Monday marked the start of Melbourne International Games Week, and with that, ACMI welcomed some exciting guests, including Maddy Thorson & Noel Berry, two of the creative minds behind Celeste. The duo took the stage Monday night and were joined by Jini Maxwell, who moderated the conversation, which took the audience through the early days of Celeste Classic, all the way through to the Farewell DLC. Maddy and Noel discussed how they wanted to create a ‘pure movement’ game, and a difficult one, but one that was kind.

Starting with Celeste Classic, it was intriguing to hear the duo discuss how the game was initially developed within restrictions, and they liked it that way. “Constraints forced us to find the core,” said Noel.

“PICO-8’s constraints—16-colour palette, 128×128 resolution, strict limits on sprites, map, and even code tokens—forced us to focus on the core. Celeste Classic didn’t have climbing yet, but the core dash and strawberries were there. We maxed out every limit.”

It was an idea that they ran with and continued to develop, building levels with the speedrunning community in mind. Much of the evening’s conversation centred on the speedrunning community.

“Early on, what shocked us was the sheer execution. Even when it wasn’t new tech, the mastery was wild—some tech we intentionally carried over from TowerFall bugs—like hyper jumping. A playtester once didn’t tell me about a bug because he was afraid I’d remove it! There were also surprises we didn’t know about—demodash (crouch + dash on the same frame) lets you dash with a smaller hitbox and slip between spikes. And corner boosting emerged from systems we didn’t plan,” said Maddy.

But she also spoke about what the speedrunning community likes, what they don’t like — and even how there’s an odd relationship between them and developers.

“Many understand fixes for casual players. Some don’t want us to design the speedrun. They want an adversarial relationship. Our “more fun” is subjective—we mean movement-focused flow where you’re not zipping through solids or wrong-warping, but you are doing the wild stuff you see on screen.”

The evening’s conversation also had Maddy open up about her transition and queer journey, in front of a packed crowd, no easy thing, I’m sure. When she was asked about the game’s themes, she mentioned how audiences initially perceived the game as being about struggles with mental health, before the Queer community recognised a deeper story within it. This was a story that Maddy herself was able to see within the game after players grasped onto it, and she was able to bring both her own queerness to the public, as well as Madeline’s in the game, in one blog post.

“The amount people related to it surprised me — and that it was seen as a queer game also surprised me. We wanted it to be personal; we’ve long believed the best art has the creator’s fingerprints on it. It felt natural to put my story into the character […] I don’t regret coming out publicly, but I feel conflicted — I never wanted to transition publicly. I pulled back from social media and took space, which helped. People wanted an answer to “Is Madeline Trans?” and I couldn’t answer without coming out. I wanted to honour their relationship to the game and validate their reading because it helped me, so I wanted to give back.

This was an insightful conversation to be a part of and a great way to end my Monday as Melbourne International Games Week 2025 begins. Given the cameras, I’m hoping it’ll be available somewhere in the near future for anyone interested in watching it in full.

Listening to  Maddy talk about both her queerness and how the game helped her realise it shows the power of video games as an art form, as one of expression and their ability to tell truly personal stories, no matter the genre. She also shared a tidbit about wishing the directions you could dash were restricted to just four, instead of eight, and that if they even did a Celeste 2, she’d kinda want to do that instead — which is both a great story about how when you make something, you can’t help but keep thinking about how to tinker with it and make it better, but also a wild and ridiculous idea.

Celeste: In Conversation with Maddy Thorson & Noel Berry took place at ACMI as part of Melbourne International Games Week 2025