Sam Coster was recovering from his first round of chemotherapy when he decided to build the video game that would keep him alive. Sam had persuaded his brother Seth to drop out of law school and move to St. Louis to build video games full time. The brothers were designing a new game—Slothcycling, featuring rabbits that ride sloths like motorcycles across lava flows—when the diagnosis came: stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“It was in my spleen, my liver, my bones, just everywhere,” remembers Sam, a 25-year-old Washington University alum. Suddenly gripped by bone pain and nausea, Sam lost interest in Slothcycling’s repetitive races. He imagined building a “wild world, full of interaction and absurdity,” a world he could escape to as he faced chemotherapy, radiation, and transplants.
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“Seth,” Sam told his brother two days after his first treatment, “I don’t want Slothcycling to be the last game I make before I die.” And it won’t be. Sam, Seth, and their brother Adam are teaming up to build Crashlands, one of the most anticipated games of 2015 and, as Sam describes it, “the game that kept me alive.”
At first glance, Crashlands, an epic two-dimensional role-playing game, seems delightfully and purposefully silly. Players take the role of an interstellar deliverywoman named Flux who, on her way to deliver a package, crash-lands on a planet full of absurdly nightmarish animals. To survive, Flux must explore and build herself a shelter and weapons while encountering a race of pretentious bubble owls, a healing hot dog made of larvae, and green-glowing glutterflies along the way.
Sam calls Crashlands his refuge, his catharsis, and “the biggest ‘F—k you’ to cancer we can muster.” Every detail in the game is inspired by a step in his journey: fevers, hospitals, pain, nausea. Even the game’s villain, Q—Flux’s megalomaniacal boss who throws things into chaos—reminds Sam of the disease that keeps interrupting his life. “Video games have a powerful way of making you forget all the other stuff going on,” Sam says. “People need something to escape to sometimes.”
Sam, Seth, and Adam, who are partners in the studio Butterscotch Shenanigans, plan to finish the game before Sam goes back to the hospital this month for another bone marrow transplant. It should clear out the cancer and give his immune system a fresh start, but the powerful chemotherapy (a derivative of mustard gas) is followed by extreme nausea and fevers that leave Sam more exhausted than ever.
“There’s a veil between being alive and being dead,” Sam says. “With all the drugs, [doctors] push you across the veil and then pull you back and hopefully leave your cancer on the other side. It was the most dead I’ve ever felt.” The Coster brothers are scrambling to finish the game, edit the trailer, and launch their publicity blitz before Sam’s surgery. When he re-emerges, his cancer could be gone, but the intergalactic adventure it inspired will live on.
Crashlands Creatures and Tools
Snorble: This snuggly creature uses pressurized air sacs to blast crystallized saliva into wayward adventurers’ faces.
Polari: A race of whale-like people in the frigid wastes of the tundra, Polari beatbox to communicate over large stretches of land and sea.
Bonkagong: The Gongs are a class of weapons found by fishermen. They combine into an incredible end-game weapon, the Megagong.
Gulanti: These are timid creatures, but when provoked, they rise from their shell-like bodies and emit immense charges of electricity. When tamed, they produce a catalyst used to create high-tech gadgets.
