“We had the licence and very few developers to work on it,” he recalls. “Feargus [Urquhart, Black Isle CEO] asked if I wanted to be the first to work on the PC version; I said: ‘Hell, yes.’” Avellone’s central conceit with Torment was that death, in storybased games, was a punitive waste of time, and served only to slow players down. From this, the story emerged: players were cast as The Nameless One, a hideously scarred immortal amnesiac who would remember (rather than learn) new skills by coming into contact with relics from his forgotten past.

Death – or the lack thereof – was so pivotal to Torment’s gameplay that it could even be used to the player’s advantage. Say you needed to break into a morgue: you might attempt to attack the guards outside, but a much simpler (albeit perhaps more cringeinducing) method of entry was to simply commit suicide and be carted in, cadaver-style.