APPLE DESIGN AWARDS
Success Was in the Cards
Where Cards Fall
A story about change
Where Cards Fall recently won a 2020 Apple Design Award, but the game’s origin story stretches back nearly a decade.
Creator Sam Rosenthal started laying the groundwork for the card-powered puzzler in his freshman dorm room at the University of Southern California, inspired by the Radiohead song “House of Cards.”
“Its metaphor was really beautiful,” he says. “The song makes lives feel very fragile. I thought that idea was ripe to explore in videogames.”
Where Cards Fall does just that, wrapping an unexpectedly moving story inside increasingly tricky puzzles. Throughout the game, you build houses of cards to leap and climb your way across levels. The twist is that each level represents a memory of the protagonist, and as you master the increasingly complex levels, you’re reconstructing chapters of their story.
“I always wanted to make games about human experiences,” Rosenthal says. “The stakes weren’t going to be about saving the world.”
Rosenthal started building Where Cards Fall out of actual paper. “USC taught that kind of mentality: Start with a board game, some physical approximation of what you want to make,” he says.
After graduation, the project took a backseat to Rosenthal’s full-time obligations but was never far from his mind. He and lead engineer Brandon Sorg chipped away at it whenever they could. “There’s a coffee shop in Santa Monica I felt like we were keeping in business,” Rosenthal says. “It was like 9 to 11 p.m. every single night.”
Rosenthal was rejected by publisher after publisher—until he met Ryan Cash, cofounder of Snowman, the acclaimed studio behind Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey (the latter won an Apple Design Award in 2018).
“A lot of people think design is how something looks,” says Cash, “but it’s more about how it feels to use. Sam and I really aligned on that, and that’s what drew me to him and his project.”
Rosenthal scrapped previous versions of the game and brought on art director Joshua Harvey to develop a new visual style. “We used what we learned from the student project, but we started from scratch with the code, the art, the design,” Rosenthal says.
As the game evolved, its story and gameplay advanced each other, Rosenthal says. “We’d develop one part, then listen to the other to create a dialogue between the theme and the mechanics.”
In the end, Where Cards Fall turned out to be more than a compelling puzzler. It’s a coming-of-age story filled with the quiet graces of the everyday: making friends, shaping a career, building a life—all things Rosenthal did while creating it. Which might lead you to wonder: Is the game about Rosenthal himself?
“I wouldn’t say it’s autobiographical, but there’s a lot of me in it,” he says. There are plenty of others too. “Every single person who worked on the game could see a bit of themselves in the story. And if our team can do that, our audience would be able to as well.”