The world ended 31 years ago. That’s the premise of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and we’re delighted to be able to announce the game’s launch date – August 11th, 2015.

To celebrate this, we’ve launched this dedicated website for the game, which will feature exclusive content – images, music and writing created just for the site. We want to set the scene for this game, introduce you to characters and themes of the story, get you exclusive previews of the game’s soundtrack and fill you in on some more of the work that’s gone on to create the title. We also wanted to share another piece of music from the game’s gorgeous soundtrack:

There’s going to be a lot more news about Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture coming out between now and launch, including a development diary which lifts the hood on how we got from the first ideas to this game we’ve poured heart and soul into over the last three years; another mini-documentary and lots more. But don’t worry – the mystery of what happened in Yaughton valley thirty-one years ago will remain buried in the empty fields and woods for you to discover.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is the culmination of journey Jess and I started back in 2006, when we asked the simple question “what happens if you remove traditional mechanics from a game world? Will that be something people will want to play?”

The answer to that question, the last nine years have proved, is a pretty emphatic YES. Dear Esther stood on the shoulders of giants, drawing on the long, proud design history of first-person gaming, to just try side-stepping into an area we believed was worth exploring. We look back now at the number of story-driven, exploration-driven games that have been produced since and that’s an incredible thing to be part of. We stand alongside studios and developers who are committed to pushing at the boundaries of what games can be, and that’s being part of a tradition as old as gaming itself. This medium has always been about those boundaries, that pushing out, that bending and breaking of rules to do new things, and we hope Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture will earn its place in that.

Personally, back in 1984 I was eleven years old, and obsessed with my ZX Spectrum. By then, I’d made a couple of games for myself, including a procedural cave shooter – it wasn’t much, but it worked, and being able to create something in this amazing space was about as cool as life got. If you’d told me then that one day I’d be squaring up to launching a game like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, I don’t think I could have believed it. But I know that the same giddy rush of excitement has never left me. Like Kate, one of the astronomers at the heart of Rapture’s story puts it – “my hands are shaking. I’m like a little kid.”

Jess & I are really lucky to have an amazing team working on this project and they’ve done an outstanding job. It’s been an incredible game to work on and we hope you enjoy it as much as we’ve enjoyed making it.

There are strange voices on the television and numbers on the phone; lights in the skies and electricity in the air. The end of the world is coming.