A Team of Three Built The Forgotten City

The Forgotten City started as a Skyrim mod by Nick Pearce that accumulated 3.7 million downloads and won a Writers' Guild award. Pearce quit his law career, brought in Alex Goss and John Eyre, and rebuilt the narrative as a standalone game in Unreal Engine 4 — a team of three tackling branching dialogue, time travel, and moral philosophy.

The team exchanged over 300 emails with historians from Oxford and Cambridge over twenty months to ground the Roman setting in authentic detail. The game shipped day-one across PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series, and Nintendo Switch, earning a BAFTA nomination and a "narrative masterpiece" designation from Game Informer.

The team transitioned from Skyrim's Creation Engine to UE4 with zero Unreal experience. They needed to simulate time travel across 2,000 years in a seamless open world — not a loading screen, but a living environment that shifted while the player remained in place. Creating convincing character conversations with three people required maximizing every animation and scripting tool available. The branching dialogue

UE Level Streaming swapped entire game "layers" in-place for time travel — the player stays in the same physical position while the world around them transforms between eras. A custom gold material system simulated gold creeping over characters and surfaces, then switched the mesh physics to rigid body for the petrification payoff.

Without AAA mocap budgets, the team used UE's animation systems to simulate full conversations — leaning, sitting, facial expressions, body language — tuning each for expressiveness rather than realism. This let three people create the impression of a cast with full performance capture.

The Forgotten City launched across PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series, and Nintendo Switch on day one. Game Informer called it "a narrative masterpiece." The game earned a BAFTA nomination. Nick Pearce quit his law career to found Modern Storyteller as a full studio. The 3.7-million-download mod proved market demand before a single line of standalone code was written.