The Stanley Parable

• 1. Introduction

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  The Stanley Parable begins with an office worker known only as employee 427. Stanley sits in a building and presses buttons whenever a screen tells him to. He never speaks, and his job is to follow instructions without asking why. Then one day the screen goes blank, which has never happened before. Stanley wanders out of his office and finds the whole workplace deserted. A voice begins narrating his every move.

  That setup carries a simple question. What happens when the person holding the controller refuses to follow the story being told? Behind it sits a second puzzle. How did a small experiment by one young developer grow into a console release, a wave of academic analysis, and a nod from television?

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• 2. Disobeying the Narrator

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  At the first fork, Stanley meets two open doors, and the voice announces that he walked through the leftmost one. That has not actually happened yet. Follow the voice and the tale of the missing coworkers carries on. Pick the right-hand door and the story adjusts, with the voice urging a return to the "proper" path.

  The voice belongs to British actor Kevan Brighting, who plays a character called The Narrator. The game was designed and written by Davey Wreden and William Pugh. The Narrator reacts to each decision with fresh lines, or tries to nudge the player back toward his plan. Keep defying him and the story bends again. Sometimes he even breaks the fourth wall. Wreden said the audience divides roughly into a "fifty-fifty split" between those who obey and those who rebel.

  The controls are modest. The player walks, opens doors and presses buttons, and there is no combat at all. After each ending, the game resets to the beginning. Wreden estimated that the 2011 original could be exhausted in about an hour, across six endings. The 2013 remake added more than ten more.

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• 3. A Mod Made Alone

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  Davey Wreden was 22 when his creation first reached the public, yet the idea had struck him about three years earlier. He had been thinking about how video games usually tell their stories, and wondering what would happen if a player simply went against the narration. He also hoped the project would help launch his career as a developer.

  Big-budget games, in his view, assumed a certain kind of player and rarely answered the "what if" questions that player might ask. A few titles had started to fill that gap by making players stop and think, among them the Metal Gear Solid series, Half-Life 2, Portal, Braid, and BioShock. His own design document was blunt. It said to "Mess with the player's head in every way possible, throwing them off-guard, or pretending there's an answer and then kinda whisking it away from in front of them." An unconventional narrator became the tool for that mischief.

  The first version was released as a free modification of Valve's Half-Life 2. Wreden had no previous experience with the Source engine, so he taught himself from wikis and forums about the Source Development Kit. Apart from Brighting's voice work, every part of it was his. Brighting won the role through an audition and recorded his lines in a single pass.

  Wreden kept the game short on purpose. A brief game lets players see every ending without much replaying, and it also allowed absurd endings such as "and then everything was happy!" Those would feel like an insult if they were the reward for a long game. Some ideas had to be cut because he could not make them work in the engine. One sequence was meant to make the player press buttons as the narration demanded, but he could not bind the keyboard input. He left it in as a "broken" puzzle, and players praised it, since it gave them a sense of losing control during that stretch of narration. Even so, he later called the whole project "grueling".

  He tested the mod with a friend, then posted it to the website ModDB on the 31st of July 2011, a few weeks before graduating from college. His plan was to move to Australia and open a video game themed bar like the Mana Bar, where he had worked for about a year. Offers poured in, including job offers from larger developers, and he turned them down because it was "not the kind of scene" he wanted. Instead he started gathering independent programmers to build an improved version, and eventually a completely new title.

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• 4. Building the Remake

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  William Pugh had already won a Saxxy Award for his environment work in the Source engine when he heard about the mod through word of mouth. Impressed after playing, he noticed Wreden was looking for help and reached out. The two worked together every day for two years.

  Wreden first wanted to rebuild the original "beat for beat". Conversations with Pugh changed that, and they chose to alter old material and add new, an "interpolation" that became a stand-alone game. Brighting returned as The Narrator, since Wreden considered his performance "half the reason this game has been successful". Blake Robinson, Yiannis Ioannides, and Christiaan Bakker composed a custom soundtrack.

  The script grew through trade-offs. Wreden and Pugh each added lines that the other then tweaked and expanded, and changes to the environment shaped The Narrator's personality in turn. Pugh pointed out that the bare office reflected the narrator's bias, because he would never think to include objects that did not matter to his story. Wreden took special care with the first choice, the left door and the right door, so that nothing looked wrong and the player's decision felt like their own.

  On the relationship at the heart of the game, Wreden was careful. He did not see a simple power struggle. In his words, "Ultimately, these things are trying to understand one another, but they're having great difficulty doing so." He added that a reconciliation between player and Narrator was always possible, depending on how the player chose to play.

  Play-testing reshaped the design. Early in the game a flowchart showed where the story could branch, but players responded badly to having that preconceived map, so it was removed. Yet without any signal, players missed the forks, so Pugh added cues such as colors to mark where a choice was available. The original mod had a route through sections modeled on Half-Life 2. The remake swapped in a route that drops the player into a Minecraft world, and another that revisits the opening of Portal before trapping the player in the 2011 mod itself. Both routes were included with the approval of Markus Persson and Valve respectively.

  For distribution, the team first considered a pay what you want scheme. They then turned to Steam Greenlight, where players vote to persuade Valve to carry an independent title. Valve approved the game in October 2012, to be added once it was finished. Wreden first called the stand-alone version The Stanley Parable: HD Remix, then dropped the subtitle, convinced it was the "definitive" version. It reached Windows on the 17th of October 2013. A macOS version, requiring 10.8 or later, followed on the 19th of December 2013, and Linux support arrived on the 9th of September 2015.

  In August 2016, Galactic Cafe partnered with the subscription box service IndieBox on a physical collector's edition. Alongside a DRM-free game CD, it came with the soundtrack, a manual, a Steam key, an "Adventure Tie" and an "Existential Mousepad".

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• 5. The Demo That Wasn't

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  A waiting room was one of the first spaces Wreden and Pugh built for the demo. Wreden said it "catalyzed this sense that even very mundane tasks like sitting in a waiting room are fun if they're not what you're ‘supposed' to be doing".

  The demo came out alongside the release announcement, and it was not a slice of the real game. It was entirely original content. The developers had found that lifting a section out of the full game left play-testers confused and annoyed, because they missed the earlier monologues that gave it meaning. Wreden explained the reasoning this way: "the best way to convey what our game is about is through an additional piece of content, completely separate from the main game, that carries the style and tone of the main game without actually spoiling it."

  For promotion, Wreden also made personalized versions for Game Grumps and for Adam Sessler of Revision3, to use in Let's Play videos. They included rerecorded lines aimed at those particular players. Both videos drew higher-than-average viewership, and Wreden felt the demo earned coverage close to that of the full game. The special editions took two months of work, and he reckoned they produced media buzz equal to two game titles.

  Wreden considered the demo a key part of the full game's success. IGN's Luke Reilly later ranked it among the top six demos in video games, calling it "an entirely standalone exercise designed to prepare the player for the unique player and narrator relationship that forms the core of The Stanley Parable experience".

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• 6. Ultra Deluxe

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  After the remake, the two creators went separate ways. Wreden began work on his next title, The Beginner's Guide, which was released in October 2015. Pugh set up an independent studio called Crows Crows Crows. Its first game, Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist, appeared in December 2015.

  The Game Awards 2018 brought the series back, with the announcement of an expanded edition called The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It was a joint release by Galactic Cafe and Pugh's Crows Crows Crows, and it was planned for 2019. To support consoles, the game was ported to the Unity engine. In November 2019 the studios pushed the release to mid-2020. To keep interest alive, the 2013 remake was made free for a limited time on the Epic Games Store in March 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic then delayed the game into 2021. In December 2021, publisher Crows Crows Crows said it would arrive in early 2022.

  Wreden later said the script for the new content was longer than the script of the entire original game. The Minecraft and Portal section was replaced by levels based on Firewatch and Rocket League. Ultra Deluxe was released on the 27th of April 2022 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It also came to Windows, macOS, and Linux through Steam, where owners of the 2013 remake got a discount for the first two weeks. An iOS port followed on the 7th of October 2024.

  Players can tell the game they have played before and skip ahead, since otherwise several endings must be seen before the new material opens up. Stanley then finds an area proclaiming "new content", which includes a bucket that can alter the game's endings. Another route leads to the Memory Zone, which recounts the praise the game has received. It soon turns into an area filled with critical Steam reviews, labeled "Pressurized Gas" in the console and mobile versions. These leave the Narrator distressed that the game was not good enough. After finishing all the new content, including a route where Stanley discovers that "The Stanley Parable 2" has been poorly reviewed, the title screen changes to show that new name.

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• 7. Praise and Sales

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  Within two weeks of release, the mod had been downloaded more than 90,000 times. Wreden became, in the source's words, "an overnight internet sensation among hardcore gamers". Journalists praised it as a short, highly experimental, thought-provoking game, and many urged readers to play it unspoiled. Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica observed that many of the choices have no effect, as "to feel like you're in more control than you are". Brighting's dry British wit was singled out as a strength. The mod earned an honorable mention for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and for "Excellence in Narrative" at the 15th Annual Independent Games Festival, plus Special Recognition at IndieCade 2012.

  As of March 2020, the 2013 remake held an 88/100 score on Metacritic, based on 47 critic reviews. Forbes put Wreden on its 2013 "30 Under 30" list for games, citing the game's success and marketing. BAFTA named Pugh one of 18 "Breakthrough Brits" for 2014. At the 2014 Independent Games Festival, the remake won the Audience Award, was a finalist for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, and was nominated for Excellence in Narrative and Excellence in Audio.

  The 2014 BAFTA Video Games Awards nominated it for Best Story, Best Debut Game, and Game Innovation. Brighting was nominated in the Performer category. At the 2013 National Academy of Video Game Trade Reviewers awards, the game won Writing in a Comedy and Performance in a Comedy, Lead, for Brighting as Narrator. The 17th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards nominated it for Downloadable Game of the Year, Outstanding Innovation in Gaming, and Outstanding Character Performance for the Narrator. Critic Ashton Raze of The Telegraph wrote that the game "offers... a look at, not a critique of... the nature of narrative construction".

  The money surprised Wreden. More than 100,000 copies sold in the first three days, and he calculated that revenue from those days alone could let him live comfortably as a full-time developer for five years. The game passed one million copies in under a year.

  A patch arrived soon after launch to replace imagery in a 1950s-style instructional video that some players found racially offensive. Wreden wrote, "We always wanted the game to be something that could be played by anyone of any age. If a person would feel less comfortable showing the game to their children then I've got no problem helping fix that!"

  The 2022 expansion drew its own praise. By April 2024, Metacritic gave Ultra Deluxe 90/100 from 16 reviews. Crows Crows Crows said on Twitter that it had sold more than 100,000 copies on Steam within 24 hours. Christopher Livingston of PC Gamer wrote that "That's really the genius of Ultra Deluxe: it gets you to laugh at a joke and then slowly makes you realize how much truth lies within that joke." Tom Marks of IGN loved the new content and humor but found several new routes more passive than the originals, though he admitted that may stem from knowing what to expect nine years later. Reviewers at Nintendo World Report flagged frame rate problems on certain ports. At the New York Game Awards, Ultra Deluxe won the "Freedom Tower Award for Best Remake".

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• 8. Reading the Game

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  Scholars have treated The Stanley Parable as a serious text. The book The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom called it a game that "speaks to other games". Its authors saw tension between the will of the game and the will of the player. Because the central ethical question is built before the player ever arrives, they argued, players are experimenting to test their own agency against the game's ethos.

  They focused on one ending in which Stanley is locked in a room with a bomb that cannot be disarmed. The timer simply counts down to zero. It punishes players for thinking outside the box and makes them question the game's purpose. They also examined "The Baby Game", where Stanley must press a button repeatedly to keep a baby from walking into an incinerator. The question there is whether saving the baby means anything, or whether the player is being manipulated throughout.

  The book Fictionality, Factuality, and Reflexivity Across Discourses and Media looked at the "Confusion" ending. There, the Narrator and Stanley find a wall listing all of the Narrator's dialogue. For that book, this moment shows the game's awareness that its story follows a fixed path, even for those who seem to be in control. It also noted that the Narrator is a homodiegetic narrator, a character inside the story, who poses as a heterodiegetic one, an outside observer. The "Freedom" ending, in which Stanley disables a mind control facility and walks outside, carries a bitter irony. To free Stanley, the player must give up control, which takes away their own freedom of choice.

  The book Against Flow: Video Games and the Flowing Subject saw the game making players stop and ask why they play, something most games try to prevent. Rather than breaking the experience, that self-reflexive pause encouraged immersion. The book called it a "deeply ironic game" that "turned a critical eye on play itself" while still drawing the player closer to games.

  The Narrator has become a fan favorite. Jeffrey Matulef of Eurogamer wrote that most games treat players as listeners "sitting cross-legged on the rug while the developer spins them a yarn", whereas this one is "more like playing improv theater with a robot comedian who was programmed to be much, much funnier than you." Scott Donaldson, writing in the book 100 Greatest Video Game Characters, saw the Narrator shift from background element to the main focus as the player progresses. He read the "Broom Closet Ending" as the Narrator recognizing his own futility and his status as pre-recorded voice lines. Another book, Time and Space in Video Games: A Cognitive-Formalist Approach, argued that his formal British speech, even when frustrated, makes players want to disobey him. It compared him to a god over a world of his own making, with the player cast against him.

  The game has also traveled beyond its own screen. In May 2014, a Dota 2 announcer pack carried the Narrator's voice, and he appeared as an optional announcer for Johann Sebastian Joust in the Sportsfriends compilation. In episode 7 of the third season of House of Cards, a novelist shows President Frank Underwood the game, and its power to contradict a narrative becomes a metaphor for the show's politics. The Apple TV+ series Severance took inspiration from The Stanley Parable.

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