Inkle’s amazing Heaven’s Vault used to be a Dr Who pitch, but the BBC left them on read, and I’m kind of thankful

80 Days and A Highland Song developers Inkle once pitched a Doctor Who game to the BBC, narrative director and writer Jon Ingold has revealed in a Bluesky post. While the BBC never responded to their overtures, the pitch became the basis for Inkle’s very excellent and bodacious astral archaeology sim Heaven’s Vault. I consider this a cool thing to know, and so do our friends at Eurogamer. They’ve just published an interview with Ingold, which includes tantalising details of a forthcoming Heaven’s Vault reveal of some kind.

Inkle met with a number of potential collaborators in 2014, following the release of 80 Days. According to Ingold: “one of those was an approach from the BBC, who floated several different BBC properties for us to consider working on. As a lifetime Doctor Who fan, that was the one we jumped on.” The team spent eight months working on a pitch for something Who-flavoured and working-titled The Daedalus Effect. It would have been set on an asteroid orbiting a black hole, and would have featured time dilation.

“For the art style, we wanted 2D characters within a 3D scene for a comic-book look, so we built a TARDIS interior model, drew some character art, and built a prototype where you could move around the console room,” Ingold told Eurogamer’s Victoria Phillips Kennedy. “We also built a playable ‘fly through the vortex’ game for the travel sequences, inspired by Super Hexagon. And the most significant thing we did was start rebuilding the ink engine, from the very scrappy first version that powered 80 Days and the Sorcery! series, to the more modern version that we eventually open-sourced.”

Alas, the Who game was not to be: a decade later, Inkle are still waiting for a response to the Doctor Who pitch. This is possibly for the best, however. Heaven’s Vault is terrific, and Inkle are arguably in a stronger place for having embarked on their own original setting. “It opened Inkle up a lot – until then we’d be doing adaptations and IP-based work,” Ingold noted. “Heaven’s Vault was the first thing we did that was all ours – and people embraced it – and that experience is what made A Highland Song, Overboard, and all the rest possible.”

Ingold isn’t sure they’d make a Who game today, fond as he is of that narrative jukebox, the Tardis. “I still love the character and the wild variety the concept would bring. But there’s been a lot of Who games since 2014, and I feel like it’d be hard to capture the same excitement as we felt for the project when we first pitched it.”

Besides which, Ingold have their hands full with both a new videogame of some kind and a mysterious “thing”, possibly not a videogame, for the world of Heaven’s Vault, which has now expanded into the realm of novels and, potentially, stageplay. “We’ve written a pilot episode and outline for an audio drama version (though we haven’t sold it to anyone), and we’ve got one other big thing cooking for the world which we haven’t announced yet, but is hopefully going to be truly wonderful for new players and for fans of the original,” Ingold concluded.

You can read more on Eurogamer. Side note: I used to be an embarrassingly dedicated fan of Barbara Hambly’s Darwath books, and they have a wizard character called Ingold I would roughly classify as Sports Illustrated Gandalf. Science has yet to prove that he and Jon Ingold are not the same person.