My Life in Games: Prey lead designer Ricardo Bare picks his top titles

As he watched the glowing reviews roll-in after four years of hard work, we caught up with an exhausted, but thoroughly satisfied Ricardo Bare – lead designer on Bethesda‘s big new sci-fi adventure Prey – to ask him about his favourite games and how he wound up turning them into a living.

1. The first game you remember playing…

“Aside from random arcades, the first game I remember playing at home was The Bard’s Tale II. My dad came home one day with a Commodore 64 and that was the first game we loaded up. I was already in love with the idea of fantasy games and table top RPG’s so that was a pretty magical experience for me – creating characters in the Adventurer’s Guild, drawing out dungeon maps by hand on graph paper, and learning that the helpful ‘Sage’ sending us out on our epic quests was the main bad guy all along.”

2. The game that made you want to be a developer…

“I’m not sure if it was any one game, but there are definitely games that were stand out experiences for me and made me dream about making my own games. It was probably a combination of playing the pen and paper version of Dungeons and Dragons along with all those ‘Gold Box’ games created by Strategic Simulations Inc’ (SSI) like Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds. Then there’re other games like Darklands and X-COM: Enemy Unknown, DOOM, the original Half-Life… I can’t pick just one!”

3. The game that you wish you had made…

“The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – or really any of the other games from the Elder Scrolls series. First-person viewpoint, deep role-playing mechanics, a big open world to explore… I mean, I honestly can’t believe I still haven’t worked on a fantasy game at this point.”

4. The game that you’ve sunk more hours into than any other…

“According to my games library, it’s Defense of the Ancients 2 (or ‘DotA 2’ as most people know it). In college, it would definitely have been Origin System’s Ultima Online, but these days it could easily be one of the games I play with my kids: something like Terraria maybe.”

5. The last game you played that made you rethink the medium…

“Gone Home. It’s not your typical kind of game, for sure, but it’s one that made me realise how games could also be great vehicles for broadening our experience – even helping us to empathise with others – in the way that reading and great works of fiction traditionally have.”

6. Last game soundtrack you whistled in the shower…

“That would be ‘Semi-Sacred Geometry’, sung by one of the characters in Prey. I’ve heard it a million times during the production for Prey and it’s a fun song – actually provides one of my favourite moments in the game.”

7. The last game that you saw the end credits for…

“Horizon: Zero Dawn – fantastic game. The Dinobots – from the original Transformers series – were some of my favourite toys growing up. So, the minute I found myself fighting giant, prehistoric robot animals in some strange dystopian future I was in heaven.”

8. Your favourite multiplayer game…

“That’s a hard one… a long time ago it would have been Blizzard’s original Diablo. Today, it’s probably DotA 2, purely for the competitive fun of it. Terraria, though, might be my favourite co-op game of the last five years.”

Try Prey now

If you’ve not had a chance to dip in the dark, futuristic world of Prey yet , then firstly, you’re missing out, and secondly, you’re in luck: Prey is this week’s PlayStation Store Deal of the Week – meaning that between now and next Wednesday you’ll be able to grab it for a song…

Read more in the My Life in Games series: