‘It didn’t exist and I wanted to play it’: Phasmophobia’s lead dev got tired of trawling around Steam for a co-op horror puzzle game so decided to just make it himself

When Larian Studios’ CEO Swen Vincke took the stage at The Game Awards to present Game of the Year he also relayed a bit of advice to other studios: Make a game that you want to play yourself, and your game will do well. Something that Daniel Knight, CEO of Kinetic Games and lead developer, did years ago with Phasmophobia.

“I don’t think there’s any main inspiration [for Phasmophobia],” Knight says in an interview with Andrea Shearon at Summer Game Fest. “The whole reason why I made [Phasmophobia] was because it didn’t exist and I wanted to play it.

“I got impatient waiting for a game to come out. I was constantly looking at the Steam store and waiting for something to come out; there was never anything. So I was like, I’ll just make it myself.”

Knight also theorises that Phasmophobia’s uniqueness was one of the reasons why it performed so well. I had certainly never played anything like it before, and I’ve played a lot of co-op horror games.

The other reason why I think Phasmo did so well, other than that fact it came out at the end of 2020 when people were still locked inside their homes trying to find new ways to entertain themselves and hang out with friends, was thanks to its odd take on horror games.

Knight also told Andrea during this interview that he doesn’t even really like horror games, nor does he play a lot of them. Phasmophobia was actually made with the intention of creating a VR puzzle game which you could try and solve together with a bunch of your friends. The ghosts and scares all came second to that.

But just having the vision of something you want to create isn’t always enough. “[Phasmophobia] originally was a VR-only game, and I’d worked at a VR company so we did VR things before,” Knight says. “I took that knowledge to make a VR puzzle horror game. At the time there weren’t very many co-op horror VR games, and I was a huge fan of VR, so I just wanted to make something like that.

“But it’s very hard to make a co-op VR game on your own. So I ended up forcing it to be able to play without VR, and then I could get friends who didn’t have VR to help play test it.”

Phasmo does offer a VR mode now, but as someone who doesn’t own an Oculus or any VR kit, I’m very happy that this switch was made. It has meant that I had the chance to experience all the hilarity and horror which comes with hunting ghosts with friends.