How Adam Orth turned a career disaster into a moment of inspiration with Adr1ft (interview)

Adam Orth came up for air briefly to talk about Adr1ft, an immersive video game where you play an astronaut who is stranded in space and has to find a way back home. It sounds a lot like the movie Gravity, but Orth swears he came up with the idea independently, while he was recovering from a deep funk and a career fiasco.

In April 2013, Microsoft game developer Orth said some unfortunate things on Twitter, while he was in a public discussion with friend. He showed little sympathy for Xbox fans who didn’t want the next console, the Xbox One, to have an always-on connection. He insulted some fans, it spiraled out of control, and Microsoft fired him. That setback happened in part because a complete misunderstanding by some fans about what he was talking about in the first place, but in the end, that didn’t matter. He lost a pending job offer, and had to examine his whole state of being. He has talked about how he created his new game studio and a beautiful game as a kind of redemption for his personal nightmare.