Dinner Date

Thursday 7 October 2010

TRAILER: http://thestoutgames.com/:dinnerdate

The independent developer STOUT GAMES announces „DINNER DATE” with a début trailer revealing details of the game. In Dinner Date the player becomes the subconsciousness of Julian Luxemburg and is privy to his thoughts as he is waiting for his date. The trailer shows the realistic setting and story as well as a glimpse of the unique interaction which makes Dinner Date a character portrait unique to games.

This freshly released trailer shows the perfect preparation for a date – the joy of anticipation and the build-up of the cuisine for a ‘dinner at my place.’ But the excitement of preparation finds a bitter continuation when the beautiful girl does not arrive on time and the ticking of the clock grows louder and louder.

„A lot goes on in the mind of a man being stood up,” the trailer suggests. There are many personal and intimate thoughts someone being stood up would not readily tell his friends: being stood up is a test of personality and so the trailer continues: „find out what it is like by becoming the subconsciousness of Julian Luxemburg.”

A subconsciousness perhaps may not influence Julian’s actions, but is at a prime spot for studying them.

This is the setting of Dinner Date, an experimental game to be released by Stout Games in a little over a month. The game fits in the current trend of making games with more realistic subjects and themes, combining them with increasingly novel forms of interaction.

This game approaches a realistic setting, a man being stood up for a date, with a romantic angle: Julian’s character is laid open and his rights and wrongs exposed. The actions are all natural: tapping the table, looking at the clock, eventually reluctantly starting to eat – actions a real person would do in such situations. They become a natural form of playing as, and with, Julian.

A large set of animations is used to bring Julian to life in his realistically rendered 3d kitchen. His musings are fully voiced and emphasized by a high-quality score composed specifically for Dinner Date.

What Julian’s realisations will be and whether he has it in him to wait long enough for his elusive date to show up will become clear with the release of Dinner Date on November 17 ^th at a quarter past 5, GMT .

Dates and price

November 3 ^rd: Pre-orders will be available for $9.95

November 17 ^th: The game will be released for $12.45

Second copies for sharing will be purchasable at a heavy discount.

Dinner Date – Context

Dinner Date is released amongst commercial titles such as The Graveyard and The Path (Tale of Tales, 2006, 2009) as well as Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010) and free mods such as Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2008) and Handle with Care (Radiator Games, 2009), titles which have at times polarized journalists and gamers by deviating from established norms. Their existence and the reactions to them clearly show an increasing desire for innovation both with developers and players, eminent in the establishment of NotGames, a movement by Tale of Tales to promote competition-less games. Stout Games joins this scene by pioneering the choice of applying unique forms of interaction to a game with a realistic setting.

Dinner Date – Credits

Stout Games – Jeroen D. Stout ( http://thestoutgames.com)

Music – Than van Nispen tot Pannerden ( http://greencouch.nl)

Stout Games – The Developer

Stout Games has been founded by Jeroen D. Stout, a scholar in gamedesign with a Master of Arts in Gamedesign & Development at the Utrecht School of the Arts (Netherlands) and a Master of Science in Computer Games Technology at the University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom). In Portsmouth he was supervised by Dr Dan Pinchbeck (creator of cultural classics Dear Esther and Korsakovia) and became enthused to begin developing games commercially, still following the fascination for original play that has been with him ever since playing The Graveyard (Tale of Tales, 2006) for the first time.

The goal of Stout Games is creating games innovative in play, using intelligent subject matters and infused with romantic-realistic plots and settings. With Dinner Date it shows its initial direction: focussing on a character portrait and treating it with the interaction required.

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More information

Mail to press@thestoutgames.com for all enquiries.

Upon request, Jeroen D. Stout is available for interviews on Dinner Date and how Stout Games views the future of artistic games. He is presently situated in the vicinity of Utrecht, the Netherlands.