By Patrick Garratt

The contemporary videogame market bears little resemblance to that of 2012, the year Mike Bithell released Thomas Was Alone, a title that remains one of the most iconic British indie games. Having subsequently launched Bithell Games and shipped many other releases, including the Robin Hood-inspired Volume, two text adventures and two Disney-licensed Tron projects, Bithell was forced to lay off staff last year and regroup. The landscape of 2026 is hardly accommodating for those looking to create expensive games.

Speaking to Knowledge on-stage at Game Republic New Horizons in Middlesbrough, UK, last week, the developer outlined the state of Vampirium: 1997, his current project, and shed light on how he's trying to reinvent the immersive sim in today's challenging conditions.

Back to basics

Vampirium, a verb-based adventure in which the player takes on the role of a vampire assassinating other vampires in a Britain ruled by Dracula, arose from the void left by the Bithell Games layoffs.

"We were a bigger team and unfortunately we had to shrink down, which sucks," he said. "I took a little break, some mental-health time, and started playing with Godot. This grew out of those experiments."

Describing Godot as a "lovely engine," Bithell realised he "could do really interesting modular interactions with it," that he "could do every Deus Ex mechanic in this, and I did… I realised was making an immersive sim and kind of went from there."

Vampirium: 1997, as is plain to anyone familiar with the immersive-sim genre, bears no visual relation to Warren Spector and Harvey Smith's Deus Ex, which Bithell describes as "the most important and visionary videogame ever made". The reinvention comes through retaining what makes an immersive sim an immersive sim (player expression through interlocking systems) via a text interface, thus dropping the expensive element, namely 3D production. Bithell adds verbs (he's currently up to around 60), not graphics, and is making the game entirely alone, including the music. The modern game market demands cost-efficiency. It doesn't get more cost efficient than one person.

"It doesn't take an enormous amount of time," he said of adding features based on a recent 200-person playtest. "Obviously I don't have to build assets, animations, complex code to handle all these things. I can kind of decide, 'Oh, I want you to be able to push someone over a railing,' and I can have that in the game a day later."

Creating the "imm-slim"

Bithell is now being credited with the creation of the "im-slim," the idea being, again, a drastic reduction in costs. Immersive sims have been some of the projects hardest hit by ongoing layoffs, with studios such as Arkane, the developer of celebrated immersive sim Dishonored, being an easy target for those seeking to reduce risk.

Pulling costs down to a personal level feels like a return to past times, said Bithell.

"It's a very cyclical industry, and a lot of things come around. Weirdly, it does feel very 2012 in a lot of ways."

Harking back to times when he was part of ten people in the London Unity User Group, he said that working with Godot has been revitalising, as Unity and Unreal "have been around for a long time and have maybe become something else. There's now this new, fresh thing."

Ironically, marketing, too, is on repeat: "The marketing side of games, the visibility stuff, feels weirdly reminiscent of the early 2010s as well. You've got twenty-somethings talking about this exciting new thing they've invented called mailing lists. And it's true – it really does work. We've had a lot of success with mailing lists. Everything old is new again."

What is new to Bithell this time is developing in front of the audience. Barely a conversation with successful independent creatives in recent years has been without hard emphasis on the indelible need to develop openly, via Steam or otherwise, and use test players as part of a feedback loop to gather momentum before launch.

"We've always done lots of playtesting, but we've always done it privately," he said. "This is the first time we're doing it in public."

"It was much more successful than we expected. We got far more interest in signing up for the playtest than we expected. And then the quality of feedback we got was genuinely excellent as well."

Out for blood

Bithell's reinvention of the immersive sim, then, founds itself in strict cost control and player feedback. The fiction’s theme, however, is well-trodden.

"Vampires became, retrospectively, a very obvious and interesting choice, primarily because vampires are a rule set," he said.

"They have specific weaknesses, they have specific strengths, there are rules. There's even a night-day cycle built into vampire lore. They're a very mechanically rich bit of theming and also something that everyone intuitively understands from engaging with pop culture."

The motif of rich, powerful entities being destroyed also made sense for Vampirium.

"If you look at when vampire fiction has been particularly popular, it has generally coincided with distrust of rich people," said Bithell. "There's a lot of fear built into vampire fiction of powerful rich people. And I think you can find that coinciding everywhere."

Regardless of the backdrop, though, it's Bithell's invention that will seal the success of Vampirium: 1997. His willingness to approach a full release by himself, adapting to player feedback loops, and playing with email lists and transmedial marketing (Bithell himself wrote The Last Portrait, an eight-chapter piece of prose fiction outlining the game's premise), means Vampirium: 1997 breathes new life into the immersive sim. Even though many thought hyper-capitalism had put paid to the genre, this project could show that even money can be beaten with a stake through the heart.