I’d lost sight of what mattered most in life…real connections with other people and nature. If you’re reading this, you must be in dire need of a change. You reach into your drawer and retrieve the envelope: But as just one man, Eric Barone tested the limits of video-game ambition and unintentionally created something that resonated with an audience of millions. Even putting money aside, the demands of making intimate art of this scale are enough to break a person: obsession, isolation, ambition. Games like Minecraft may have paved the way for the democratization of indie-game development, yet despite the tectonic shift in the scene, entirely solo projects like Stardew Valley-financially unviable and creatively overwhelming-are still very rare. His budget was the part-time wage he made as an evening usher at the local stage theater. It took him four and a half years to design, program, animate, draw, compose, record, and write everything in the game, working 12-hour days, seven days a week. Then there’s Stardew Valley-a humble, intimate farming adventure about the monotony of domestic life, in which you spend dozens of hours parenting cabbages. Grand Theft Auto, Madden, Call of Duty-guns, sports, more guns. “I wanted to do all the music, the art.”īlockbusters of this scope take a few familiar shapes. “I think it makes sense that I worked entirely alone,” Eric says. So he made it himself-all by himself, having never made a game before. He kept wishing a better version existed. It all started with a modest idea: a renaissance for Harvest Moon, the long-running Japanese farming simulation series that, in Eric’s eyes, had lost its way. We’re speaking a few days before the second anniversary of the release of Stardew Valley, the video game Eric spent nearly half a decade making. He could afford it for several lifetimes. Most of his days are spent much like today: an indeterminate spiral of reading articles and perusing the comments below, eventually starting work at some unspecified point in the afternoon. Even his three-times-weekly workout takes place downstairs in his basement-alone, away from other people.

It’s a place he rarely leaves: only to go get groceries, for walks to clear his head, or to drive his long-term girlfriend, Amber, to college.

It’s just after lunch and Eric Barone, a 30-year-old developer, is at his computer in his Seattle apartment.

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