Sophie Rogers Readies Prelude: Three Minutes to Midnight

Sophie Rogers says a playable prototype of Prelude: Three Minutes to Midnight is coming "very soon." The game, which Rogers has been building in Unreal Engine since 2024, was shown this summer at Palmer Gallery as an installation and visual loop taken from its live game environment, part of the gallery's The Door series, from July 3 to Sept. 12. This week Rogers shared installation images and game stills from the show. It's coming along!

The date 2007 looms large over the project as that's the year the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists added climate change to the threats measured by its Doomsday Clock. (I suspect there have been more added to the list!) The gallery outlines a loop that runs from an empty ocean shore into the recesses of a rock formation, where hybrid organisms mix synthetic and organic matter. Rogers cites fungi that grow at sites like Chornobyl as a model for life that adapts to damage rather than repairing it. These avenues are also explored by artists like Keiken, who dream of post-human existences.

Rogers's are wide, from UCLA game worlds prof Alenda Chang to Fredric Jameson, to Hideo Kojima to Ursula K. Le Guin. Even The Chinese Room gets a nod. An earlier version from 2021 was, she writes, called boring by teenagers in Sheffield. "They were right," she adds, an enduring challenge for many artists looking to make games.

The exhibition text sets out the design: "Rather than prioritizing control, optimization, or extraction, agency remains partial and unstable." Rogers, a 3D artist and designer, has also written about games. No release date or platform has been announced for the prototype.

For more reading see Palmer Gallery's exhibition text for The Door - 07, Rogers's project page for the earlier 3 Minutes to Midnight, and Killscreen's Chernobyl Stalks, on the exclusion zone in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.