‘I’m doing puzzles that may take 10 years to solve’: Animal Well, a mysterious video game time capsule

In an industry notorious for neglecting its past, one developer is trying to make a game that will be playable (and enigmatic) long into the future

In January 2020, players of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time stumbled on a buried spaceship: a fully functional Arwing" fighter from another classic Nintendo game, Star Fox 64. The Arwing was added as a programmer's shortcut to, essentially, teach a dragon how to fly. Once the dragon was airborne, the ship was hidden away in Ocarina of Time's source code, where hackers unearthed it 22 years later.

It's amazing to me that it was there all this time - it just took a lot of digging to find it," says Billy Basso, a game developer from Chicago. It's completely inessential, but it helps people bond with how games are made, the creators behind them and the time and place. It connects you to history in a way." Basso hopes to foster similar connections with Animal Well, an eerie pixel-art cave system which its creator hopes will have plenty of secrets left to uncover a decade from now.

Animal Well will debut on PlayStation 5 and Steam; release date to be confirmed