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Inside Jakub Dvorský's Philosophy — Dropping Words, Building a World You Can Touch
A study of Amanita Design founder Jakub Dvorský, read across primary interviews in Adventure Classic Gaming (2009), MCV/DEVELOP (2011), bounthavy (2020) and TouchArcade (2024). It traces the origin of his wordless design, his obsession with atmosphere and hand-drawn worlds, his aim to build 'an interactive toy' you keep playing rather than a puzzle you defeat, his dilemmas of kindness versus difficulty and commerce versus authorship, and the Czech animation and science-fiction he himself names as influences — grounded only in what he has said in public.
Soundtrack: Machinarium — The arithmetic of loops that never go stale in a rusty world
The music Tomáš Dvořák (Floex) wrote for Amanita Design's dialogue-free, hand-drawn adventure Machinarium is a strange alloy: the body heat of piano and clarinet fused with a dirty analog synth and the clatter of scrap metal. In a game where you stare at the same screen for minutes on end, why do these loops keep living in your ear? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through the lens of 'the mixing ratio of abstraction and melody.'
