Ten years ago today, on 10 September 2005, the first phase of The Endless Forest was launched at a fine art exhibition entitled "Tardis" that took place on the ruins of a medieval abbey. The gothic Saint Salvator church that was part of the abbey served as the floor plan for the well-known ruin in our deer Forest.

The game was actually based on a prototype that had been made in response to a commission from the Museum of Modern Art in Luxemburg in 2003. This prototype was presented in its online gallery in 2004. MUDAM would continue to host the server for the game until 2012.



The Endless Forest is the first game released to the public by Tale of Tales. Over the years that followed, the game has been expanded to its current form. Each iteration of its development has been supported in part by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund and Design Flanders. Additionally, Phase Two was created with the support of the STUK Arts Centre in Leuven and released in 2006. And Phase Three with the support of Rasa in 2007. Since then a few smaller additions were added such as Halloween for the Velocity Festival in 2007 and De Drinkplaats for an exhibition in the Broelmuseum in 2009.

As the game continued to draw players (20,000 registered deer by 2007, 50,000 by 2009, and almost 170,000 today), we've had to add new generations of pictograms to identify players in this wordless game. In 2010, the second generation was added, in 2012 the third and last year the fourth.

A success story

We are delighted to see that The Endless Forest is still a lively place with a super-active community. And we're proud that we have been able to keep the game up and running and available to all for free all this time, in part thanks to some of the generous players who donate to the forest either monthly or in chunks. We, and all the players, are extremely grateful to them!

Now that Tale of Tales has moved away from commercial games, we want to devote more attention to The Endless Forest again. What better time than the ten year anniversary to start thinking about Phase Four of the project!

The future

We will submit a request for funding Phase Four with the Flanders Audiovisual Fund's new game fund next month. If we get the grant, which we should know by February 2016, we will run a crowdsourcing campaign to collect the remainder of the budget, as the new fund only funds up to 50% of production costs. We hope you will all help raise awareness and support the game if and when that happens.

The idea is that The Endless Forest remains free to play for everyone. So we need money to pay for the server. And we want to expand the game once again. We want to increase the size of the forest, add new narrative elements, new deer sets, new actions, and so on.

We also want to make the game more robust so we don't have to be so secretive about it for fear too many players will show up. This will require a complete overhaul of the software, most probably rebuilding the entire game in a new engine, hopefully with the help of an experienced programmer. And while we're doing that, we will do our utmost to support Mac OS too (and maybe Linux).

Revamped software would also mean that we can organize Abiogenesis events regularly again without the risk of crashing everybody's computers!


We hope you are all as excited as we are about Phase Four. Touch wood that we get the subsidy, and that the crowdsourcing campaign succeeds!

See you in the Forest!

—Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn.