Legend of Grimrock’s First Build Presented and Explained

It’s absolutely amazing to me how much Almost Human has accomplished with Legend of Grimrock in less than a year, and I think you’ll agree after you watch this placeholder-laden video of the game’s first build (dated April 3rd, 2011) in action:

Team member Petri Hakkinen shares some history about the build, as well:

A few people have been asking for a making of video and while we’re still too occupied with launch preparations to make a proper video we thought we could share something that might interest you. Thanks to our source code control system it’s possible to go back in time and see how the project looked at its very early stages. So, behold the first ever build of Grimrock!

The build has an epic title (Build 001’³ and it’s from April 3rd 2011. It was done in a weekend for no particular reason other than for fun. The project didn’t really start for real back then because the outsourcing projects we were doing for other game companies were keeping us fully occupied. By June we had finished a bigger outsourcing project and we sat down to think about our next move. We dusted off the old build and it didn’t take long for us to get up to speed with our first ever game project. And the rest is history as they say!

Naturally all graphics in the video are placeholders but it already shows what Grimrock is all about: pure old-school gameplay, grid-based dungeon crawling, secret switches, locked doors and of course horrible, horrible creatures with moustaches that haunt you forever in your dreams! Observant readers probably notice that the player walks over a pit in the video the prototype did not support pits and falling (hey, it could have been a fake illusionary pit! 😛 )