The Game That Kept Finding Her
Marlène Delrive at Playable Stories — Part 1 of 2
At our Playable Stories evening, Marlène Delrive spoke about what happens when a piece of creative work refuses to let you go.
Some stories choose you as much as you choose them.
That thought stayed with me after our last Playable Stories evening at Somerset House, where moderator Ed Sibley spoke with Marlène Delrive, the lead developer behind As Long As You're Here — a quiet, intimate game about living with Alzheimer's, told from the inside. Over the course of an hour, what emerged wasn't just a story about making a game. It was a story about what happens when a piece of creative work refuses to let you go.
Marlène's starting point was personal. Her grandmother had Alzheimer's for much of Marlène's teenage years, and passed away when Marlène was in her early twenties. It was an experience, she told us, that "really marked" her — and one that her family, like many, didn't quite know how to talk about. It lingered.
She tried to process it through drawings. Through a short story. Neither felt finished. Then she discovered games.
In the first semester of her games programme at IT University of Copenhagen, in 2018, she pitched an idea in a class called Making Games: put the player in the shoes of someone with Alzheimer's. In their apartment. And just see how that feels. A team gathered around the idea almost immediately. The core of what would become As Long As You're Here was there from week one.
What's striking about this origin story is how clearly Marlène understood, even then, why games specifically were the right medium. Not because the subject matter was unusual — though it was — but because of what interactivity could do that other forms couldn't. "I love how with games there are so many different elements that play together," she said. "Whereas I thought my sketches could do one thing and my little story could do another thing, I just love seeing all those different dimensions coming together." Audio, space, time, agency — all of it in service of a single question: how do we make you feel like Annie?
That question became the north star for everything that followed. And what followed was a long road.
After the university prototype won recognition — an IGF nomination for Best Student Game, a YouTuber's video racking up millions of views — the team knew there was more to make. But finishing the game would take years of evenings and weekends, of one-night-a-week meetings with team members scattered across time zones, of constantly moving finish lines. Marlène worked full-time in the games industry throughout, including a stint at Triband making the very funny What the Golf? — which, she noted with some self-awareness, provided useful emotional counterbalance to spending your spare hours inside a dementia simulation.
"I felt like people were constantly being like, 'Oh, you're still working on that?'" she told us. There were serious moments of wanting to stop. What kept her going, she said, was a team member in the US with the dedication to carry the torch when she couldn't, and a shared commitment to showing up consistently, however tired.
Eventually, two years ago, she quit her job. Last year, she went full-time on Autoscopia with one other teammate. They finished it. The game is out.
What made the evening particularly moving was hearing how the subject matter kept arriving in Marlène's life, independently of the game. As development stretched across years, the theme kept finding her in new ways. "It just kept being so relevant," she said, "and more and more relevant."
A lesser version of this story might be one where someone processes a grief and moves on. But what Marlène described felt more like the opposite: the game becoming more true over time, because life kept insisting on it. By the time they finished, what had started as something deeply personal had become — in her words — "this kind of universal story that was kind of emerging over the years."
When she played the finished ending for the first time and sobbed, she described it as "a really, really cool confirming moment." Not in spite of the tears. Because of them.
To the room full of game developers listening that evening, Marlène offered a piece of advice that I keep returning to. Be brave about personal stories, she said. Know why it should be a game. And lead with the feeling you want the player to feel — hold onto that, and let it guide every decision.
For Marlène, that feeling was always the same: what does it mean to be Annie, in that apartment, on that ordinary day?
Everything else followed from there.
This is the first of two posts from our Playable Stories: Inside As Long As You're Here evening at Somerset House. The second post will explore the craft and mechanics behind As Long As You're Here — how Marlène and her team translated the experience of dementia into game design.