JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Some video games have grand adventures, epic heroes and galactic firefights, but not all of them. That is not the case for one of my favorite games.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONCERNEDAPE’S “STARDEW VALLEY OVERTURE”)
SUMMERS: The farming simulation game Stardew Valley came out eight years ago, and it became a sensation.
ERIC BARONE: Stardew Valley is a role-playing game where you inherit a farm from your grandfather and you decide to leave your corporate job in the city to go move out to the countryside and try to make a new life for yourself by living off the land.
SUMMERS: That’s creator Eric Barone. He graduated college and was struggling to find a job, so he decided to make his own video game, one inspired by those games he played as a kid.
BARONE: They really sparked my imagination, gave me this magical, special feeling of exploring a different world. And I wanted to create that myself and kind of share that same feeling that I had with other people.
SUMMERS: When Stardew Valley came out in 2016, it was a solo project. That meant Barone was behind all the programming, the pixel art, the music.
BARONE: For me, it’s a dream game. It’s the game that I always wanted to play. Whenever I play it, I’m always coming up with new ideas. And it’s just, like, I can add these things to the game, so it’s fun. Like, I just want to keep adding to it.
SUMMERS: And he does keep adding to it. Barone and a small team of developers updated the game again last month, making hundreds of changes and even adding new content. To date, the game has sold over 35 million copies, and people keep playing, including me. I started playing back in 2020 around the start of the pandemic. And over the years, I’ve probably sunk hundreds of hours into playing it. When we called up Eric Barone, I asked him why he thinks this game still resonates with players after all these years.
BARONE: You know, some people have called it Chores: The Game. And I can kind of see that, yeah. Like, as you mentioned, you’re - every day, you’re kind of getting up. You’re watering your crops. You might go in and talk to people. There’s no high, grand adventure. It’s kind of, like, little domestic things. But that’s the sort of thing that, you know, we all do every day, and that’s just part of life. You know, it just keeps us going every day. So I think there’s something about that that does tap into a certain - a human drive that we have.
SUMMERS: And what about the music? I know that you composed the music, which is something that has also resonated with a lot of people. Can you walk us through some of your thinking?
BARONE: So for the music, I wanted to, for one, capture the seasons because the seasons are very important in Stardew Valley. You grow different crops in different seasons. The landscape changes. In the fall, you might harvest mushrooms from the forest. And so I wanted each season to have a very distinct feeling to it. And I think a lot of that was the instruments. You know, in the spring, I used a lot of, like, woodwinds and things like that.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONCERNEDAPE’S “SPRING (THE VALLEY COMES ALIVE)”)
BARONE: In the winter, I used, like, synthesizers, which I feel like have a cold quality to them.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONCERNEDAPE’S “WINTER (NOCTURNE OF ICE)”)
BARONE: So there was a little bit of, I guess, a challenge in taking, you know, what is essentially computer music but making it sound natural and organic and for it to really, you know, feel like you’re in a countryside village with all computer music - a lot of synthesizers and stuff.
SUMMERS: You’ve said elsewhere that you could work on Stardew Valley for the rest of your life. So I do wonder, do you see a future at some point where you’ll be done with this game, where Stardew Valley feels like it’s complete?
BARONE: I think so because I think a game can have too much content. And I want - I ultimately want Stardew Valley to be the best game it can be. So if I feel like, you know, it’s starting to become kind of overwhelmed with content to the point where it’s detrimental to the game’s, like, entertainment factor, I would stop at that point. Another thing is I do want to make more than one game in my life. It’s - I’ve been - you know, including the development time, I’ve been working on Stardew Valley for over 12 years now. But I don’t want to definitively say that the book is ever closed because I think that I will always have a desire to come back and maybe add a thing or two. You know, maybe even 50 years from now, I might add something. We’ll see.
SUMMERS: Fifty years from now.
BARONE: Well, we’ll see. You know, I like creating things. I don’t think I’m ever going to retire. I’m going to - I think it would be funny to release an update when I’m, like, 90 years old if I live that long. Let’s hope.
SUMMERS: Eric Barone is the creator of Stardew Valley. Eric, thank you so much.
BARONE: Thank you very much. I had a great time.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONCERNEDAPE’S “MINES (CRYSTAL BELLS)”) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
