Article: An Industrial Shift - Nine Inch Nails/ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist Robin Finck leaps to the games industry with Sleep Awake by Brian Shea

Some of Nine Inch Nails’ songs and albums feel like self-contained worlds in their own ways. Can you talk to me about the difference between building a world through a song and building a world through a game?

With games, we’re considering the collision of many different departments: gameplay, feel of the gameplay, the pacing of the story, narrative design – whether that’s dialogue or otherwise – environmental narrative, the environments, engineering and all that […] Cory and I were working on this for a year before it was funded. We took the opportunity to load two vans full of far too much gear, and head out to Joshua Tree to a house off the grid, and we set it all up in the house. It didn’t fit in the house, so we set it up outside the house. We brought a generator, and we were there for about 10 days, and we just had a time with sound [and] music, listening. We had some ideas. I had some wireframe templates. We chewed through them day one, and then we were off to the good stuff of a true exploration and supporting one another and ourselves through process, and that was really the portal from which all else continues to travel.