Welcome to 1,000 Percent: Dave the Diver. This page is your guide to the series: where everything lives, what's coming, and why any of this exists at all.

Index

Articles will be linked here as they're published. The current plan:

The Joy of Dave the Diver: Playing Dave the Diver to completion, and what makes it special enough to deserve all this.

The Science of Dave the Diver: The real science and strange beauty of the underwater environments Dave the Diver borrows from, including coral reef ecosystems, blue holes, and the biodiversity hiding in shallow tropical waters.

The Food of Dave the Diver:  A deep dive into the Japanese and Korean seafood culture that inspired Bancho Sushi, including the history of omakase and what it means to cook something you pulled from the water yourself.

The Manga of Dave the Diver: The manga inspirations woven into Dave the Diver, and the long tradition of slice-of-life and food manga in Japanese comics.

The Genre of Dave the Diver: An exploration of the "cozy game" genre, and how Dave the Diver subverts it. 

The list will grow. Until then, thanks for diving in.

What Is 1,000 Percent?

It's an article series built around a simple premise: some games are too good to just play once and set down. The best ones leave you wanting more. More story, more world, more context. With 1,000 Percent, I hope to satisfy that feeling. To get there, I'll explain my experience with The Last of Us.

Playing through The Last of Us Part 1 and 2 was one of the most magical experiences I've ever had with a story. I loved it so much, I'll be honest: I 100%'d it. Both of them. And when I was done, I still wanted more. The DLC helped. The comic, The Last of Us: American Dreams, helped more than I expected, and somewhere along the way, gave me a genuine appreciation for comic books I'd never had before. The TV show was… okay. But I was still hungry.

So I went looking. Neil Druckmann and the team at Naughty Dog had been public about what shaped the game. I started working through them. I played Ico. I read Cormac McCarthy's The Road and David Benioff's City of Thieves. I watched No Country for Old Men. I found the Paradise Lost documentaries. I went through more zombie films than I can honestly account for.

And something unexpected happened. It wasn't just that I had more material. It was that I understood the game differently. The fourth playthrough of The Last of Us hit differently than the first, because I could hear what they were reaching for. I could feel the influences in the relationship between Joel and Ellie. It felt complete. More than that! It wasn't completing a game 100%, it was something closer to 1,000%.

I want to do that with more games.

So that's what this is. For each installment of 1,000 Percent, I pick a game worth the full treatment;  one deserving enough to pull every thread. The inspirations, the culture, the art, the real-world context underneath the fiction. Not just playing it, but understanding it. Dave the Diver is next. 

It's a game that shouldn't work: a deep-sea exploration sim stapled to a sushi restaurant management game, wrapped in a story that somehow made me feel things about a giant blue hole in the ocean. It's maximalist in a way that usually collapses under its own weight, but here, it floats. It feels, more than anything, like it was made by people who loved a lot of things: the ocean, food, absurdist manga, Kaiju movies, the specific chaos of running a small business. That feeling is exactly the kind of thing worth chasing down. So let's dive.