Gone Home was originally an Amnesia mod

The Fullbright Company's highly-lauded debut release Gone Home was originally planned as a rather different experience, as it was prototyped in Frictional Games' Amnesia: The Dark Descent engine. In a blog post, Frictional's Thomas Grip explained how Gone Home creator Steve Gaynor had previously asked for permission to utilize Frictional's HPL2 game engine to build his game. However, Grip refused to license the engine out (as he did with all developers who requested permission) and suggested Gaynor use the Unity engine instead. This eventually gave birth to the version of Gone Home that we now know. Gaynor has now provided a copy of the original Gone Home prototype that was built in HPL2 -- you can download it through Grip's blog post. Screenshots show that the original prototype looks and plays in a similar fashion to the final product, albeit it with darker visuals, as you'd expect of the engine that brought us Amnesia. Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander spoke to Gaynor earlier this week at GameCity about the story behind Gone Home, and what elements make up a great game.