If there's one thing I'm always saying as a PC gamer, it's "I really hope nobody takes a console-exclusive series I loved as a kid that's rarely if ever been replicated on the platform I now predominantly use as an adult and creates a modern homage to it." You know, like we said about Final Fantasy Tactics for years. More stuff like that formative thing I loved? No thank you!
That's basically the reaction Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone expected from Harvest Moon fans back in 2016 when he released his indie farm sim. Thank goodness he was wrong.
Eric "ConcernedApe" Barone sat down to chat with PC Gamer at last year's Game Developer's conference, nine years after Stardew Valley launched. Now Stardew Valley is celebrating its first decade—on February 26, specifically—and I still can't believe that Barone thought that farm sim players weren't going to like his farm sim.
"I still didn't think it was going to be super popular," Barone said of the lead up to launch. "I thought it would be maybe a niche game for Harvest Moon lovers—and I even thought a lot of them would probably hate it because they'd be like 'this isn't as good as my favorite Harvest Moon game' you know?"
We actually interviewed Barone back in March 2016, too, right as he was realizing Stardew Valley was on its way from "success" to "phenomenon." He basically said the same thing then: "I thought it would be popular with people who were fans of Harvest Moon or Rune Factory, and I thought that would pretty much be it."
I do understand Barone's suspicion that a farm sim on PC would be a bit niche. Before Stardew, people just weren't making them, not on PC anyhow. Harvest Moon had always been a console series, had recently gotten split into Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons brands, and the adults who wanted chill farm games were still rocking FarmVille on Facebook. (This is the part of the story that makes a decade feel like a lifetime ago.)
As someone who did love Harvest Moon as a kid—though admittedly my experience was with the single Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life game that I owned and not broadly across the series at that time—I loved Stardew Valley on day one. Well, close to day one. My Steam library informs me that I bought it on March 8, 2016. I loved it on day 11. Regardless, I was completely taken with Stardew as soon as I got my hands on it, as were so many others.
Stardew Valley re-popularized a style of life sim that I hadn't realized I'd been missing. I had fond memories of giving gifts to my prospective spouses and doing my daily chores in A Wonderful Life and had a real fascination with NPCs who had actual schedules I could learn and follow. Stardew Valley took the admittedly pretty slow pace of those old Harvest Moon games and kicked it up a bit with a bit more management-minded focus on profits and a greater spread of activities.
I can imagine a Harvest Moon fan being disappointed with a half-hearted attempt to mimic the qualities of an old favorite series. Lucky for us, and Barone, that's definitely not what Stardew Valley turned out to be.
In the decade since, Stardew's massive success has spawned a whole era of games like Stardew Valley cropping up, making old farm sim fans so spoiled for choice that the Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons series themselves both now have some PC releases. And Eric Barone got to meet and talk with Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada—and get his Super Nintendo copy of Harvest Moon signed. "It's one of my most cherished items," he told us last year.
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