The critic Roger Ebert once drew a crucial distinction between video games and art: he said that the ultimate objective of a video game—unlike that of a book, film, or poem—is to achieve a high score, vaporize falling blocks, or save the princess. Art, he argued, cannot be won.

But Journey, which was released last spring, is not like other games. You play a faceless, cloaked figure who glides through a vast desert towards a mountain on the horizon. Along the way, you may encounter a second player, with an identical avatar, who is plucked from the Internet through an online matchmaking system. Both players remain anonymous—there are no usernames or other identifying details—and communication is limited to varying combinations of the same, one-note chirp. No words ever appear onscreen during gameplay. The idea of the two-hour game is to make a pair of players connect, despite those limitations, and help each other move forward. Along the way, they solve puzzles and explore the remnants of a forgotten civilization.

This kind of purity of form is at odds with most contemporary games. As the gaming industry has increasingly come to resemble Hollywood in its pursuit of guaranteed blockbuster franchises, the titles that dominate the sales charts—the shooters and the sports games—are designed to trigger the kind of escapism that rarely invites contemplation or self-reflection. Few games are willing to stray from familiar territory, and even fewer do so successfully. By delighting critics and smashing sales records, Journey, a weird game from an unconventional game-development studio, joins the small pantheon of titles to have done both with ease.

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Thatgamecompany, the independent studio responsible for creating Journey, is a fourteen-person firm that operates out of a small, one-room office in suburban Santa Monica, California.

TGC’s creative director, Jenova Chen, sits by the front door, next to a shelf packed with a growing collection of industry trophies and awards. Now thirty-one, Chen co-founded TGC with Kellee Santiago during his final year at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, in 2006. Since Santiago’s departure, in 2012, Chen has become the company’s leader, ideas man, and public face. He believes that TGC is “the Pixar of games”: “Right now, most games feel like summer blockbuster films, all explosions and crappy dialogue,” Chen said. “A big part of the games industry still hasn’t figured out how to give players something new. That’s what I want to do.”

The concept of the auteur is relatively new to gaming. Only a small group of developers have earned the title, people like Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, and Warren Spector. Chen considers himself a commercial artist, whose role is as much to create “real art”—the kind that Ebert referred to—as it is to produce marketable entertainment. He wears suits to work instead of the jeans-and-T-shirt uniform adopted by most game developers. And he describes himself as a perfectionist; he redesigned TGC’s 2009 title, Flower, twelve times before being convinced it was ready for release. Even his name is overly designed: he adopted “Jenova” from the antagonist of one of his favorite video games, Final Fantasy VII, while he was in high school. (His real name, “Xinghan,” means “Milky Way” in Chinese.)

In the industry press, TGC’s games are often described as “experimental.” The studio’s past three titles, released on the PlayStation Network as part of an exclusive three-game deal with Sony Computer Entertainment America, featured no dialogue or conventional protagonists. Flow, released in 2007, requires players to guide a microorganism through a series of underwater two-dimensional plains; in Flower, the player guides a single flower petal across different environments. Journey, released in spring of 2012, was TGC’s first online game. Following its release, it became the fastest-selling PlayStation Store title in both North America and Europe. (Sony did not reveal how many copies the game sold, saying only that it broke sales records.)

In the first week of sales, TGC received over three hundred emails and letters from gamers expressing awe at Journey’s ability to rouse their altruistic spirit. Meanwhile, critics pointed to Journey as evidence of a cultural shift in gaming—the start of a new era of thought-provoking, meaningful experiences that stretch the boundaries of the medium. This year, Journey was nominated for almost every recognizable game-of-the-year award, eclipsing games with many times its budget. Overnight, TGC became the gaming industry’s new heroes.

But in a keynote speech shortly after Journey had won Game of the Year at the 2013 DICE Summit, Chen announced that the studio had run out of money while developing the game.

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TGC had begun work on Journey in 2009. Sony’s strict budget for the title determined many of the firm’s design decisions: Chen originally intended for the game to be set in a forest but switched the backdrop to a desert because there was “less stuff to draw.” The fully animated human protagonist was reduced to a pair of matchstick legs. The game’s striking visual aesthetic was the fortunate result of limitations.

At the end of 2011, a few months before Journey’s deadline, TGC asked Sony for an extension. It was the third in as many years—the development cycle had been unusually long, and Chen didn’t want to submit the game until it had “achieved its intended emotional impact.” He had spent twelve months reading sociology books. Knowing he couldn’t anticipate players’ reactions, he reasoned that they might be more willing to invest emotionally in the game if they were forced to play anonymously. (This runs contrary to current conventional wisdom about how online speech becomes more civil if you attach people’s real names to their actions.) “Right now, when you think about online players, you just think of jerks that couldn’t be happier than when they see you suffer,” Chen said. “I wanted a game where players could connect to someone, someone they could trust but who they knew nothing about.”

Sony gave the studio more time but no additional money. Chen used the last of TGC’s savings to finish Journey; it submitted the game to Sony in January, 2012. A week later, the company shut down. Most of the employees left for new jobs; the rest were quietly let go. Chen, his lead engineer, and his lead designer held on to await the verdict on the game that had bankrupted them.

Chen waited long enough to be convinced the game would succeed before flying to San Francisco to meet with Benchmark Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm whose list of investments includes Twitter, Instagram, and Yelp. Mitch Lasky, the Benchmark general partner who agreed to meet with Chen, was already impressed by Journey. After Chen finished his pitch and left the room, one of the partners who sat in on the meeting told Lasky, “Don’t let him leave the parking lot without a handshake.”

A week later, Benchmark signed off on a five-and-a-half-million-dollar investment. “I’m a venture capitalist, not a patron of the arts,” Lasky explained to me. “He’s an outlier, and in our business, it’s the outliers who can produce the biggest returns. Journey may be the video-game industry’s ‘Toy Story’ moment.”

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A week before our interview, Chen stopped at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in downtown Los Angeles, to see if anyone had one-upped him on his next idea. “I was proud to see that no one is doing what we’re doing, but also worried because I know why,” he said. “It’s risky.” Earlier this year, an ex-TGC employee promised that the company’s next game would “change the industry.”