Dan Pearce: from dreaming of video game design to doing it for real

'Castles in the Sky evokes the awe and energy of being a kid. In a way, it helped me let go of childhood'

When Dan Pearce was in primary school, he told his friends that he had won a competition to have one of his ideas made into a video game by an international video game publisher. It was a lie, but one Pearce coolly upheld, inviting his friends to pitch in ideas for how the game could be improved. "It basically turned into a two-year exercise in designing as a group and getting feedback on my ideas," he recalls today. "That said, I do still feel very guilty about maintaining the lie for so long."

Thanks to this formative experience, by the age of 10, Pearce, who lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire, knew that he wanted to become a game designer. The following year he bought a copy of RPG Maker, a simple game-making tool for Sony's PlayStation. The first game he made was a pastiche of his favourite Nintendo games - The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy and Poki(C)mon. "It was basically just me taking aesthetic elements that I liked in various pieces of media," he says. "There was an island floating in the sky because I liked a Gorillaz music video. I once bunked off school for two weeks so that I could just work on that game."