Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking

Welcome to the Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, an interactive,

meticulously recreated selection of lockpicking minigames from a variety

of genres across the history of games.

FEATURES

• Challenge yourself against locks from dozens of game worlds
• Compare your skills with other players via Steam leaderboards
• Unlock the complete set of Steam achievements for mastering all the minigames
• Beat “The Door,” a fiendish set of ever-changing locks from every exhibit in the Museum
• Read analysis on each minigame from a professional game designer
• Go deeper into the design of each game with our archived source code, and even implement them yourself, should you catch the lockpicking bug!

This isn’t a game with a story, or an ending; it’s not possible to ‘win’. It is also not a long experience, but one you will hopefully want to return to.

A Word from Designer Johnnemann Nordhagen

As a game designer, you often find yourself doing research on how other games do things – it’s a good way to get ideas, see what works and what doesn’t, and build an understanding of the space you’re solving problems in. Usually this research involves buying a lot of games and playing until you get to the part you want to see, if you can remember the games that have it!

How nice it would be, I thought, if someone collected all the reference for particular ways of doing things in one place. Thus was born the Museum of Mechanics, and the first entry: Lockpicking. Many genres and types of games include lockpicking minigames, so I thought I would do an exploration of a broad swathe of them and gather them together in a single place. This is the result. I hope you’ll join me in exploring the different ways this has been done through the history of games.