The Last Worker
A riveting 6-to-8-hour narrative experience.
Chris Penwell, Destructoid
The Last Worker is a first person narrative adventure centered around our struggle in an increasingly automated world.
Behind The Scenes
Technically, The Last Worker is not a RapidEyeMovers game, but it came out at the same time as our official debut title, C-Smash VRS and shares some of its DNA.
This game was the first collaboration between Jörg and Wolf & Wood in Newcastle, who'd been recommended to him by our friends at Coatsink. Coatsink were going to develop the game at first, but had to fold the team designated to The Last Worker into a Jurassic World VR game. The Last Worker was Jörg's first game as creator, writer, director and producer.
He got to work with Mick McMahon, the legendary comic book artist and co-creator of Judge Dredd (and other 2000 AD classics) and prove that co-developing a game works - not to mention working remotely with talent as far as Taiwan. We were developing the game remotely long before the pandemic made it a necessity and the "new normal". And that is how Jörg met producer Huei Chan, too, who would join RapidEyeMovers years later.
Jörg got to direct an extraordinary cast - Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Severance), Jason Isaacs (White Lotus), Clare-Hope Ashitey (Children of Men), Zelda Williams (Legend of Korra), David Hewlett (The Shape of Water) and Tommie Early Jenkins (Death Stranding). Thanks to the pandemic (yeah, it had its good parts), he devised a way to direct actors simultaneously, each performer recording to their laptop at home and jumping off each other's lines via Zoom. It made for super natural banter and wonderful chemistry, which would have been impossible to achieve in isolated sessions in a sound booth.
The game was the first (and perhaps still the only to this day) game in competition at the Venice International Film Festival.