Over the long span of his 20-year career in games, 2004 DigiPen graduate Nate Purkeypile has amassed the kind of resume most developers only dream about. As a world artist at Bethesda Game Studios from 2007 to 2021, he helped craft the majestic landscapes and ruined settlements of landmark games like Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim — games that helped define a generation of epic, open-world adventures.
From environment art and props to level design and lighting, there were few areas of Bethesda’s sprawling game worlds Purkeypile didn’t touch in some fashion or another. And with so many massive games under his belt, you’d be hard pressed to find a game developer who’s decorated more virtual square mileage than him.
So it probably didn’t come as too big of a surprise to Purkeypile’s followers when, following his departure from Bethesda in 2021, he announced that his first solo indie project, The Axis Unseen, would be the sixth open-world game of his career, developed under the studio moniker, Just Purkey Games. After three-and-a-half years in development, the game launched last week on PC — just in time for Halloween.
“The Axis Unseen is a heavy metal horror game,” Purkeypile says. “You hunt monsters in folklore, and it’s all in a big open world.”
With little more than a rune-adorned hunting bow and some handy magical spells at their disposal, players must locate and defeat a smorgasbord of eldritch beasts. While the game plays at first like a traditional hunting game — wherein players must pay attention to things like tracks, scents, and the sound of their footsteps in order to both locate creatures and avoid detection — the horror element quickly becomes apparent when players discover that the creatures are using the same sensory cues to hunt them in return.
“I like having that spectrum of moments where you’re quietly sneaking in the forest, but then five minutes later everything might be on fire and there’s a giant tree golem and werewolves in your face,” Purkeypile says. “And then the metal music is going, and that’s scary.”
Thanks to the game’s demo, as well as footage from the pre-launch trailers, Purkeypile has already revealed some of the game’s cast of creatures, including the aforementioned wolves and golems. He also hints at a few obscure monsters derived from Western and Eastern mythology alike — such as the Australian bunyip and Japanese kappa. Still, he promises, there are greater thrills and horrors that await those who venture into the full game.
“Within the framework of horror, you can do a lot of things that might not be possible if you were completely restricted to what can happen in reality. So I have a monster you can only see out of the corner of your eyes — all sorts of little tricks,” Purkeypile says. “People ask me, ‘Are you worried you’re going to spoil it?’ There are 30 unique monsters, 72 if you count all the variants. So I’m not super worried about that. It’s a very big game.”
According to Purkeypile, the game world of The Axis Unseen is roughly five times the size of Skyrim. Nowhere is that sense of scale more immediately felt than in the game’s high-elevation vistas, from which the first-person camera reveals an otherworldly landscape overshadowed by the skeletal remains of massive primordial creatures that stretch higher than mountains themselves.
“There are six different regions that all have their unique weather and locations and creatures, and those areas vary quite a bit. You start in a relatively normal forest but then eventually go into a crazy swamp choked with poisonous gas, all the way up to a snowy mountain. There’s some other completely wild stuff, where I get a bit out there and even more horror focused,” Purkeypile says. “And it all has kind of a metal aesthetic.”
If it all sounds like a lot for a development team of just one, it is, especially when you consider the fact that Purkeypile was singlehandedly responsible not only for creating a whole game’s worth of original 3D art assets, but also the character animation, audio design, programming, marketing, and more.
“I would not recommend that most people make a giant open-world game that’s 20 hours long and five times as big as Skyrim,” he says with a laugh. “That’s usually not going to be a good idea.”
Fortunately, Purkeypile is not your typical solo developer — even for an open-world veteran who’s been through the proverbial rodeo more than once.
“Different people have different dev superpowers. Someone might be really good at making armor and super detailed stuff, but mine was always that I can get a lot of stuff done really fast, which was really useful at Bethesda,” Purkeypile says. “It’s often just finding the most streamlined workflow and knowing the best point to stop working on something.”
Looking back, he says, it was that same focused mindset that brought him to pursue a games-centered education in the first place.
“Out of high school, I was 100% certain I was going to be doing games. It was just a matter of where I went to college for it,” Purkeypile says, noting he even dropped out of a different college’s art program before switching over to DigiPen’s Associate of Applied Arts in 3D Computer Animation, a precursor to the BFA in Digital Art and Animation. “It was pretty much what I expected — intense and a lot of work, but I got a job.”
After getting his professional start at two Texas-based game studios — first at Terminal Reality and then, with the help of some fellow DigiPen alumni, at Retro Studios — Purkeypile eventually landed at Bethesda in 2007. Having played and enjoyed the original Fallout computer role-playing games as a teenager, he was thrilled that his first Bethesda project would be to transform the beloved post-apocalyptic series into an immersive 3D experience for Fallout 3.
“Some people were like, ‘Oh, I really want to work on The Elder Scrolls,’” he says. “I didn’t really care about that. Fallout was my thing, which worked out, because 10 of those Bethesda years were on Fallout games.”
One of Purkeypile’s primary areas of focus was the creation of modular asset kits, used by Bethesda’s level designers to more easily dress and decorate the various locations within the game based on specific building or location types. He even co-presented on the topic twice at the annual Game Developers Conference.
In addition to his wide-ranging creative duties, Purkeypile also took on an early leadership role as the co-lead for Fallout 3’s Point Lookout downloadable content.
“That eventually led to me effectively being the art director on Fallout 76, deciding what everybody was doing art wise, even coming up with the list of monsters and laying out that whole giant map,” Purkeypile says.
Thanks largely to the success of Purkeypile and his co-workers, the Bethesda team steadily grew over the course of his 14-year tenure. What had begun as a small, agile team of about 60 developers when he started had grown to a team of nearly 500 people by the time he left. With that growth came tradeoffs. As time went on, Purkeypile found himself spending more time in meetings and less time doing the kind of heads-down work he preferred. Then in 2021, with production ramping up on Starfield, Bethesda’s first original property in 25 years, Purkeypile decided it was as good a time as any to strike out on his own.
“I’d been kind of thinking of it in the back of my head for a long time, but I got to the point where it was like, I should just do it,” he says.
Although he had initially planned to test out a range of game ideas before committing to his first solo dev project, he soon decided The Axis Unseen was the game he wanted to make. Being an avid fan of both horror and metal, not to mention an archery hobbyist and outdoor enthusiast, it seemed like the kind of concept that could keep him engaged and hopefully appeal to a similar-minded demographic.
“I just kind of rolled with it — started with a small prototype to make sure I could actually do everything, get all the systems working and not have to hire a programmer,” Purkeypile says.
Fortunately, the tools available for indie game developers had progressed by leaps and bounds since the start of his career almost two decades earlier. For The Axis Unseen, Purkeypile says he relied heavily on three key pieces of technology: Houdini for terrain erosion simulation, VR sculpting for making props and creatures, and Unreal Engine 5 at the core of everything.
“With Unreal 5 and the Nanite tech, I can make these incredibly detailed things and then just throw the models straight in without having to go through all these other steps,” he says, referring to the engine’s innovative virtualized geometry system.
Of course, with The Axis Unseen being pitched as a heavy metal horror game, there was also the gaping question as to who would supply the actual sounds of metal? For this, Purkeypile enlisted the help of musician Clifford Meyer — formerly of the critically acclaimed post-metal band ISIS — whose brooding score alternates between moody atmosphere and pounding aural assault based on the moment-to-moment gameplay.
The collaboration came about, Purkeypile says, when he sent an email to the ISIS Bandcamp page, asking to see if he could license one of the band’s songs for the game’s opening sequence, which Purkeypile had envisioned as a kind of playable music video. It was Meyer who responded to the inquiry.
“I had mentioned I worked on Skyrim and stuff. He said he was a big fan and wanted to know if I was looking for anyone to make music. So we just got to chatting, and he ended up making the whole soundtrack,” Purkeypile says. “It’s about 90 minutes of original music by one of the guys that’s in one of my favorite bands, so it worked out great.”
In fact, if there’s a common refrain within Purkeypile’s recounting of his three-and-a-half-year indie journey so far, it’s that just about everything “worked out” either as good or better than expected. Even he has a hard time explaining the formula to his success, besides that he simply puts in the work one day at a time.
“Most people are kind of surprised to hear that the game is so big. They think, ‘Oh, you must be crunching the whole time.’ It’s like, no. I kind of purposefully didn’t do that. I have two kids,” he says. “I like to focus and get stuff done, and then when I’m not working, I’m not working.”
There was one additional thing that happened near the end of the game’s development that Purkeypile can’t quite explain, but which seems like a good sign that the game is already finding its intended audience. After recruiting a small group of private playtesters to test out the game and provide user feedback, a trio of testers asked him for the digital images of the tattooed symbols that appear on the player character’s hand.
“Tattoos play a big part in the game, so they asked me to send them the files over, and they ended up getting the tattoos,” Purkeypile says. “I was pretty happy about it.”
The Axis Unseen is available now on Steam and the Epic Games Store.