A 'little educational game for middle-schoolers' left DayZ's creators obsessed, inspired, and embroiled in a contentious presidential campaign: 'It's 4.5 years later, and I'm still talking about this story'

During the pandemic, while most of us were stuck inside, the RocketWerkz dev team, including former DayZ creative director Brian Hicks and head honcho Dean Hall, were roaming around in Eco—an early access sandbox that Hicks describes as a "little educational game for middle-schoolers".

Hicks was there at the birth of the modern survival genre, becoming smitten with DayZ when it was still an Arma 2 mod, before eventually leaving his job at Microsoft to work on the standalone game. He teamed up with Hall again for Icarus, lent his expertise to the upcoming The Long Dark 2, and most recently co-founded a survival studio, 775 Interactive.

But in a chat with PC Gamer about the history of the genre and where it might be heading, Hicks was perhaps most effusive about a game he hadn't actually worked on, but which he seems to absolutely love: the aforementioned Eco.

I was only vaguely aware of Eco and never played it, but Hicks' enthusiasm makes me want to rectify that. It's a survival game with no combat, and where the thing that you're desperately trying to keep alive is not your own frail, human body, but rather the world itself. It's about to be hit by a meteor, you see.

"You start out on a new Minecraft-ish world, with very basic agrarian technology," says Hicks. "And your end goal over the span of however much time before that meteor hits is to progress the planet's technology level to the point where you can build lasers to shoot down this meteor and save the planet."

You can research tech and harvest resources, but some resources are non-renewable, and the process of crafting and refining (at least once you hit the industrial stage) is pollution. There's an ecosystem to consider, then. You need to keep the planet alive for long enough to save it.

So there's a clear, shared goal. Some nice co-operation bait. Hicks became obsessed immediately. Particularly because of the kind of soft skills that he wanted to include in DayZ, but never got to; the roles you got in classic sandbox MMOs like Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online.

"Much like Ultima Online, you could be a baker, and a lumberjack," he says. "There's gathering and refining and crafting and that kind of three-point loop, constantly driving the economy. You can decide where you fit in there and what you find compelling."

While these kinds of activities can be found in countless survival games, Hicks is specifically interested in the way Eco lets players focus on what they find engaging, slotting neatly into a society of survivors. It's this society element that seems to have gripped Hicks and his colleagues, but it's also why Hicks calls it "easily one of the most friendship-killing games ever".

It was during the development of Icarus and in the midst of the Covid lockdowns that Hicks, along with some friends and colleagues, found himself trying to create a functioning society to save the world from a meteor. And it got intense.

Hicks recalls that he "ended up in a situation during the development of Icarus where my wife's childhood best friend and my dear friend and boss Dean [Hall] were at odds over an action that Dean took during a presidential campaign in our Eco server". Things got weird during Covid. For everyone.

Things kicked off when Hall hopped into his truck, then hit up his fellow survivor's store while she was asleep over on the other side of the planet (the real one). Hall then bought up all of a specific resource she was selling there at "almost-cost". Hicks says that his boss "cleared her store out, then trucked it over to his store on the other side of the country, and then resold it for a profit".

While Hall "played innocent", this wasn't Hicks' first rodeo. "I knew, having survived significant amounts of weekend LAN parties in Dean's apartment during the early days of DayZ development, that he is absolutely a mischievous, sneaky person when it comes to these multiplayer games."

At the time, Hall was also running for president of the server, "because there are offices and a whole system for visual scripting for laws [in Eco]". And while reselling a pal's stuff doesn't sound like a solid way to get votes, Hall won the election. His reign, however, was short-lived.

Hick says that his wife's friend's social group started vandalising highway signs with slogans like "not my president" and "demand a recount". Society was fracturing.

"This tiny, little educational game for middle-schoolers devolved to a point where my boss ended up spooling up a second Eco server and pulling a bunch of the RocketWerkz dev team off of my Eco server," says Hicks. "This is just a very soft touch example of what introducing that social layer to that type of survival experience can do."

Hicks reckons that this is where the survival space needs to go. "It’s four and a half years later, and I'm still talking about this story. Long after people forget what DayZ is, I will remember this story."

Games like Valheim, The Long Dark 2 and RocketWerkz's own Icarus are good examples of this style of survival game, says Hicks—"titles that are built to be adventures with your friends". He adds that this kind of "non-competitive push is one indicator that it doesn't have to always be 'loot, shoot, survive'. We can have more nuance."

The next step, he reckons, is to look towards the big roleplaying sandboxes, from the classics like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, to the communities that forged the likes of GTA RP, DayZ RP and Read Dead RP. Games that let you carve out a virtual life.

"I foresee at some point, whether it be myself or someone else, building experiences around those two core concepts," says Hicks. "Of the virtual, authentic world that you would see in something like DayZ and The Long Dark and Icarus, where you're worried about wind and rain and staying fed and energy consumption. And doing it through the lens of, for lack of a better term, a second life, your avatar in that virtual world."

I might just be running a fever, but 'Star Wars Galaxies, but you need to worry about the weather and eating a balanced diet' is kinda doing it for me. I would gladly be a cantina dancer trying to save up for a sturdy anorak. And it does feel like survival games could do with some more reasons to keep playing once you go beyond living a subsistence lifestyle.

Participating in a mutable society might be just the ticket.