Hyper Light Drifter: The Story of Alx Preston

The story of Alx Preston is one of the most interesting in indie gaming. Born with a congenital heart defect, Alx (or Alex if you want to spell his name the boring way!) has a short life expectancy, and needs frequent medical attention.

Rather than wallow in self-pity, Alx has used his pain and fear to create Hyper Light Drifter, a soulful, emotional video game that explores themes of life, death, and everything in between.

This video probably won't be the most popular thing our channel ever puts out, but Alx's story inspired us to the point that we wanted to make this anyway.

Our version pales in comparison to one of the sources for this video; a short documentary by Vice in which Alx shares a lot of these points first hand (it's linked below if you'd like to see it).

Alx, along with his studio, Heart Machine, show what can be accomplished when you take your pain and try to make something positive out of it. This isn't an entirely happy story, but it is a satisfying one.

We apologise if the tone or presentation here feels awkward or out of place. We've done our best to be faithful to Alx's story.

If you haven't already, go play Hyper Light Drifter. This is one game that truly proves the artistic potential of video games.

Love,
BretonStripes (  / bretonstriped  ) and Kotor (  / kotor  )

Title music by Tee Lopes

Incidental music: Ever Mindful by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...

Sources:
   • ‘Hyper Light Drifter’ - Inside the Video G...  
http://www.theskinny.co.uk/tech/gamin...
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/2...
https://www.theguardian.com/technolog...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
  / heartmachinez  

PS sorry this video is coming up a little late in the day, we had to render it three times to fix an annoying graphical error!