Façade, the AI game with Grace and Trip

Façade is a free, short interactive drama from 2005. You visit a married couple, Grace and Trip, and you type what you say to them. Their marriage falls apart in front of you, and your words change how the evening ends.

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern made the game. Their small studio, Procedural Arts, released it for Windows on July 5, 2005, as a free download. A Mac OS X version followed on August 15, 2006. Ryan C. Gordon of icculus.org made that port.

The makers call Façade a “one-act interactive drama”. In their 2005 paper, they describe it as an AI-based art and research experiment. Its goal was to move past stories with fixed branches or links.

You play a longtime friend of the couple. They are in their early thirties and live in an apartment in New York City. You arrive for an evening get-together, and it soon turns ugly. The paper says that you, the player, “will have changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives” by the end.

The official site reports more than 500,000 downloads since July 2005. In 2006, Façade won the Grand Jury Prize at the Slamdance Independent Games Festival. Many people today know the game best from YouTube videos. We explain why below.

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern made Façade. They did the design, the code, the writing and the animation together.

Wikipedia says that the work started in 1998. The two began to work on it full time in 2000. They paid for the five years of work themselves, with a small budget. At that time, Mateas was a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University. Stern had worked as a programmer and designer on the Petz series.

The credits on the Procedural Arts site list a small team. Chloe Johnston and Andy Bayiates gave the voices of Grace and Trip. Five people made the music. Mehmet Fidanboylu helped with the code, and John Lavin was the story consultant.

Mateas and Stern told PC Gamer that they wanted to make an “anti-videogame”. They did not want dozens of hours of quests and levels. They wanted “a short but emotionally intense” play about human relationships.

Façade has no language model. The makers wrote the lines and the rules by hand. Two systems do the main work: one reads what you type, and a “drama manager” picks the next part of the story.

What you do

You type on the keyboard to speak at any time. You move with the arrow keys. You pick up and use objects with a hand cursor. You can also hug, comfort or kiss Grace and Trip. If you are rude, or too physical, they can tell you to leave.

How the game reads your words

Wikipedia says the game finds keywords in what you type. A 2020 article on Game Developer gives more detail. The game sorts each line you type into one of about 30 “discourse acts”. More than 800 rules, written by hand, do this sorting.

The system prefers to give some answer over no answer. So it often reads a line in the wrong way. The same article says that the makers knew it could not survive players who try to break it.

How the drama manager picks the story

The story is a set of short scenes that the makers call “beats”. Game Developer says that Façade has 27 main beats. One play uses about 15 of them. The drama manager picks the next beat from the state of the story and the feelings of the two characters. It aims for rising tension and then a resolution.

Inside each beat, Grace and Trip act together. The makers wrote thousands of joint dialog behaviors for them in ABL, their own programming language. When you say something that the beat does not expect, the game can add, remove or change the order of beats.

How long a play takes, and how it ends

Game Developer says that one play takes about 20 minutes. Wikipedia lists three kinds of endings. One character can end the marriage, the two can make up, or they can keep the fight going after you leave. The makers want you to play again. After each play, the game saves a new stageplay file in the Facade\stageplays folder.

Today, many games let you type to characters who answer with a language model. Our guide to games where you can talk to AI covers them. For the history of games that are only text, see text-based games.

The official site, proceduralarts.net, still offers Façade as a free download for Windows. The site says it runs on Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 “via compatibility settings”.

The official download

Go to the Procedural Arts site and use the “Download the interactive drama Façade” link. The installer file there is FacadeInstaller1.1b.exe. Get the game from this page, not from an unknown mirror site.

The system needs

• Windows XP or later.
• An Intel Pentium III processor at 1.6 GHz.
• 256 MB of RAM.
• 1 GB of free storage.

The site does not say which compatibility settings to use. We did not install the game ourselves, so we cannot confirm the steps on Windows 11.

Mac

A Mac OS X version came out in 2006. The current official site lists only Windows. We found no source that confirms that Façade runs on a current Mac.

Façade became a meme because players can type anything, and Grace and Trip still try to answer in a serious way. YouTubers used this to make comedy videos.

In a 2018 article, PC Gamer named PewDiePie as the likely start. His first Façade video got about 7 million views. Jacksepticeye and The Gaming Lemon also made videos. Players insult the couple, kiss Trip at the door, or interrupt a fight with a rude line.

The game also has some jokes of its own. PC Gamer points to a magic eight-ball in the apartment that gives random advice.

Mateas and Stern said they were happy about the videos. They told PC Gamer that the open language system lets players with improv skills “show off their talent directly in the game”. Grace and Trip “play it straight”, so the player can be the wild friend. The writer also says that the AI holds up well if you play as a concerned friend.

Not yet. Mateas and Stern planned a follow-up called The Party, and Wikipedia says that work on it started again in September 2024.

The Party was to be a dinner party with ten characters. It was also to have more objects to use and more mature content. Work began in 2006. In 2013, Mateas confirmed that the work had stopped.

An interview on Adventure Game Hotspot says the two are “once again finally working on prototypes” for The Party. The page shows no date. We found no release date and no store page for The Party.

Vaudeville and Suck Up! are two paid games where you talk to AI characters in your own words. LifeSim, our game, is free, but it is a whole life, not a short drama.

These games use modern language models, not hand-written rules. That means the characters can answer almost anything. It also means that no writer planned each line, so the story is less tight than in Façade.

Vaudeville

Vaudeville is a murder mystery from Bumblebee Studios. You play a detective and question the people of a town. You type your questions or speak them into a microphone. The Steam page says the game creates the dialogue in real time with AI. It came out of early access on November 28, 2025. It is a paid game, and its Steam reviews are mixed.

Suck Up!

In Suck Up!, from Proxima, you play a vampire. You must talk the people of a town into inviting you into their homes. The Steam page says you talk with your real voice, and the characters answer in real time. It uses ChatGPT from OpenAI. Version 1.0 came out on Steam on October 1, 2025. It is a paid game, with mixed reviews.

LifeSim (our game)

LifeSim is a free AI life simulation game. It has no ads, no subscription and nothing to buy. You live one life, a day at a time, in a real city on a 3D map of Earth. You type what you say to people, in your own words, with open text chat. They answer in their own words.

The people also remember what you said and tell their friends, and they text you. It plays in any browser at play.lifesim.com and in an iPhone app.

LifeSim is not a Façade copy. It is not a short, written one-act drama with a set ending. Nobody writes a planned conflict for you to fix in 20 minutes. If you want a tight, authored story, Façade is the better fit.

For more games of this kind, see our list of AI games and our guide to story games. If you want to play a role with an AI character and no game rules, read about AI roleplay.

• The exact compatibility settings that make Façade run on Windows 10 or 11. The official site does not list them, and we did not test them.
• Whether the 2006 Mac version runs on a current Mac.
• A date for the Adventure Game Hotspot interview, and any release date for The Party.
• The full text of the 2005 AIIDE papers. We read the abstracts. The details on rules and beats come from the Game Developer article.

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• Procedural Arts: Façade (official site and download page)
• Wikipedia: Façade (video game)
• Mateas and Stern: Demonstration: The Interactive Drama Façade (AIIDE 2005)
• Mateas and Stern: Structuring Content in the Façade Interactive Drama Architecture
• Electronic Literature Organization: Interactive Drama Façade Released (2005)
• PC Gamer: Façade’s groundbreaking AI lives on through bad YouTube jokes
• Game Developer: Facade, the AI-powered interactive drama (Tommy Thompson, 2020)
• Adventure Game Hotspot: interview with the creators of Façade
• Vaudeville on Steam
• Suck Up! on Steam