Intro

Intro is the introductory level of The Beginner's Guide, not exactly listed as a chapter.

Level
Intro is a map for Counter-Strike. Being a small area of a desert town, it has sand bricks and stones with some typical elements of Middle Eastern desert architecture and a bright blue sky. Around it are a couple of wooden boxes, some of which are strangely floating. There is no interaction in this map and the only thing to do is to explore.

Narration
Hi there. Thank you very much for playing The Beginner's Guide.

My name is Davey Wreden, I wrote The Stanley Parable, and while that game tells a pretty absurd story, today I'm going to tell you about a series of events that happened between 2008 and 2011.

We're going to look at the games made by a friend of mine named Coda.

Now these games mean a lot to me. I met Coda in early 2009 at a time when I was really struggling with some personal stuff, and his work pointed me in a very powerful direction, I found it to be a good reference point for the kinds of creative works that I wanted to make.

So just to start you off, this is I think the first game he ever made, it's a level for Counterstrike, you can walk around here by the way, and mostly it's just Coda learning the basics of building a 3D environment.

But what I like is that even though he starts from the simple aesthetic of a desert town, he then scatters these colorful abstract blobs and impossible floating crates around the level, and of course it destroys the illusion that this actually IS a desert town, and instead this level becomes a kind of calling card from its creator, a reminder that this video game was constructed by a real person.

And it kind of makes you wonder: What was going through his head as he was building this?

This is what I like about all of Coda's games. Not that they're all fascinating as games, but that they are all going to give us access to their creator.

I want us to see past the games themselves, I want to know who this human being really is, and that's exactly what we're going to do here.

So it's 2008, Coda starts making these games, and he never releases any of them.

He doesn't put them onto the internet, he just makes them and then immediately abandons them and they sit on his computer forever.

And I think he really understood this image of himself as a recluse, at one point he jokingly renamed his computer's recycling bin to “Important Games folder.”

So you know, this was just how he worked, he tended to crank them out one after the other without even really pausing to try to understand what he had just made, until suddenly one day he just stopped.

In 2011 that was it, he made his last game and then he hasn't made another one since.

And that's why I've taken this opportunity to gather all of his work together, is because I find his games powerful and interesting, and I'd like this collection to reach him to maybe encourage him to start creating again.

And if the people like you who play this also happen to find his work interesting, then I'm sure it'll send that much stronger of a message of encouragement to Coda.

So thanks for joining me on this, if you have a particular interpretation that I haven't mentioned here or if you just need to get in touch, you can email me at daveywreden@gmail.com

Okay that's about it for introduction, let's take a look at Coda's first proper game.

As each game is loading I'll show you the date that it was completed, this first one was made in November 2008.