A day ago, Kickstarter launched the fundraising campaign for a remake of Pathologic. There is a great deal to say about this game. For many, it remains the chief argument that games can be art. It was open-world survival long before DayZ. It was one of the few Russian games released in the West before digital distribution. But above all, it leaves a tremor that lasts for days after finishing and still resonates today. It is a great pleasure for me to revisit the past and relive the events connecting me to this wonderful game's creators, Ice-Pick Lodge, and Nikolay Dybowski personally.

It began in 2006. I remember clearly that my path first crossed the Lodge's thanks to the game Petka and Vasily Ivanovich and my then-future ex-wife, Anna “Nuka” Kravtsova. It is an adventure-game series published by Buka. Every game disc included trailers for other Buka games. One of them was the Pathologic trailer. Nuka found it first and then showed it to me.

Watch the video on the original platform


After seeing the trailer, I decided to play the game. Through long evenings, I chased the disease as Dankovsky, gathered herbs as Burakh, and saved everyone and no one as the Changeling.
I had explored the game inside out, but wanted more. Somehow, I found my way to the Ice-Pick Lodge forum's “Alphabet” section—registration is required to read it—where the game's atmosphere continued, not through its plot but through reflections on the role of games. I was already an experienced gamer who had completed dozens of games, but these conversations were a revelation.
One thing led to another, and I found myself in a fateful thread where Nikolay was preparing a talk for KRI-2007 and asking the community for help with randomness in games. Like any respectable Internet dweller, I could not possibly lack an opinion on any random subject, so I immediately posted everything I thought. Although a dozen others did the same, my contribution was singled out. That really motivated me to become more active on the forum.


What followed was simple. The Lodge had a straightforward, understandable habit of occasionally visiting drinking establishments and announcing on the forum that others were welcome to join. There was a meetup right after KRI-2007, where Nikolay had delivered that very talk on chaos in games. Photos of the meetup are here.

At that meetup or a later one, Nuka and Gaukhar Aldiyarova, the Lodge's PR and marketing specialist, arranged a photo shoot of Ice-Pick Lodge members for the credits of The Void, which was nearing completion. The shoot took place in Dybowski's apartment and left a hole in the ceiling from fallen plaster. The freshly renovated ceiling did not survive our particular method of installing lighting equipment.
To help the Lodge members look natural, I distracted them with conversation, asking how they had joined Ice-Pick Lodge. The shoot lasted all day, yet we still could not photograph everyone: some were absent from the nearby office.

Exclusive photographs never previously published:

You can see how this looks in the game here and here.

I no longer remember whose joining story was whose, but I clearly remember that all were stories of entering game development. I had just left my postgraduate research job and was choosing what to do next. I did not think long: I too decided to enter game development. Not at the Lodge, since they had told me frightening stories of going for years without food or sunlight. I followed my own path and, literally within a week, got a job at G5 on projects for THQ, Electronic Arts, Konami and other global publishers. Work left no spare time to socialize with the Lodge.
I was working extensively on mobile-phone games and understood adapting games to different screen resolutions. I wanted to run Pathologic on my 1600×1200 monitor, while the game supported at most 1280×1024. After a brief consultation with IPL's technical director, Airat Zakirov, he gave me the internal interface editor. It was so awkward that all my enthusiasm shattered against it.

On modern monitors, the original game has black bars on the sides like these.
My enthusiasm returned around mid-2012 when Knock-Knock was announced. The Lodge reminded me of their existence, and I desperately wanted to replay Pathologic. But my sense of aesthetics would not let me play it on a widescreen monitor. Unfortunately, Pathologic supported only monitors of its own era, so I decided to dig through the game's resources again, this time without any special editors. Surprisingly, the first step was easy, and I could walk through its town using the full 1920×1080 pixels. It felt incredible. Yet many interfaces still insisted they were incompatible with the new resolution. That took work. Simply moving icons to the right places was insufficient: they were too small at that resolution, making play uncomfortable. I rebuilt the interface, doubling every element's size. Along the way, the most common textures—ground and grass—also got improvements. Special thanks go to Nuka, who found suitable replacement textures and adapted them to the game. Identifying a plant from its picture to find a high-resolution version was particularly difficult. Incidentally, guess which plant can stand in for twyrine.


The original trading interface. Very small icons and many unused slots.


The redesigned widescreen interface, with larger icons.
The original game also had a problem: body, head and eyeball textures were combined into one image. People are remarkably sensitive to the eyes of the person they are looking at. That is why eye textures are generally not skimped on and are stored separately from body textures, where savings are made. I therefore had to enlarge the combined body, head and eye texture several times so that the eyes had sufficiently high resolution.
As Full HD support neared completion, I returned to the forum with the good news. The response informed me that not everyone had such a large monitor. But manually adding several more resolutions was too difficult: an enormous amount of tedious, routine work.
Fortunately, a user named elgarf came to the rescue. He was already making his own version of support for the widescreen resolution 1366×768. He shared a home-made program that converted an interface from one resolution to another. It was imperfect and had many bugs, but at least work on new resolutions did not begin from scratch. After studying usage statistics, I listed every resolution used by 97% of users. Ultimately, I supported 8 resolutions in two languages, Russian and English. I targeted an international audience from the outset, knowing there were many Ice-Pick Lodge fans abroad who could support Knock-Knock on Kickstarter.


Making a mod is not enough: you must deliver it to users in a simple, convenient format so they can download it, install it in a few clicks and play, without lengthy instructions on copying files. I had to learn installer-building software. Fortunately, elgarf helped with advice here too.
I put together a short video demonstrating the modification:

Watch the video on the original platform


You can download the modification 
here (Russian) and here (English). Current statistics show 3392 downloads by Russian-speaking players and 3354 by English-speaking players, suggesting that the two fan audiences are comparable. Some people think Pathologic is popular only in Russia, or conversely that it has far more fans in the West. The total number of installs is not large, though: mods for games such as GTA and Skyrim can receive several hundred thousand downloads. But knowing I helped even one player experience this wonderful game is enough for me.
The low download count is not surprising: I never advertised the mod anywhere. All its spread has been purely viral. Of the major outlets, only PCGamer noticed it, mentioning it in an article about Pathologic's release on GOG.com.
That is the story of adapting Pathologic to modern monitors. I no longer work on the mod; it is a completed chapter. Most frustratingly, after making it, I never managed to sit down and peacefully play Pathologic on my own monitor. It feels as though I fulfilled my purpose and have nothing more to do here.
As for everything else I do, I am still in game development. I moved from G5 to Nival's team, formerly Nival Online and later Allods Team. Then I became lead level designer on Skyforge. Then I stopped being that and went indie to make my game Message Quest. I photograph the Lodge at GamesNight events, where we sometimes cross paths. And, of course, I backed their next project on Kickstarter, a full remake of Pathologic, and encourage you to do the same.