Rahul Shirke

Sixty Paintings Per Second

When I walked into Christopher Gibbon's studio apartment in Indianapolis, the first question that came to mind was "Is this guy for real?"

When I left his apartment and returned to the hotel room a few blocks away, I once again had a question in my mind. "Is this guy for real?"

Christopher Gibbon, who goes by his one-man studio name Sixty Pipes online, is the creator of what might be the most audacious experiment ever attempted in video game history. The game he's making—his first—is titled Canterville's Curse, and it plays a lot like FromSoftware's iconic action role-playing game, Dark Souls.

Pull up the official screenshots for the game, however, and you might find something a little off. The screen is daubed with smudges of paint, where you can make out every ridge and trough. The lighting casts shadows with a subtlety and artistic sensibility that would be very difficult to replicate with an ordinary game engine.

Why is it, you may wonder, that Canterville's Curse looks like a painting? Is Sixty Pipes passing off concept artwork as screenshots? Are we essentially looking at “bullshots” from some indie developer no one's heard of?

I investigated, and the answer turned out to be much, much stranger than you would suspect.

Gibbon invited me to sit on a couch whose seams were coming undone, and which was hosting several stacks of paper, all of which seemed to be painted on. The closed window let in a gentle spring sun, and it was easy to imagine the room tinged bluer only a month ago, while Indiana was covered in snow.

"Is this concept art for the game?" I asked while I fingered the pages next to me, which sat on each other with the awkward unevenness of painted paper.

"No, that's working material," Gibbon cryptically answered as he set water to boil in a kettle and emptied a packet of green tea into it.

A few moments later, he sat at his PC. The “gaming chair” he sat on barely retained any of the pleather it had presumably shipped with. His workstation had two monitors, a keyboard with colorful lighting, and a figurine of a character from FromSoftware's 2015 action game Bloodborne.

I took the liberty of walking up to him, and as if reminded of my presence, he rolled his chair over to a drawing desk. The slightly inclined, well-polished desk had a large sheet of paper spread across it. A few simple shapes had been drawn up on it, along with a few smudges of paint to mark which color would be where.

This is when, only moments before the explanation came, I realized what Canterville's Curse is.

"It's a game made entirely out of hand-drawn paintings."

The words registered in my mind just as Gibbon said them. To the right, his monitor displayed a painting very similar to a published screenshot I'd seen. It wasn't quite the same, but I couldn't put my finger on what was different about it.

I said as much to Gibbon.

"Oh," he said and smiled. "No, the screenshot that you saw was thirty seconds before this screenshot."

I begged pardon.

"Well, you see, the screenshot that you saw, when you see it in the game—if you see it in the game, will be one painting, right? And the next second, there will be another painting on the screen, hand-painted by me. And the next one, and the next one, and so forth."

"So every frame is a painting?" I asked. I wondered if he would catch the reference to the YouTube channel of that name. He did not.

"Yes!" Gibbon laughed, enthusiasm brimming ear to ear. "That's exactly it! I could use that as a tagline."

I was too stunned to ward him against it at that moment. I had many, many questions to ask.

"How many frames are in one second of gameplay?"

"Sixty," Gibbon replied without missing a beat.

"So you paint sixty paintings, by hand, from scratch, and place them one after the other, to form one second of gameplay."

Gibbon nodded, and with a mouse click, he showed me a one-second sequence on his computer. Sixty paintings flashed in front of my eyes, so fast that I had barely time to register them as individual works. As far as I was concerned, I was looking at a living, breathing world through a glowing window.

"Did you consider making a more relaxed kind of game?" I asked, looking at him while leaning over the computer, like some kind of supervisor at an office.

"You mean like a point-and-click? You get one frame, then you click, then it takes you to another frame, that kind of stuff?"

I nodded. "Or any kind of game where each painting will have more ... breathing room to be seen."

Gibbon shook his head slowly, in an explanatory manner. "I don't like those kinds of games. It's got to have direct control, it's got to have action."

After this, Gibbon said he'll demonstrate how the game is “constructed.” He pulled away the blank sheet of paper and overlaid a previously completed painting.

It looked very, very similar to the paintings I had seen thus far. The same armored protagonist, the same view of an alley off a Victorian-era city square, and a gangly beast approaching from a distance. In the corners of the frame, you could see a meticulously painted mini-map of the area, as well as bars representing health and stamina, and a carousel of items that the player can use at the ready.

Gibbon scanned the painting a few times before picking out the best copy on his computer. Then, he imported the scanned image file into the program he was using to make Canterville's Curse. It resembled an animation program, with some programming logic included.

"So right now, this painting is what happens when the Corrupted Hound—that's the pretty boy there—moves from located X775.92 to..." He checked the coordinates. "X776.22."

With rapid keystrokes, he wrote several lines of code which referenced the coordinates he had mentioned. He leaned back in his chair, wrote some more lines, and hit the preview button.

"There, you see? The Corrupted Hound is moving from the previous painting's location to the new location."

I nodded at his glee and asked the question that had been brewing in my mind. "What happens if the Corrupted Hound moves to a different location? Or if the player moves?"

"Then I'll have to come up with a painting for that eventuality," Gibbon said in a matter-of-fact way.

I squinted. It was impossible to tell if he was being serious or not. I began to consider if I'd been lured into a grandiose practical joke. However, there was no mistaking that Gibbon was a real artist. He had the tools of the trade, the expertise, and he definitely had an eye for good art. What he was doing was as real as anything else.

"Okay, so," I said, more for my own benefit than his, "If I understand this correctly, if the player steps forward, that's a whole series of paintings. If the player steps backwards, that's another whole series of paintings."

"Yep," Gibbon said, and with the kettle's shrill whistle sounding, he got up and poured the tea into two neat porcelain cups.

"And if the player steps in any of the 360 directions they can step in, that's 360 series of paintings—all to account for a possibility that may or may not occur."

Gibbon grinned back at me as he poured the tea and set the kettle back in place. "I'm so glad you understand. A lot of people don't. They think what I'm doing is just concept art, but in truth, I am personally rendering every frame, every possible frame, down as an image."

"You're not an artist," I blurted out, "You're a graphics processor."

Gibbon looked up wonderingly. "Am I? I guess I am. I never thought of it like that before."

It occurred to me that Gibbon may not have thought of a lot of things before.

"Okay, so to be clear," I said delicately and paused to accept the cup of tea I'd been served. "You are creating an infinite number of paintings just to illustrate a few seconds of gameplay?"

Gibbon blew on his tea and then lowered it to answer my question. "Erica, there's nothing in this world that's infinite. Nothing. My paintings will definitely not be infinite. I will simply account for all the possibilities that the player can do, and that's it. That's all."

I nodded, strained. "But the player can do so much. Run in every direction, use an item, turn the camera around, swing their weapon, bring up the pause menu ... the possibilities are endless."

Gibbon continued his wry smile. "No, not endless," he said. "It's a game. It has rules, limitations. That is what makes it a game, right? It's not like reality, but even if it was reality, it wouldn't really be endless. You just have to have …" He snapped his fingers, searching for a word. "You've got to have the scope to see how big and complicated the world is."

"Isn't that what a god is?" I asked.

With an unimpressed, rejecting expression, Gibbon shook his head. "I'm not religious."

Already, my mind was rife with possibilities for how I would explain Gibbon's insane project. What do you call it when, every second, your eyes are being exposed to sixty hand-crafted paintings, all depicting the unique choice that you made—or didn't make—in the game?

Wrapped up in the mad vision of Canterville's Curse, I imagined someone actually playing this game. As they swung their swords or axes, navigated the winding alleys of Canterville, plunged blades into hideous monsters, would they have time to appreciate that a human being carefully painted every picture they laid their eyes on?

"Wait, but," I blurted out again, only just realising a question I'd had for a while. "How long will development take? How long will it take you to finish the game?"

Gibbon looked at me solemnly for a few moments. "Several centuries, I think."

I looked solemnly back at him.

"In my lifetime, I expect to finish maybe the first few minutes of gameplay. I'm going for five minutes specifically. Assuming I live a long life, that should be doable, I think."

"What happens then?"

Gibbon looked back at the monitor. "Then someone else takes over. An apprentice, someone I have trained to follow the exact same art style, the exact same commitment, the exact same ..." Once again, he snapped his fingers. "Je ne sais quoi."

I nodded, because that was all I could do at that point. "And have you considered getting more artists on the project to speed things up?"

Shrugging, Gibbon took a sip from his tea. "I wouldn't trust a team. Too many people, too many variables. Besides, I can control what's in here." He tapped at his right temple. "But I can't control an entire team for a project like this. I can't let him steer the project in a direction I don't like. It has to be just as I imagined it, and the most efficient way to realise that vision is to do it myself."

Now, I couldn’t help but touch my forehead. Holy shit, I wanted to say. Is this guy for real? I wanted to ask again.

"But you're okay with an apprentice?" I asked.

Gibbon nodded uncertainly. "Someone who can sit and watch me work for years before I could offload some duties to them, sure. I mean, I'm not mad. I know that at some point, I will die, and my game will be unfinished. But I accept that, and I want someone who has trained under me to continue my work."

"Continue it for centuries, then?"

"That's right." Gibbon toured the windows open on his system without doing anything in particular with them. "A master-apprentice relationship is intimate. Most game developers, they'll want a big team, and that works for them. But I don't think what I'm doing is comparable to a regular video game."

"What would you compare it to?"

Gibbon shrugged. "Notre Dame. The Pyramids. Things that took generations and generations of people to build, all of them working on one goal, one blueprint, one design plan. Just one after the other, until it's done."

I watched the screenshot that Gibbon's clicking had finally settled on. In the transient world of digital technology, measuring centuries felt like thinking about entire epochs. We often struggle to imagine the passage of millions of years just to bring to mind the dinosaurs that once trampled the Earth. For me, it was the same with Gibbon's software.

Will he be using the same software five years from now? And in ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Will we still be playing games like these in fifty years? Gibbon, the man sitting on the worn-out chair in front of me, had none of these concerns. He was thinking of a few hundred years in the future.

"What do you think the world will be like by the time your game is finished?" I asked.

"Who knows?" Gibbon laughed. "These days, you have developers who start making a game and they don't expect to see the game released for five years. And then, it takes eight years to actually release the game! Did you see what happened with Final Fantasy XV? They have no idea what the world will look like when they finish their games. I don't either."

"So five, ten years are the same to you as three hundred years?"

"Why shouldn't they be? I guess I know where you're leading this." He put up a hand to prevent me from asking a question I never did mean to ask. "You want to ask me what the point of a game is if I know I will never see it released in my lifetime, never even see it completed to a one percent mark in all that time."

I just raised my eyebrows and looked at him expectantly for him to answer his own question.

"I think people rely too much on instant gratification these days. They want things fast, they want to see progress bars moving, moving to hit the end and then disappear. I mean, isn't that sad? That's how they see their lives. Progress bars moving, moving, moving to the right and then hitting a hundred percent and disappearing. That's how they disappear."

Gibbon motioned at pages on the couch. "But this? This won't disappear. I'll die, and it'll still be there." He struggled to contain his grin as he spoke. "And whoever comes after me, they'll die, and their apprentice will die, and on and on. And this? This won't disappear even after all that."

As if through percolation, I had built up a reserve of respect for this mad endeavor. Gibbon scrolled across his program, showing me how each painting was linked to another painting. This one, and that one, he showed me, are linked simply by the logic of pressing a button. So if you're in this painting and you happen to press this button, you get that painting.

After this, feeling quite drained of questions, I decided it was time to take pictures while we still had light. I took a few shots of Gibbon as he worked on the game and as he poured some more tea into his cup. He was a shy soul and found it difficult to maintain the right smile, which meant that he was either stone-faced or grinning artificially.

I took pictures of the studio, taking care not to capture anything on the screen, or any of the paintings on the couch. After this, I checked the pictures on my laptop to make sure they looked good on a bigger screen.

As I moved the pointer and pressed the keys, a webbed sensation gripped me, making me realize the depth of code that I entangle myself in every day. At that very moment, I wondered how much hand-written code was involved, right from the point where my finger hit the key, through the hardware and operating system of my computer, across the network architecture, into the software that stores and accesses my pictures on a remote Google server.

It's the work of many mortals, who made small efforts, small advances, all of which eventually coalesced and combined and ended up creating the dense rainforest that is the digital landscape. A digital brain, and I had to learn how to talk to it every single day, learn to converse with it and adapt to it, just as it conversed with me and adapted to me.

With the images confirmed and the laptop slapped shut, I thanked Gibbon for his time and asked him if there was anything else he wanted to tell me, anything that I hadn't covered about his game in all the questions I'd pincushioned him with.

"Please tag me in the Twitter post," he said. "I'll retweet it."

Leaving his apartment building, taking the cab back to the hotel, checking in, and dropping on the bed—all of that felt like a blur. I couldn't get the paintings of Canterville's Curse out of my head.

When I checked into the company's Slack chatroom, I felt at a loss for words. How do I explain Christopher Gibbon to my fellow writers and editors? How do I explain him to the gaming world? How do I explain him to anybody?

And then, while staring at the ceiling as I had been doing for half an hour, I picked up the phone and called Christopher Gibbon. He was surprised to get my call, and asked if I left anything at his place.

"No," I said. "But when are you thinking of training that apprentice?"

Rahul Shirke (he/him or she/her) is a writer based in the suburbs of Mumbai, India. His works have been published in Déraciné, Constellate Literary Journal, and Strix, and he has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He also maintained a daily fiction blog for five consecutive years with no breaks and currently runs a weekly fiction newsletter called Sulfur Dreams.