Outer Wilds was inspired, in part, by roasting marshmallows

Each time you start a new playthrough in Mobius Digital’s time-loop game Outer WildsYour character will blink their blurry eyes to view the night sky. Then, you’ll hear the crackling sound of a fire. The game allows you to explore 22 minute sections of a solar system at a given time. Each run ends with the solar system exploding and the game returning you to your home planet. When you start again, you are welcomed back to the world of the game with the familiar image of an alien four-eyed in hipster attire roasting marshmallows on a bonfire.

Roasting marshmallows (or “mallows,” as they’re lovingly called by some) is a time-honored tradition in North America. Whether you’re camping or just hanging out around a fire in the summer, odds are someone will bring out a bag of the fluffy confection at some point. Whether you prefer to eat them by themselves or paired with chocolate and graham crackers as a s’more, you’d be hard-pressed to find a food that better encapsulates the spirit of summer camp of the warm, gooey years of old.

Outer WildsTo roast the mallow, simply press a button. If you hold the marshmallow the perfect distance from the fire for the right amount of time, you’ll end up with a golden crispy dessert that can heal some of your health. It’s a novel reprieve from the cold deadness of space, and as creative director of Outer Wilds Alex Beachum said in an interview with Polygon, it isn’t just some cutesy addition with no use. The concept was, in fact, central to the creation and development of the game from its earliest stages.

Grid View

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  Developers shared images from their old projects of making marshmallows. Outer WildsFor this story. This is a picture of a temperature gauge they were considering adding to their game.
  
  
  Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive
  

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  This is where you will see the heat zones that are used to roast marshmallows.
  
  
  Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive
  

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  This “emotional prototype” of roasting a marshmallow helped inspire the game.
  
  
  Image: Mobius Digital/Annapurna Interactive
  

Beachum traced the history of marshmallow roasting back to prototypes for his thesis over ten years ago. Prior Outer WildsBeachum was the one who created the game that became it today. He had to decide what his project would be. It was then when a friend suggested that he make an “emotional prototype,” so he made a little game where you sit and roast a marshmallow on a fire and the sun explodes above, sort of like a “serene firework thing and then all the planets get destroyed,” he said. According to Beachum, while that wasn’t his first prototype to resemble Outer Wilds, it was the first one to capture the “emotional tone” of the game he hoped to make.

“It always embodied the ‘camping’ part of the camping and space aesthetic,” Beachum said. He didn’t want the sci-fi adventure to have a “middle hallway” feel common to the cold steeliness of other space adventures, and roasting a marshmallow brought a warmth to the game’s world. Beachum also wanted the campfire to show the scale difference between roasting marshmallows and witnessing the entire universe explode in front of you. “The whole game is all about things like nature, forces, and things falling apart beyond your control. And then the marshmallow being like this one small moment you can control.”

Beachum tried to force players to make marshmallows at the start of the game in an early version, but it was too late. He said that the team kept playing with it because they felt it was invested in it.

“We just loved the idea of making the most detailed simulation in this game of cosmic craziness,” he said while laughing. “And it’s like, No, no, no, the marshmallow is the thing that’s actually the most complicated.” At one point the team played with making the roasting system even more complicated than the one we see in the final game. The idea was not cut.

It’s also an addition that’s deeply personal. Beachum spent his childhood camping with his family and sat around the campfire every night as a kid. “[The fire]This is all that remains of the beacon of light. One little place of safety and coziness in the middle of the big dark forest and, you know, the sky space above,” Beachum said. “And Outer Wilds is just the fantasy of that situation exactly.”