perfectly return by the year 207X with another context or an additional twist. I’ve seen many people like the in-game text board because it’s a perfect replica of the toxic nature of today’s internet with female users as the default.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This also prevents most of those things from getting old, since we’re not really copying and pasting the most current viral meme or some shit like that, we’re taking the way interaction works between people today, and filtering the trendy speech, if it makes any sense.